Debut albums rarely feel as raw as From Her To Eternity. The Birthday Party had dissolved pretty messily, amid drug abuse and ego problems, so Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds could have toned things down a little in order to hit that commercial paydirt.
Ha, as if. Cave was far too independent, too contrarian to offer up something to trouble the top 40. This was May 1984, he was still battling his drug demons, yet there were glimpses of the classic Cave sound to be found on later albums like the mighty Tender Prey.
The title track, for example, bubbles with staccato malevolence as piano lines creep around his voyeuristic narrator, fantasising over his neighbour treading her floorboards, an insomniac with a crushed heart. “WALK and CRY!” he roars in a lusty, demented mantra. (See later performance from 1989 below)
The cover of Leonard Cohen ‘s ‘Avalanche’ is in many ways pretty respectful, but it’s the fearsome ‘Saint Huck’ where we hear him patent the perverse evangelist archetype, almost akin to Robert Mitchum’s conman Harry Powell in Night Of The Hunter. He possesses the same yelping chaos he brought to The Birthday Party, if not the same sleaze,sans Rowland S Howard. Instead, Barry Adamson and Einsturzende Neubauten’s Blixa Bargeld bring the shivers. And the rest is the stuff of legend.
Hit The North 
I don’t know much at all about him, but what I can tell is he’s one of these rare people who’s really self-aware
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I like that you make the connection with that persona from Night of the Hunter, that’s cool. Didn’t know Barry Adamson played with him! I had Adamson’s record Oedipus Schmedipus at one time, what a vivid set of memories I get from that. You’ve hooked me now into “going in” on Nick, thanks. If I could untangle myself from Liz Frazier still, which is near impossible (and why would you want to?).
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I will always adore Cocteau Twins and Liz Fraser is one of the best singers ever, IMO. Else Torp, the opera singer, collaborates beautifully with Nick Cave on Distant Sky.
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