It’s four decades since Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds released their debut album From Her To Eternity, a record that found Cave attempting a new musical and lyrical language that could free him from his past and help him create – and curate – his future, says Wesley Doyle
When Aug Stone explored a rumour he’d heard about “Nick Cave’s Bar”, he found a joint where Blixa Bargeld bartended, bizarre performance art took place, and the drugs meant everyone kept drinking long into the morning
Julian Marszalek spoke with colleagues and fans of the pioneering musician Rowland S Howard, including Mick Harvey, Lydia Lunch, Harry Howard, Genevieve McGuckin, Jonnine Standish, Daniel Miller and Henry Rollins, in order to get to grips with his work
From Rock's Backpages this month, an infamous NME pop summit from 1989. James Brown and Sean O'Hagan took Mark E Smith, Nick Cave & Shane MacGowan to the Montague Arms (RIP) in New Cross. Great merriment ensued... (republished 24th January 2018)
Sod the first few EPs, we say a band's real hidden gems are buried at the end, among the ill-advised career moves and last grasps at fading relevance. Here, tQ writers fight the corner for their favourite unloved and underrated records from the tail-end of their favourite artists' discography.
Amid a whirlwind of drug use, chaotic live shows and within-band animosity, The Birthday Party juddered to a halt in 1983. Daniel Dylan Wray traces the story of the band's messy dissolution, and of Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds' phoenix-like emergence the following year with From Her To Eternity. Interviews with Mick Harvey, Flood, Jim Thirlwell, Barry Adamson, Nick Launey, Chris Bohn, Henry Rollins, Jessamy Calkin and Hugo Race
Jeremy Allen, David Bennun, Julian Marszalek, Erin Lyndal Martin, JR Moores, Jamie Thomson, Luke Turner and John Doran run through some of the finest album tracks, b-sides, session moments, live versions, covers and hits that never were of Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds' long and illustrious career
Best known for documentaries about Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds and Einstürzende Neubauten, for his latest project Uli M Schueppel has profiled German avant-guitarist Caspar Brötzmann. The director talked to Dino Gollnick at the recent Berlin Film Festival
Low Culture is a new series where tQ writers use lockdown time to pull some of their favourite music, films, games and books off the shelves in order to tackle an idea that's been bugging them for a long time. In the first instalment John Doran argues that the Velvet Underground only really hit their true peak after they lost Nico, Warhol and Cale
Recently discovered free jazz gems from Los Angeles and Berlin, orchestral free jazz spiked by West African grooves, folk-jazz tracing the history of indigenous North American Wabanaki people, and dynamic dice-and-splice free jazz assemblages from LA are featured in Peter Margasak’s latest round up of jazz and improvised music.
Half a century after the release of one of the all-time great live albums, John Doran argues that the Velvet Underground only really hit their true peak after they lost Nico, Warhol and Cale. This feature was first published on 2 April 2020