Skeleton Tree Is A Decade Old

How is it possible? Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ ‘Skeleton Tree’s a decade old. An overwhelming album scrutinising appalling loss, grief and coping through love, it was arguably the most personal album Cave had ever created at that pont.

Andrew Dominik’s film, ‘One More Time With Feeling’ that came out to accompany the album, is, as with the record, almost unbearably candid and heartbreaking at times. “When did I become such a figure of pity?” muses Cave at one point, wondering also when the bags under his eyes appeared.

But the love is there, rescuing the Aussie icon from endless rumination- whether the open affection between him and Warren Ellis, or tender interviews with him and wife Susie Bick where they ponder the future ahead, or the simple but moving scene where Earl gently touches his mum’s back as they enter the recording studio, as if to say,”I’ve got you”. This sums up the glue holding them together, and the intimacy. “We decided to be happy”, says Cave, “because that seemed to be the way to be defiant”.