Known for his work as a performer and songwriter with the Birthday Party, the Bad Seeds and Grinderman, Australian artist Nick Cave has also pursued a variety of other projects, including writing and acting. Covering the full range of Cave’s creative endeavors, this collection of critical essays provides a comprehensive overview of his multifaceted career.
The contributors, who hail from an array of disciplines, consider Cave’s work from many different angles, drawing on historical, psychological, pedagogical, and generic perspectives. Illuminating the remarkable scope of Cave’s achievements, they explore his career as a composer of film scores, scriptwriter, and performer, most strikingly in Ghosts of the Civil Dead; his work in theater; and his literary output, which includes the novels And the Ass Saw the Angel and The Death of Bunny Munro, as well as two collections of prose. Together, the resulting essays provide a lucid overview of Nick Cave’s work that will orient students and fans while offering fresh insights sure to deepen even expert perspectives.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Nick Cave, Twenty-First Century Man
John H. Baker
John H. Baker
Part I: Cave, the Songwriter
1. ‘Into My Arms’: Themes of Desire and Spirituality in The Boatman’s Call
Peter Billingham
2. The Performance of Voice: Nick Cave and the Dialectic of Abandonment
Carl Lavery
3. ‘The College Professor Says It’: Using Nick Cave’s Lyrics in the University Classroom
Paul Lumsden
4. A Beautiful, Evil Thing: The Music of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
David Pattie
Part II: Murder Ballads
5. ‘Executioner-Style”: Nick Cave and the Murder Ballad Tradition
Nick Groom
6. In Praise of Flat-out Meanness: Nick Cave’s ‘Stagger Lee’
Dan Rose
Part III: Film and Theatre
7. ‘You Won’t Want the Moment to End’: Nick Cave in the Theatre, from King Ink to Collaborating with Vesturport
Karoline Gritzner
8. Welcome to Hell: Nick Cave and Ghosts ... of the Civil Dead
Rebecca Johinke
9. ‘People Just Ain’t No Good’: Nick Cave’s Noir Western, The Proposition
William Verrone
Part IV: Influences
10. Nick Cave and the Gothic: Ghost Stories, Fucked Organs, Spectral Liturgy
Isabella van Elferen
11. The Singer and the Song: Nick Cave and the Archetypal Function of the Cover Version
Nathan Wiseman-Trowse
12. Nick Cave: The Spirit of the Duende and the Sound of the Rent Heart
Sarah Wishart
Part V: Sacred and Profane
13. ‘There is a Kingdom’: Nick Cave, Christian Artist?
John H. Baker
14. ‘The Time of Our Great Undoing’: Love, Madness, Catastrophe and the Secret Afterlife of Romanticism in Nick Cave’s Love Songs
Steven Barfield
15. From ‘Cute Cunts’ to ‘No Pussy’: Sexuality, Sovereignty and the Sacred
Fred Botting
Part V: Sacred and Profane
13. ‘There is a Kingdom’: Nick Cave, Christian Artist?
John H. Baker
14. ‘The Time of Our Great Undoing’: Love, Madness, Catastrophe and the Secret Afterlife of Romanticism in Nick Cave’s Love Songs
Steven Barfield
15. From ‘Cute Cunts’ to ‘No Pussy’: Sexuality, Sovereignty and the Sacred
Fred Botting
Notes on Contributors