Nick Cave has appeared on Desert Island Discs, the long-running BBC Radio show which asks its guests to name the eight songs they'd choose to keep if they were banished to a desert island.
Cave, whose 18th album with the Bad Seeds, Wild God, was released last year, talked with host Lauren Laverne about a wide range of subjects including his upbringing in Australia, the death of his sons, Arthur and Jethro, and about the lasting influence of Johnny Cash, who the young Cave first saw on TV as a youngster.
"There was something about Johnny Cash that really captured me," says Cave. "He was the first time I'd ever seen the potential of music to be evil, and outlaw, and dangerous. He looked like a dangerous guy.
"He dressed in black and he started off the programme going [mimics Cash's onstage introduction], ‘Hello, I’m Johnny Cash’ and he would swing around. There was just this gravity to the man."
Cave would later cover Cash's The Singer on his 1986 covers album Kicking Against The Pricks, and eventually sang with Cash himself on a version of Hank Williams' classic I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry on the Main In Black's final studio album American IV: The Man Comes Around. Another duet, a version of the traditional North American folk song Cindy, was posthumously released on the Unearthed box set in 2003.
Among the eight songs Cave chose for Desert Island Discs were Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash's Girl From The North Country, as well as songs by T. Rex, Nina Simone, The Saints, John Lee Hooker, Karen Dalton, Kanye West and Tim Rose.
The Nick Cave edition of Desert Island Discs is available via BBC Sounds.
Nick Cave: Desert Island Discs
- T. Rex - Metal Guru
- Nina Simone - My Father
- The Saints - (I’m) Stranded
- John Lee Hooker - It Serves You Right to Suffer
- Karen Dalton - Something on Your Mind
- Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash West - Girl From The North Country
- Kanye West - I Am a God
- Tim Rose - Morning Dew
