The Nick Cave album that changed Anna Calvi’s life
With a voice of dark velvet, Anna Calvi treats her music to a distinctive air of angst and emotional fever. With a broad canon of covers and original compositions, she panders to the introspective and haunting realms of lyricism, at times delicate, at others powerful and arresting. Employing strains of blues, rock, and post-punk, her work thrives on deeply personal yet universally resonant lyrical rumination.
Although Calvi’s approach was forged in the fires of rock, her first sonic infatuation was with classical music. “It helped me sleep,” she said in a 2013 interview with Music Radar. “Hearing Mozart is my first memory of music.” At the age of eight, she turned her attention to lyric-based pop music after hearing one of her father’s David Bowie records. “I couldn’t get enough of Bowie,” she added. “As soon as I got my own pocket money, I started buying his records.”
Expanding on her musical education, Calvi recalled that, from childhood, she favoured dramatic and introspective music. “I gravitated towards things that were dramatic,” she said. “When I got a little older, I listened to a lot of Jeff Buckley, but I also liked singers like Edith Piaf and Billie Holiday. I always liked a wide variety of styles.”
Such a trajectory would inevitably lead to the jagged poetry of contemporary songwriters like Nick Cave and Tom Waits. Calvi thanks the latter for broadening her instrumental scope. Waits’ 1985 masterpiece Rain Dogs was particularly helpful while she worked on her 2013 album, One Breath.
“When making One Breath, I did listen to Rain Dogs. I love the way that Tom Waits uses really unusual instrumentation, like tuned marimbas, to sort of suggest chords instead of just the obvious guitar strumming changes,” she recalled. “Doing this was a real influence on me, using marimba and not relying on the guitar as an accompanying instrument, but treating it as a character that comes in as kind of a surprise. Tom can make the guitar sound wild – I really like that.”
As for the Australian songwriter Nick Cave, Calvi lauds his poetic brawn above all else. Discussing Cave’s 1994 album Let Love In, home to the popular song ‘Red Right Hand’, as an essential in her collection, Calvi revealed: “I love all of Nick Cave’s albums, but this was the first one that I got. It’s very powerful and confrontational, and it’s even a little ugly at times.”
“His lyrics are always so beautiful, even when he’s singing about things that are quite violent,” Calvi added. “This record got me into the Bad Seeds, and I became a very big fan of theirs, as well. Nick is brilliant.”
In 2022, Calvi included an enveloping cover of Nick Cave’s ‘Red Right Hand’ on her EP Tommy. Music on the release, also including a cover of Johnny Cash’s ‘Ain’t No Grave’, had previously featured in her soundtrack score for the TV series Peaky Blinders, which uses Cave’s original version of ‘Red Right Hand’ as its dramatic theme song.
Listen to Anna Calvi’s cover of ‘Red Right Hand’ below.
