Nick Cave – Mercy on me

What do you do if you’re growing up in a dreary one-horse town in Australia called Warracknabeal, and find out one day that you have the unruly heart of an outlaw? There is only one thing you can do: pack up and leave. In the company of a high school friend with whom he had formed a punk band, Nick Cave washes up in London, where no one has ever heard of the Boys Next Door despite their album down under. Life becomes one big blowout of noise blues and drugs. Cave moves on to West Berlin, where he forms The Bad Seeds, whose sombre ballads such as Mercy Seat are covered by the likes of Johnny Cash – tying in with Reinhard Kleist’s successful and widely translated comic biography “Cash”. Here, though, Kleist goes for rougher, more impulsive strokes to get closer to Cave. The resulting striking images, which are also devoted to the themes of his ballads, are in equal measure artful and unsettling.