David Pattie

‘A Beautiful, Evil Thing: The Music of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’

In a 2003 obituary for Johnny Cash, Nick Cave credited the singer with giving him the idea that music could be a ‘beautiful, evil thing. (Guardian, Sept 13th 2003)’. It seems logical to suggest that this description has been chosen because it fits the Cave persona neatly: it is also, though, a very useful description of the dominant strands in Cave’s and the Bad Seeds’ musical development. Put simply, the musical forms employed by Cave and his band alternate between melody and noise, both across the span of Cave’s career (from the band’s first album, From Her to Eternity, through the archetypal songwriter’s confessional The Boatman’s Call to the R&B/rock of Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!) and within individual albums and tracks. For example, ‘Far from Me’ on The Boatman’s Call juxtaposes its well-crafted melodic line against instrumentation that includes a harshly recorded violin, played by Warren Ellis: in the band’s output in the 80s and early 90s, Blixa Bargeld’s determinedly unconventional guitar playing runs against, and frequently undermines, the melodic framework of the rest of the music (a good example of this are the reconfigurings of classic tracks on Kicking Against the Pricks).

In this chapter I will argue that Cave’s and the Bad Seeds’ music displays a simultaneous investment in, and distance from, ‘classic songwriting’ (as Cave himself described it in a 1993 interview). In the typology established in Allan Moore’s ‘Authenticity as Authentication’ (Popular Music, Vol 21 no 2: 2002), I will argue that the dialectic that plays out between melody and noise within the music is itself part of a larger dialectic, between first-person authenticity (defined by Moore as the mark of an artist’s investment in the work) and third-person authenticity (defined by Moore as fidelity to previously existing musical forms and structures). Cave and his band, in other words, both espouse previously existing musical forms (blues, gospel, confessional songwriting) which are themselves usually regarded as bearers of authenticity, while at the same time employing musical (and lyrical) strategies which subvert those forms (thus converting these forms into exemplars of first-person authenticity, as defined above).