PJ Harvey’s favourite Nick Cave song
PJ Harvey befriended the Australian singer-songwriter Nick Cave in the 1990s during her emphatic rise to fame. Cave, 13 years Harvey’s senior, had garnered a cult following from the early 1980s during his tenure fronting The Birthday Party and his subsequent material with the Bad Seeds. When he met Harvey in the mid-90s, Cave was soaring to new heights of success with the Bad Seeds, but his personal life was plagued by a worsening relationship with drugs.
Cave addressed his transient yet emotionally and artistically profound relationship with Harvey in a 2019 post on his Red Hand Files website. “The truth of the matter is that I didn’t give up on PJ Harvey, PJ Harvey gave up on me,” he wrote. “There I am, sitting on the floor of my flat in Notting Hill, sun streaming through the window, feeling good, with a talented and beautiful young singer for a girlfriend, when the phone rings. I pick up the phone, and it’s Polly.”
Harvey informed Cave that the relationship was over, and when he asked why, she replied simply: “It’s just over”.
“I was so surprised I almost dropped my syringe,” Cave remembered.
“Deep down, I suspected that drugs might have been a problem between us, but there were other things too,” Cave continued. “I still had a certain amount of work to do on my understanding of the concept of monogamy, and Polly had her own issues, I suspect, but I think at the end of the day, it came down to the fact that we were both fiercely creative people, each too self-absorbed to ever be able to inhabit the same space in any truly meaningful way. We were like two lost matching suitcases on a carousel going nowhere.”
Great art often comes from a place of pain; this is certainly true of Cave’s oeuvre. Following the break-up with Harvey, Cave focussed intently on finishing material for what would become his 1997 masterpiece, The Boatman’s Call.
“The break-up filled me with a lunatic energy that gave me the courage to write songs about commonplace human experiences (like broken hearts) openly, boldly and with meaning – a kind of writing that I had, until that date, steered clear of, feeling a need to instead conceal my personal experiences in character-driven stories,” Cave wrote.
In June 2016, Harvey appeared as a guest on ‘Start Making Sense’, the Beats 1 radio show hosted by Savages’ Jehnny Beth. During the feature, Harvey was asked to pick out some of her favourite songs to share with listeners. Harvey’s mix featured Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band’s ‘Dropout Boogie’, John Jacob Niles’ ‘I Wonder As I Wander’, and her favourite song by Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds.
One might expect the English singer to pick a track from The Boatman’s Call or 1996’s Murder Ballads, which features Harvey’s collaboration with Cave, ‘Henry Lee’. Alas, Harvey’s favourite is ‘From Her to Eternity’, the anguished, punk-infused hit from the Bad Seeds’ 1984 album of the same name.
Watch Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds perform ‘From Her to Eternity’ live in 1989 below.
