Anita Lane
Bad Seeds éminence grise BORN 1960
Most likely the ‘Her’ in the title of Nick Cave’s solo album debut From Her To Eternity, Anita Lane was briefly a Bad Seed and an occasional lyricist for both The Birthday Party and solo Cave. She also recorded two dramatic and sensual solo albums, Dirty Pearl (1993) and Sex O’Clock (2001). “Everyone wanted to work with her but it was like trying to trap lightning in a bottle,” Cave wrote in tribute to his former paramour and collaborator.
Lane first met Cave through her former classmate Rowland S. Howard, guitarist in Melbourne post-punk maniacs The Boys Next Door. Whilst still in her teens, Lane co-authored A Dead Song, Dead Joe and Kiss Me Black with Cave for the group, who were renamed The Birthday Party in 1980. “She was the smartest and most talented of all of us, by far,” the singer recalled.
When Cave went solo, Lane contributed keyboards, backing vocals and occasional lead vocals to his nascent Bad Seeds. Though she wasn’t an official member after the pair split in 1983, she remained part of the inner circle, writing the lyrics to Stranger Than Kindness (about Cave, he says) on his fourth album Your Funeral… My Trial and adding purring vocals to his ninth album Murder Ballads.
Lane subsequently carved out a role as a Jane Birkin-styled foil for numerous class acts, including ex-Bad Seed Barry Adamson, Kid Congo Powers, Einstürzende Neubauten and, most notably, Bad Seed Mick Harvey’s Gainsbourg tributes Intoxicated Man and Pink Elephants. Driven by, in Cave’s words, “a rampant, unstable, fatal energy that would follow her all her life”, after 2001’s barbed pop album Sex O’Clock Lane devoted herself to motherhood and a wanderlust that took her from Berlin to Morocco to Sicily and back to Australia. “I kind of wanted to glorify insecurity,” she once said, “rather than being confident and successful.”