Nick Cave's West Berlin — the Kreuzberg years

Nick Cave moved to West Berlin in 1984, following the Birthday Party's dissolution in London, and lived in the Kreuzberg neighbourhood for most of the mid-to-late 1980s. West Berlin at that moment was a city of unique atmospheric character: physically surrounded by East Germany, subsidised by the West German government to maintain a viable population, and consequently full of people who had come there precisely because the city's encircled geography made it a place apart — artists, musicians, drug users, draft avoiders, and anyone else who needed a city that was simultaneously central European and entirely disconnected from the normal rhythms of European life. Cave arrived already darkly inclined and found a city that matched his aesthetic exactly.

The Bad Seeds were formed in Berlin in 1983-84, initially with Blixa Bargeld of Einstürzende Neubauten — the German industrial band who were the definitive musical expression of Berlin's post-war fracture. The combination of Cave's literary Gothic sensibility with Bargeld's Berlin experimentalism produced the sound of the early Bad Seeds albums: From Her to Eternity, The Firstborn Is Dead, Kicking Against the Pricks. Berlin gave Cave access to a community of like-minded artists working in a city that had no particular investment in commercial success or mainstream legibility, and the music he made there has a specific quality — confrontational, unconcerned, at times genuinely frightening — that reflects both his own character and the city's.

Cave left Berlin around 1990 and moved to São Paulo, then London, then Brighton. The Kreuzberg he inhabited in the 1980s — cheap, gritty, physically adjacent to the Wall, home to the Turkish immigrant community and the West German avant-garde in equal measure — has been substantially transformed by reunification and gentrification. The neighbourhood retains its creative identity, but the specific conditions that drew Cave there no longer exist.