Mojo - The Music Magazine

MY WORD, THERE’S a lot of great Nick Cave footage on the web. Not surprising when you think about it: is there a more theatrical songwriter in operation, or one more visually striking? Then there’s the eye-popping subject matter: sex, murder, murder after sex (ew!), sex after murder (euch!) – it’s all here in the moving-picture pantheon of the praying mantis of antipodean pop.

And that’s just the videos – before we’ve even mentioned the feature film cameos. And indeed, what more can possibly be said about Cave’s performance as peroxide-quiffed rock’n’roller Freak Storm in “cult favourite” Johnny Suede? “Acutely stylized” or “ridiculously bad”? You decide!

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The Boys Next Door – Shivers

The Birthday Party precursors’ gothic swoon of a song. Have we come full circle? In a way.

The Birthday Party – Nick The Stripper

Tracy Pew’s disgusting bass gyrations cause Cave to go topless and daub “HELL” on his chest. Well, you would.

Nick Cave & The Cavemen – I Put A Spell On You

From the proto-Bad Seeds’ period. Guitars like insects eating each other on flesh-crawling Screamin’ Jay Hawkins cover.

Ghosts… Of The Civil Dead

Cave’s best film performance (indubitably, given the competition – see below) in John Hillcoat’s terrifying prison mayhem movie.

Nick Cave - And The Ass Saw The Angel (Recital)

From the late, lamented Late Show, Cave reads from his novel of 1989. “The anus of obscenity!” Yeah!

Johnny Suede

What, in the name of all that’s holy, is going on here?

The Weeping Song

Fabulously camp promo with Cave and Blixa Bargeld in a rowing boat, in the middle of a black vinyl sea.

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – New Morning

Lovely late reading of the Tender Prey tune, with hail of cigarettes “thrown” in.

Where The Wild Roses Grow

Kylie Minogue plays it straight – amid a supersaturated magic-realist tableau – as the victim of one of Cave’s Murder Ballads.

Wonderful World

Cave joins Shane MacGowan for a barely upright live TV versh of the crooner’s classic. Jools Holland looks on, rightly petrified.

Grinderman – No Pussy Blues

Cave rediscovers filthy Birthday Party groove – with Martyn Casey providing low-end scurf – in a black skit on the aging rock star’s dilemma…

Promo: Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!!

One of several lo-fi, and engagingly silly, filmed “adverts” for last year’s Bad Seeds album. Dig the Edwardian spiritualist theme and Warren Ellis’s spooky acting!