Nick Cave collaborating with Morrisseywould have been something special back in the 1980s. Even in 2025, it would have been huge, but Cave revealed that a partnership between these two underground rock icons was not meant to be.
Cave first found success in the late 1970s by leading the post-punk band The Birthday Party. In the early 1980s, Cave formed Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, incorporating darker sounds and themes into their music, making them contemporaries of the goth movement of the time. A star of that movement was Morrissey, lyricist and frontman for the gothic rock band The Smiths.
And these two nearly worked together on a song. “I’ve never actually met Morrissey, which is probably why I like him,” wrote Cave in a recent edition of his newsletter, The Red Hand Files. Cave acknowledged Morrissey as “undeniably a complex and divisive figure, someone who takes more than a little pleasure in pissing people off.”
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But Cave considers him “probably the best lyricist of his generation — certainly the strangest, funniest, most sophisticated, and most subtle.”
Nick revealed that through “a few pleasant email exchanges,” Morrissey asked him to sing on a new song with a “lengthy and entirely irrelevant Greek bouzouki intro.”
“It also seemed that he didn’t want me to actually sing on the song,” wrote Nick, “but deliver, over the top of the bouzouki, an unnecessarily provocative and slightly silly anti-woke screed he had written.”
“Although I suppose I agreed with the sentiment on some level, it just wasn’t my thing. I try to keep politics, cultural or otherwise, out of the music I am involved with. I find that it has a diminishing effect and is antithetical to whatever it is I am trying to achieve. So…I politely declined. I said no.”
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In recent decades, the 66-year-old Morrissey has drawn ire over political views and statements. In 2019, he wore a pin in support of For Britain, a far-right political party, per The Guardian. He also has a history of inflammatory remarks about race, the #MeToo movement, and more, often leaving fans feeling “betrayed.”
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