Description
Book SynopsisKnown for his work as a performer and songwriter with the Birthday Party, the Bad Seeds and Grinderman, Australian artist Nick Cave has also pursued a variety of other projects, including writing and acting. Covering the full range of Cave's creative endeavours, this collection of critical essays provides a comprehensive overview of his multifaceted career. The contributors, who hail from an array of disciplines, consider Cave's work from many different angles, drawing on historical, psychological, pedagogical, and generic perspectives. Illuminating the remarkable scope of Cave's achievements, they explore his career as a composer of film scores, scriptwriter, and performer, most strikingly in Ghosts of the Civil Dead; his work in theatre; and his literary output, which includes the novels And the Ass Saw the Angel and The Death of Bunny Munro, as well as two collections of prose. Together, the resulting essays provide a lucid overview of Nick Cave's work that will orient students and fans while offering fresh insights sure to deepen even expert perspectives.
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Nick Cave, Twenty-First Century Man – John H. Baker
PART I: Cave, the Songwriter
Chapter 1: ‘Into My Arms’: Themes of Desire and Spirituality in The Boatman’s Call – Peter Billingham
Chapter 2: The Performance of Voice: Nick Cave and the Dialectic of Abandonment – Carl Lavery
Chapter 3: ‘The College Professor Says It’: Using Nick Cave’s Lyrics in the University Classroom – Paul Lumsden
Chapter 4: A Beautiful, Evil Thing: The Music of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds – David Pattie
PART II: Murder Ballads
Chapter 5: ‘Executioner-Style’: Nick Cave and the Murder Ballad Tradition – Nick Groom
Chapter 6: In Praise of Flat-out Meanness: Nick Cave’s ‘Stagger Lee’ – Dan Rose
PART III: Film and Theatre
Chapter 7: ‘You Won’t Want the Moment to End’: Nick Cave in the Theatre, from King Ink to Collaborating with Vesturport – Karoline Gritzner
Chapter 8: Welcome to Hell: Nick Cave and Ghosts … of the Civil Dead – Rebecca Johinke
Chapter 9: ‘People Just Ain’t No Good’: Nick Cave’s Noir Western, The Proposition – William Verrone
PART IV: Influences
Chapter 10: Nick Cave and Gothic: Ghost Stories, Fucked Organs, Spectral Liturgy – Isabella van Elferen
Chapter 11: The Singer and the Song: Nick Cave and the Archetypal Function of the Cover Version – Nathan Wiseman-Trowse
Chapter 12: Nick Cave: The Spirit of the Duende and the Sound of the Rent Heart – Sarah Wishart
PART V: Sacred and Profane
Chapter 13: ‘There is a Kingdom’: Nick Cave, Christian Artist? – John H. Baker
Chapter 14: ‘The Time of Our Great Undoing’: Love, Madness, Catastrophe and the Secret Afterlife of Romanticism in Nick Cave’s Love Songs – Steven Barfield Chapter 15: From ‘Cute Cunts’ to ‘No Pussy’: Sexuality, Sovereignty and the Sacred – Fred Botting
