Nick Cave

Kicking Against the Pricks was actually a holding device. Following 1984's From Her to Eternity, the Bad Seeds recorded The Firstborn is Dead in the final two months of that same year; but because Bob Dylan's lawyers made them wait months for clearance to include "Wanted Man", the album wasn't released until 1985. Due to a lack of new songs and as Cave was in the middle of writing his novel And The Ass Saw the Angel, a covers album looked the thing to follow up.

If intended as filler, or a scene setting for what was to come; it became much more. It moved Cave on, freed him up, let him loose on stuff that frankly rocked, in a deathly way, and broke him into a much wider audience. And it happened because Cave kept walking deeper into the American heart of darkness.

In the mid-80s, the States weren't cool; you had Springsteen, John Mellencamp, Madonna and Top Gun. For Cave, that didn't exist; he reached back to the America of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, a Southern Gothic wild west of swampland and twisted religion, of extreme good and bad, a place of chaos. Not Cave's roots, but that doesn't matter, it's always really your own story whatever background you choose. Cave happened to be working through a broken-down relationship, and working out his mounting dislike of music journalists. "Kicking against the pricks" is a biblical lift, referring to an ox kicking in irritation at the sharpened rod – the goad or prick – used by the driver when tilling soil. It would seem there were plenty of goads and an abundance of pain to deal with.

Each deluxe double-disc collectors edition contains the remastered stereo album, the new surround mix (5.1 dvd), a specially commissioned short film made by acclaimed UK artists Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard plus the b-sides from the singles and exclusive sleeve notes.