Review: Karen Welberry and Tanya Dalziell (eds), Cultural Seeds: Essays on the Work of Nick Cave (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009)
Abstract
Review Karen Welberry and Tanya Dalziell (eds), Cultural Seeds: Essays on the Work of Nick Cave (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009) SAGE Publications, Inc. 201110.1177/0725513611399392 KeithTester University of Hull, UK, K.Tester@hull.ac.uk Despite the flamboyant success and hard work of Kylie Minogue, Melbourne’s most enduring contributor to contemporary popular culture is likely to be Nick Cave, the man who in 1996 sang about bludgeoning her face with a rock. The song was taken from his bleakly-hilarious Murder Ballads album, which knee-jerk commentators immediately condemned as misogynistic. Cave first came to note as the ‘singer’ in the post-punk band The Boys Next Door, before moving on to assault music – and often audience members – as the dominant public performer of the fearsome The Birthday Party (formed in 1980). In the wake of The Birthday Party’s drug-fuelled implosion, Cave formed the Bad Seeds. The first Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds album, From Her to Eternity, was released in 1984, and since then he has written and sung some 14 albums of music ranging from apocalyptic blues to parodic cover versions, exceptionally tender love songs and more recently the kind of in-your-face guitar-led rock that only 50-year-olds who know the years have