“I think I was reaching quite high from the beginning. I may not have had any right to be, but I was. I was always interested in people that were older than me and I looked up to them – people really from a different era to me: Johnny Cash, John Lee Hooker, even writers like Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen. I wasn’t particularly influenced by my contemporaries. They weren’t very good.”
This is Nick Cave, if you were wondering, writing in the introduction to the latest in our series of Ultimate Music Guides, which will be on sale from May 16, and dedicated to Cave and his albums with The Birthday Party, The Bad Seeds and Grinderman.
This is our 14th Ultimate Music Guide and follows specials on David Bowie, The Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen, John Lennon, The Clash, Paul Weller, The Who, Led Zeppelin, The Beatles, Pink Floyd, The Kinks, U2 and The Smiths, which are all available to order online at www.uncut.co.uk/store or to download digitally at www.uncut.co.uk/download.
As ever, Nick Cave – the Ultimate Music Guide gathers together an amazing collection of features from the archives of NME and Melody Maker, including some eye-popping early encounters with The Birthday Party, all of them unseen for years. Additionally, there are brand new in-depth reviews of every Cave album by a top team of Uncut writers, a full discography, sections on his books and the films he’s been involved with as writer, actor and soundtrack composer and guides to Cave rarities, guest slots and his many loyal sidemen in the three bands he has so memorably fronted.
To put you in the mood, here are a couple of clips – The Birthday Party doing “Fears Of Gun” and The Bad Seeds laying waste to the mighty “Tupelo” at the Paradiso in Amsterdam.
The Great Escape festival, meanwhile, is finally upon us, so some of us will be heading to Brighton on Thursday, where we’ll be taking over what used to be called The Pavilion Theatre but has apparently been renamed this year and is now known as The Dome Studio. We’re there for three nights, with the following line-ups, our strongest ever we think.
Thursday, May 16
Phosphorescent
Lord Huron
Dean McPhee
Red River Dialect
Friday, May 17
Mikal Cronin
Allah-Las
Charlie Boyer & the Voyeurs
C Joynes
Saturday, May 18
Woods
White Fence
Mary Epworth
The Strypes
Hopefully, we’ll see a lot of you there!