A Bad Seed – But A Good Egg 

The day that I met Nick Cave makes me relieved and regretful in equal measure that we didn’t have camera phones – or indeed mobile phones at all – back then. It was 1989; a time when London was all about the music and the Abbas and the disco divas had been kicked to the kerb to make way for more edgy artists. 

I was 17 and working for Mute Records, having reached the lofty heights of General Assistant. The label, at that time, was best known for Depeche Mode and Erasure but while these provided the cash, other artists brought the kudos and one of those was Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds.

Hailing from Australia, there’s little ozzy sunshine in the band’s music which features lyrics as dark as Mr Cave’s trademark suits, including the iconic Where The Wild Roses Grow. Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds have also produced a cover or two including Leonard Cohen’s “Avalanche” about which the great man said that they ‘butchered it – but in a good way’. In 2023, at the age of 66, Nick Cave has something of a cult following although, these days, his fans wear Gucci rather than Goth attire and, this autumn he’ll be crooning his way across the USA on his latest tour.

In 1989, Nick Cave also published a novel – And The Ass Saw The Angel – which was suitably dark, compelling and at times incomprehensible. Following the release, Nick arrived at our offices for a meeting and proceeded to hand out copies of his novel. Polite and chatty but shy, he was unrecognisable as the gloomy – even scary – person I’d seen on the TV and this was possibly my first lesson in on and off duty personas – and a realisation that he had brought some of the Australian sunshine with him after all.