NICK CAVE~ HAPPY TO YOU

NICK CAVE, (born 22 September 1957) is an Australian musician, songwriter, author, screenwriter, composer and occasional film actor.

 Known for his work as a frontman of the critically acclaimed rock band Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, established in 1983, a group known for its eclectic influences and musical styles. Before that, he had fronted the group The Birthday Party in the early 1980s, a band renowned for its highly gothic, challenging lyrics and violent sound influenced by free jazz, blues, and post-punk. In 2006, he formed the garage rock band Grinderman that released its debut the following year. Cave's music is generally characterised by emotional intensity, a wide variety of influences, and lyrical obsessions with religion, death, love and violence.

Upon Cave's induction into the ARIA Hall of Fame, ARIA Awards committee chairman Ed St John said, “Nick Cave has enjoyed—and continues to enjoy—one of the most extraordinary careers in the annals of popular music. He is an Australian artist like Sidney Nolan is an Australian artist—beyond comparison, beyond genre, beyond dispute.

Raised as an Anglican, Cave sang in the boys choir at Wangaratta Cathedral. He grew to detest the attitudes of small-town Australia, and he was often in trouble with the local school authorities,  so his parents sent him to boarding school at Melbourne's Caulfield Grammar School in 1970. Cave joined the school choir under choirmaster Norman Kaye, and also benefited from having a piano in his home. 

The following year he became a "day boy" when his family moved to Murrumbeena, a suburb of Melbourne. Cave was 19 when his father was killed in a car accident; at the moment he was informed of this, his mother Dawn Cave was bailing him out of a St Kilda police station for a charge of burglary. Cave would later recall that his father "died at a point in my life when I was most confused", and "the loss of my father created in my life a vacuum, a space in which my words began to float and collect and find their purpose."

In the past, Cave identified as a Christian. In his recorded lectures on music and songwriting, he has claimed that any true love song is a song for God and has ascribed the mellowing of his music to a shift in focus from the Old to the New Testaments. He does not belong to a particular denomination and has distanced himself from "religion as being an American thing, in which the name of God has been hijacked". He said in a recent Los Angeles Times article: "I'm not religious, and I'm not a Christian, but I do reserve the right to believe in the possibility of a god.

 It's kind of defending the indefensible, though; I'm critical of what religions are becoming, the more destructive they're becoming. But I think as an artist, particularly, it's a necessary part of what I do, that there is some divine element going on within my songs".

In a 2008 interview with Beat Magazine, Cave expressed a desire to return to the original pronunciation of his name - Ka-VAY

Happy 55th Birthday to singer/songwriter/novelist/screenwriter NICK CAVE. Raised as an Anglican, Cave sang in a boys choir but grew to detest the attitudes of his small town and was sent to boarding school in Melbourne in 1970. 

Cave joined the school choir and benefitted from the presence of a piano in his dorm. Cave's first embryonic band (with Mick Harvey and Phil Calvert) formed in 1973 with Cave as the singer. They eventually evolved into THE BOYS NEXT DOOR, and after one album, became THE BIRTHDAY PARTY. 

The latter band dissoved in 1983 with Cave resurfacing the following year with his long-running BAD SEEDS. With a new Bad Seeds album rumored for next year, Cave's electrifying, take-no-prisoners career soldiers on. 
NICK CAVE is an original in a world of carbon cutouts.