Nicholas Lens & Nick Cave
Biography Nicholas Lens & Nick Cave
Nicholas Lens
The multi-disciplinary artist Nicholas Lens is a contemporary Belgian author/composer and (recently as well) director. He was born in Ypres, the small but legendary first world war town near the French boarder in Belgium. He started studying violin with his godfather when he was five. Once when he was playing in a very enthusiastic way during the lessons, his bow touched, by accident, the director of the local academy on one of his vital organs. So the little Nicholas' violin career ended when he was ten. His first television appearance was as a trumpet player when he was eleven. He was asked to play “The Last Post” at an official ceremony at a British and American war cemetery. Nicholas was wearing short pants and it was freezing cold. The television crew members offered him some brandy. The version of “The Last Post” he played during the ceremony on his trumpet was never heard before. Later on, while he was studying at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Brussels, he started composing professionally for theatrical projects, film and television. While he was a member of the National Orchestra of Belgium, the conductor Mendi Rodan offered him a contract as a double bass player in the Israel Sinfonietta in Beersheeva, Israel. He had to make an important choice between the career of a professional musician and the uncertain life conditions of an autodidact composer. He made his choice. Meanwhile he was caught by the virus of globetrotting. Inspired by this new passion, adventurous traveling, he started to create a musical -and recently as well a visual- oeuvre of the maze of images gathered in his mind. His work is published by Schott Music Mainz/New York.
Nicholas Lens is single dad and lives in Brussels with his daughter Clara-Lane. The works of Nicholas Lens are supported by The Yuko Ikewada Foundation, Tokyo /Venice.
Nick Cave
Nicholas Edward Cave (born 22 September 1957) is an Australian singer, songwriter, author, screenwriter, composer and occasional actor, best known for fronting the rock band Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Cave's music is generally characterised by his baritone voice, emotional intensity, a wide variety of influences and lyrical obsessions with death, religion, love and violence.[2]
Born and raised in rural Victoria, Cave studied art in Melbourne before fronting The Birthday Party, one of the city's leading post-punk bands, in the late 1970s. They relocated to London in 1980, but, disillusioned by life there, evolved towards a darker, more challenging sound that helped inspire gothic rock, and acquired a reputation as "the most violent live band in the world".[3] Cave became recognised for his confrontational performances, his shock of black hair and pale, emaciated look. The band broke up soon after moving to Berlin in 1982, and Cave formed Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds the year after, later described as one of rock's "most redoubtable, enduring" bands.[4] Much of their early material is set in a mythic American Deep South, drawing on spirituals and Delta blues, while Cave's preoccupation with Old Testament notions of good versus evil culminated in what has been called his signature song, "The Mercy Seat" (1988), and in his debut novel, And the Ass Saw the Angel (1989). Also in 1988, he starred in Ghosts... of the Civil Dead, an Australian prison film which he co-wrote and scored.
