For two decades, there have been plans for a statue of Nick Cave in his birth town Warracknabeal, 320 kilometres north-west of Melbourne. Cave was to be cast in gold, riding a horse and naked to the waist, wearing a loin cloth. He cooked up the idea in the late 1990s with sculptor Corin Johnson, who also built the private, columned memorial to Princess Diana at the Althorp estate in England.

This was a lifetime ago, when Cave wore a drooping moustache and a medallion, and looked like a porn star on the slide. It was a glorious era of family contentment, living with his wife, Susie Bick, a model and fashion designer, and their twin sons in Brighton, England, enjoying the commercial and critical success of his album Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!, a sleazy, humorous rock bombshell that was praised as one of many career resurrections on its release in 2008.

New Statesman