A Little History : Photographs of Nick Cave and Cohorts 1981 – 2013

“Bleddyn Butcher has been taking pictures of me and my cohorts since I first got up on stage back in Australia right through to the shuddering present and some of these images are so familiar to me, so much a part of the fabric of my life, my little history, that much like the songs I have written, these photographs have become the props around which my memories collect. Without them so many of those days would be lost. Soul-stealer and dream-catcher – here he comes then – with his book of rescued moments.” Nick Cave

When Bleddyn Butcher first saw The Birthday Party play, back in 1981, he was astonished. And then enthralled. He set about trying to catch their lightning in his Nikon F2AS.

That quixotic impulse became a lifelong quest.

A little history got made on the way.

Collected here for the first time are the fruits of his labour. A Little History is an extraordinary document, tracking Nick Cave’s creative career from the apoplectic extravagance of The Birthday Party to the calmer disquiet of 2013’s Push The Sky Away via snapshots, spotlit visions and sumptuous, theatrical portraits. It mixes the candid and uncanny, the spontaneous and the patiently staged, and includes eyeball encounters with Cave’s baddest lieutenants, men for the most part who long since burned their own bridges down.

Butcher’s Nikonic eye defines moment after arresting moment in Cave’s glorious, sprawling story: it’s a splendid testament to two brilliant careers.