Nick Cave is no stranger to bold creative statements.



This week he will deliver two more gripping and impassioned works. A 3D, black and white film, One More Time With Feeling, out Thursday, which tracks the making of his new album, Skeleton Tree, out Friday. Both works will directly address the tragic loss of his son last year.

While we brace ourselves for a moving double knockout punch, here are some of his finest perfectly twisted musical treats from deep in the shadows of his back catalogue.

The Hammer Song – The Good Son (1990)

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There is a primal momentum to Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ sound. The cinematic, creepy production of the rhythm in tunes such as Red Right Hand is burned into dark pulse of the musical underground. If it’s that kind of classic Cave footprint you crave, The Hammer is worth a listen.

Never one to shy away from the epic, Cave brings forth borderline absurdist levels of grand frontier mythology crossed with the Bible at its most apocalyptic.

Many miles did I roam

Through the ice and through the snow

My horse died on the seventh day

The actual hammer described in the song is the most powerful and yet quietest tool I have ever heard described in song.

(I’ll Love You) Till the End of the World – Until the End of the World soundtrack (1991)

Cave is a renaissance man. His ability for supreme and consistent creative output of all kinds is awe-inspiring. He’s a novelist, screenwriter, director, actor and poet, over and above his various musical identities.

In (I’ll Love You) Till the End of the World, he seems to wear all his hats at once. He acts out his hard-boiled, spoken narrative, cigarette in hand, before ushering in the reassuring lilt of the chorus.

Despite having artistic integrity in spades, Cave has never been afraid to work to a brief if given the right opportunity. In this song, as with so much of his recent soundtrack work with Warren Ellis, I can see how inspiring and constructive having his creativity constrained and directed can be. It leads to some of his most intriguing and surprising work.

Lay Me Low – Let Love In (1994)

Cave’s songs have a gift for making my jaw drop in horror and then, thanks to a deft lyrical twist, making me inadvertently laugh at the unlaughable. He makes me smirk in the face of doom in the most unexpected and beautiful way.



There is no better evidence of his wicked humour than in Lay Me Low, in which Cave paints a graphic and hilarious picture of the aftermath of his own death. From the grandiose proclamations of the size of the motorcade at his funeral to the intimate and surreal minutiae of his mourners trying to get in touch with his mother on the phone but getting stuck on the line with his brother, who can’t help spill the beans about a long forgotten ex-lover.

They’ll interview my teachers

Who’ll say I was one of God’s sorrier creatures

Though it’s no surprise that his teachers might have found young Nick a bit of a troublemaker, I have a feeling that they’d now be more than happy to brag that he haunted the back row of their classroom.

Sleeping Annaleah – Kicking Against the Pricks (1986)

Relatively early in the life of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, the band made an album consisting exclusively of covers. It was bold to make the album in the first place and even bolder to cover a song made famous by Tom Jones.



Jones’ tanned, well-postured and hairy-chested presence seemed diametrically opposed to everything Cave stood for. On the flipside, how much more twisted and dark can one be than screwing with Tom Jones?

Cave treads a most beautiful tightrope here, exploding the song and covering it in a potent grime while somehow also honouring the original.

We Call Upon the Author – Dig, Lazarus, Dig (2008)

Dig, Lazarus, Dig saw an increasingly sage-like Cave looking outwards, taking names and looking for answers. After the epic barrage that was Grinderman, he returned to some of his older seedy cronies ready to spill the beans on the state of the world.

In We Call Upon the Author we catch a glimpse through Cave’s reddening eyes. He pleads through the Bad Seeds’ rollicking and hypnotic cacophony as he asks who is responsible for all the damn mess? Who is the ultimate author who can answer for our farcical state of chaos? Is it God, politicians, the media, or his mate Doug rapping at the window?

Like a charming and authoritative prosecutor, he hollers, “We call upon the author to explain!”. He strikes a unique balance between anger and irreverence, between passion and satirical resignation.

• Henry Wagons hosts the Nick Cave edition of The J Files, this Thursday night (8 September) from 8pm, AEST.