Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds | OohYeah

Nick Cave is the brooding Australian singer for the bands Grinderman and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.Born in Warracknabeal, Australia, on September 22, 1957, Nick Cave teamed up with school friend Mick Harvey in the mid-1970s to form the post-punk band The Birthday Party; in 1982 it released its signature album Junkyard. The following year, the band dissolved and was replaced by a new incarnation: Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. The Bad Seeds developed a unique sound that veers wildly from art rock to dark ballad, and Cave's lyrics often ring of brooding tavern poetry, with love, murder and a near Southern Gothic embrace of the damned at the fore. Cave also has written books, screenplays and movie scores, and has acted in films.Early YearsMusician and writer Nick Cave was born in Warracknabeal, Australia, on September 22, 1957, to a librarian mother and an English-teacher father. Along with his two older brothers and younger sister, Cave was raised an Anglican, and the Bible has always been influential in his work (his first novel, And the Ass Saw the Angel, takes its name from a Bible verse). In high school in the mid-1970s, Cave met Mick Harvey, and the pair formed their first band, The Boys Next Door. The band's first record was a cover of "These Boots Are Made for Walking" (1978), and they followed it the next year with their first album, Door, Door. After high school, The Boys Next Door became The Birthday Party, and the band moved to London.The Birthday Party represented an immediate change of pace from the prevailing '80s post-punk scene, with their blues-influenced, jangling rock. Their first LP, Prayers on Fire, was followed by Junkyard in 1982 and Mutiny, an EP, in 1983. That would be all The Birthday Party could muster by the time they disbanded in 1983.The Bad SeedsAfter the band's breakup, Cave headed to Los Angeles and put together his new band, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Mick Harvey was one of the Bad Seeds, and a notable addition was Blixa Bargeld, of Einstürzende Neubauten, a legendary German industrial band that specialized in creating sheer walls of noise.From Her To Eternity (1984) would be the new band's first album, and it was a more refined, if no less iconoclastic, sound than that of The Birthday Party. The band had moved from Los Angeles to Berlin, and there Cave began what would become And the Ass Saw the Angel, a novel that would draw critical acclaim and comparisons to the works of William Faulkner.