Nick Cave discusses the “violence towards women” in his early material: “I’m not a misogynist”
Australian musician Nick Cave has discussed the “violence towards women” evident in some of his early lyrics, asserting that he is “not a misogynist”.
Cave first rose to prominence as a member of the post-punk outfit The Birthday Party, which he formed with friends in the mid-1970s, originally going by the name The Boys Next Door.
Cave often wrote disturbing and shocking lyrics to accompany the music, which he carried into his career as the frontman of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. While appearing on a recent episode of The Louis Theroux Podcast, Cave discussed his previous use of violent lyrics, particularly on the Bad Seeds’ 1996 album Murder Ballads.
“Some of my early lyrics with The Birthday Party, the Murder Ballads record, this kind of thing, there was violence towards women, but there was actually violence towards everybody,” he told Theroux.
Continuing, he explained, “They were just violent records. There were heroic women, and female murderers, and all sorts of stuff going on in that record, and songs before that.”
However, Cave ensured that he no longer has the desire to write such extreme lyrics. “But I’m not personally a misogynist,” he says. “I don’t have those inclinations but I liked to write songs that were violent in those days.”
He claimed that he “just enjoyed the thrill of language, being able to write about violent things in the same way that a thriller writer maybe likes to write about violent things too”.
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