‘Songs of Love and Hate’: The album that convinced Nick Cave to become a musician
Few musicians have caught the attention of fans more consistently than Nick Cave. The Australian musician emerged with his signature messy, ink-black hair in the late 1970s as the electrifying vocalist of The Birthday Party. Known for their chaotic live performances and lyrical journeys into the depths of human depravity and violence, the band became icons of the post-punk movement.
The band eventually ended, evolving into Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, whose sound has developed over the years to incorporate rich ballads containing lyricism that cements Cave as an incredible poet just as much as a skilled musician. From the band’s debut, From Her to Eternity, to their most recent release, Ghosteen, Cave’s way with words has always been apparent.
One of Cave’s biggest inspirations has always been literature, citing books like Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita and the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud and Charles Baudelaire as significant sources of lyrical and thematic guidance. Thus, it’s unsurprising that he is also a huge fan of Leonard Cohen, who was, first and foremost, a poet before transferring his skills to the accompaniment of his guitar.
Cohen left behind an incredible body of work, with some of his greatest albums including Songs of Love and Hate, You Want It Darker, New Skin for the Old Ceremony, and Songs of Leonard Cohen. For Cave, hearing 1971’s Songs of Love and Hate was a revolutionary experience, spurring him on to become a musician.
He told BBC Radio Four’s This Cultural Life: “I was 15 or something like that. The sister of my best friend told me to come over – ‘I’ve found this thing; you’ve gotta hear it!’ And she played me Leonard Cohen’s Songs of Love and Hate. I just heard this incredible voice, these incredible words, and I think that was probably when I first thought, ‘Maybe I could do something like this.’”
He continued: “Something within his voice chimed with a feeling I always had inside of me, a kind of melancholy that was always at odds with the Australian country town that I grew up in. I always had this weird feeling, and Leonard Cohen’s voice seemed to sum it up. There was a darkness to it, a morose humour, a deep melancholy, and I responded to that really well.”
Songs of Love and Hate contains some of Cohen’s most iconic songs, such as ‘Avalanche’, which Cave covered on From Her to Eternity. Upon discovering it, he “couldn’t believe what [he] was hearing”, and he realised that he “could not go back”. Things changed from then on, leading him on a path towards musical devotion.
