Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds Discography

The records over the past two decades

• From Her To Eternity (June 1984)
• The Firstborn Is Dead (June 1985)
• Kicking Against The Pricks (1986)
• Your Funeral My Trial (November 1986)
• Tender Prey (September 1988)
• The Good Son (April 1990)
• Henry's Dream (April 1992)
• Live Seeds (1993)
• Let Love In (April 1994)
• Murder Ballads (February 1996)
• The Boatman's Call (February 1997)
• The Best Of Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds (1998)
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The Singles:   

• "From Her To Eternity"

The press on this album:    

• "If rock in its current state is the Hilton masquerading as home, the rock the Bad Seeds roll is a shack on the edge of town where all the good guys go." - City Limits 
• "Cave sings some of the blackest blues ever written." - Music Week 
• "This is a beautiful record." - Sounds
• "The band who kept on playing while the whole world sank." - Melody Maker 
• "One of the greatest rock albums ever made." - NME

Cave on his work:    

• "There was this conscious attempt to make this really violent music but without relying on the usual cliches that violent music uses like screeching guitars. All the guitar work in it is very dead....I don't like the outcome because like is not an appropriate word. I hate them because tales like 'Box For Black Paul' and 'Well Of Misery' take me to the edge of where I don't want to be. Music which frightens beyond mere entertainment." - Cave to Sounds, May 1984
• "I had never thought of tossing over in my mind the worth of religion, I always assumed that it was a blind alley and not worth thinking about, although I plundered it for its imagery. These days I find myself more and more considering it as a viable alternative. If I thought anything was heading towards insanity, it would have been to start feeling religious about things." - Cave to NME, May 1984 
   

The Singles:   

• "Tupelo"

The press on this album:   

• "Doesn't it strike you as absurd that the most evocative blues record dealing with predominantly American imagery released for years should be the still-born child of a white, waxy Australian? Or that the murkiest delta slide to slip out of the speakers for aeons should come courtesy of a zonked German non-guitarist, Blixa Bargeld?" - Sounds
• "Strangely fascinating." - Smash Hits

Cave on his work:   

• "I've been complimented by one LA journalist on my astute knowledge of the South, after she heard an extended piece I'd read, based on the song  'Blind Lemon Jefferson'. She said that I'd obviously done a lot of research, that I knew my stuff, when the truth of it is I've been there just once, on an overnight stop in Georgia with The Birthday Party. So there's a few facts I know, but the rest is bogus. I quite enjoy that element." - Cave to NME, August 1985
   

The Singles:   

• "The Carny"
• "Stranger Than Kindness"

The press on this album:   

• "A disturbing implacably off-beam record." - Q
• "He is probably the only man more openly religious than Cliff Richard...Yet this paradise is one hell of a place." - Melody Maker
• "Perhaps the singer's masterpiece...haunted by a shadow of tenderness that had only flickered through his work before." - NME
• "Cave reaches a pinnacle of willful tragedy and exhibits his blackest portrait yet of the thwarted outsider stalking the edge of town." - Sounds

Cave on his work:   

• "I seem so totally at odds with the modern world, sometimes I feel that I'm harping on about things and I wonder who's interested in that anyway, anymore. These days, I feel so alienated that I just see myself as some oddity or novelty that has ceased to be important." - Cave to Sounds, July 1986
   

The Singles:   

• "Deanna"
• "The Mercy Seat"

The press on this album:   

• "Cave remains one of the few contemporary souls whose work resonates with the need for release that marked out the otherness of his influences." - NME
• "He's far more interesting than his image." - The Guardian
• "Anyone not moved by at least one track on the record must be either of a delicate disposition or too immersed in acid-house dog turd to know their arse  from their haircut." - Time Out
• "Tender Prey is a circumstantial classic. It's an almost embarrassingly yearnful tour de force." - Melody Maker

Cave on his work:   

• "I'd hate to go down in history as the number one Goth, the man who spawned a thousand goth bands with stacked hairstyles, no personality, pale sick people. I really don't want to be responsible for that sort of thing at all. I think there are a lot more interesting things about what I've done than what seems to have the most affect on people." - Cave to NME, August 1988
   

The Singles:   

• "The Weeping Song"
• "The Ship Song"

The press on this album:   

• "What shines through this dark hour is the dignity of Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds. Futile it may be to hope for redemption or healing–if music had that kind of exorcising quality, Cave would have lobotomized himself of grief years ago–but it is completely apposite to think of great art, full of awe and love, for that is what The Good Son is." - Sounds
• "At the heart of The Good Son is more than human emotion or empathetic musicianship: there's a single-minded dedication to presenting a conceptual, spiritual whole." - Spin
• "Memories fade, but Cave's scars still linger." - NME
•  "Compellingly effective, pregnant with a chilling sense of dread and remorse." - Q

Cave on his work:    

• "On this particular record, I wanted to actually write about a particular feeling that I'd had for a long time. Feelings that I'd tried to express in other songs before. This time, I wanted to dedicate a record to it. There's an actual word for it in Portuguese: saudade. It means a kind of inexplicable longing for something that's gone and cannot be retrieved. I wanted to write a series of songs  about that particular feeling." - Cave to Melody Maker, March 1990
• "I'd like to write songs from a woman's point of view, I like the idea of being given an exercise. It would depend on who I was writing for, if it were Lydia Lunch it would be quite different from Kylie Minogue...I must say I would like to write a song for Kylie." - Cave to Sounds, April 1990
   

The Singles:   

• "Straight To You"

The press on this album:   

• "Henry's Dream is another colossal, towering, juddering miracle from a man who's made a career out of reclaiming the grail." - Melody Maker

Cave on his work:   

• "I've certainly taken in experiences from living in Brazil. But I don't think I've been altered by traditional Brazilian music. I haven't sought out a samba. I'm shaped more by incidents, like one day when I was walking through Sao Paulo and saw an old guy beating the shit out of a twostring guitar, screaming crazy words in people's faces. I guess it could have happened anywhere. But that sort of thing always affects me deeply." - Cave to Melody Maker, March 1992
• "I think every artist who has a very strong sense of style in the way that they write is always burdened by these same questions that are always posed to me. If you ask me about religion, in the way that you ask me about the American South, or you ask me about drugs...I just say no." - Cave to NME, April 1992
• "People have remarked that this album has a Wild West feel to it. I find that pretty alarming." - Cave to Select, April 1992
   

The Singles:   

• "Do You Love Me?"
• "Red Right Hand"
• "Loverman"

The press on this album:   

• "'Let Love In' is a loaded gun blasting away all your preconceptions of what love should be. Dangerous in the wrong hands, no doubt, but what the fuck, buy it for the one you love." - Melody Maker
• "Records that will keep you awake at night long after you've stopped playing them are few and far between. This, happily, is one of them." - Select
• "This is not simply a great album; it's a cornucopia of imagination, passion and ideas." - Rolling Stone

Cave on his work:   

• "I wanted to write more about myself and my situation these days, a bare-faced document of the way I am these days, the way I feel these days." - Cave to NME, April 1994
• "I hope nobody's waiting around for me to make a happy record, because I write best when I'm depressed and angry. If I'm strolling though the park with my heart pumping with joy, the last thing I want to do is sit down and write a song." - Cave to The Independent, April 1994
   

The Singles:   

• "Henry Lee"
• "Where The Wild Roses Grow"

The press on this album:   

• "There's a powerful sense of alienation about the album, as if Cave wanted to indulge certain morbid, violent fantasies and at the same time drain them of their glamour, defusing the myth of the superman-psychopath as fostered so assiduously by Hollywood." - The Independent
• "Of course these stories are horrific, disgusting, tasteless. They're about human beings–what are we to expect? Nick Cave tells it like it is." - Vox
• "Cave makes Leonard Cohen sound like the Laughing Policeman." - The Sunday Telegraph

Cave on his work:   

• "This record is chiefly a comic record, it's designed to be funny. It didn't start off that way, but as soon as we started to make it, it became clear that the whole idea was quite ludicrous, to be making an entire record like this....it became a bit of a joke." - Cave to The Independent, January 1996
• "The song ('Where The Wild Roses Grow') is a murder ballad, but it's also a song about the way I feel about Kylie. It's not that I wanted to kill her like I did in the song - there's a kind of expression of love which goes through the lyrics." - Cave to Vox, March 1996
• "I'm always very happy for my records to confound and irritate, but I get intensely annoyed when people suggest I filter my thoughts through a system of political correctness." - Cave to NME, January 1996
   

The Singles:   

• "Into My Arms"
• "(Are You) The One That I've Been Waiting For?"

The press on this album:   

• "He delivers these heartfelt songs...with such conviction, you get the feeling that this is the album Cave has always longed to make." - Neon
• "Nick is fuming into the only twisted conscience our tortured decade deserves." - Maxim
• "In short, it's an amazing record." - Vox
• "The Boatman's Call will touch and torment you and – in a certain mood – may even cause you to question every one you hold dear." - Melody Maker

Cave on his work:   

• "For me, this whole business is very much a journey that I'm doing on my own. The very foundation of my spiritual belief is doubt about the whole thing. I haven't had any great epiphanies. I just feel it's my duty to educate myself about the concept of God." - Cave to Mojo, March 1997
• "For me, what was really important about a lot of those songs was getting it right in terms of what actually happened to me, and what I felt about the particular people involved. Because basically, it's a way of remembering what was good about a particular relationship as much as what was bad about it. I've written about things on that record which I can listen to now and can't comprehend how I could have felt that way about that particular person. But I know that I did through those songs." - Cave to Vox, February 1997
• "This is the first record I've felt happy with lyrically. This is about me wanting to get basically at the truth of the matter without obscuring it in metaphor and decoration." - Cave to NME, March 1997
   

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