Nicholas Edward "Nick" Cave (born 22 September 1957) is an Australian musician, songwriter, author, screenwriter, composer and occasional film actor. He is best known as the frontman of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, established in 1983, a group known for its diverse output and ever-evolving line-up. Prior to this, he fronted the Birthday Party, one of the most extreme and confrontational post-punk bands of the early 1980s. In 2006, he formed the garage rock band Grinderman, releasing its debut album the following year.
Referred to as rock music's "Prince of Darkness", Cave's music is generally characterised by emotional intensity, a wide variety of influences, and lyrical obsessions with death, religion, love and violence. NME described him as "the grand lord of gothic lushness"
The band with Cave as their leader and frontman has released fifteen studio albums. Pitchfork Media calls the group one of rock's "most enduring, redoubtable" bands, with an accomplished discography. Though their sound tends to change considerably from one album to another, the one constant of the band is an unpolished blending of disparate genres, and song structures which provide a vehicle for Cave's virtuosic, frequently histrionic theatrics. Critics Stephen Thomas Erlewine and Steve Huey wrote: "With the Bad Seeds, Cave continued to explore his obsessions with religion, death, love, America, and violence with a bizarre, sometimes self-consciously eclectic hybrid of blues, gospel, rock, and arty post-punk."
Cave has played with Shane MacGowan on cover versions of Bob Dylan's "Death is Not the End" and Louis Armstrong's "What a Wonderful World". He also performed "What a Wonderful World" live with The Flaming Lips and has recorded a cover version of the Pogues song "Rainy Night in Soho", written by MacGowan.
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