Anita Lane, singer-songwriter who collaborated with Nick Cave, dies aged 61

Anita Lane, the Australian singer-songwriter best known for her collaborations with Nick Cave, has died aged 61. A representative for her label confirmed the news. No cause of death was given.

Lane was born in Melbourne and attended art school where she began dating Cave in the 1970s. The pair later moved to Europe together and they collaborated, initially for Cave’s band the Birthday Party – Lane co-wrote A Dead Song from their 1981 debut album, Prayers on Fire. The photographer Bleddyn Butcher, who extensively documented Cave’s early years, later said: “Anita’s influence on Nick’s early thinking and creative confidence was catalytic.”

Lane and Cave continued to work together on songs on the second Birthday Party album, and she joined his next group, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Her tenure with the band was short, and she and Cave split as a couple in the mid-80s. But she continued to write lyrics, including for the songs Stranger Than Kindness and From Her to Eternity. She also duetted with Cave on Death Is Not the End, a Bob Dylan cover version taken from 1996 album Murder Ballads.

Lane released a debut solo EP, Dirty Sings, in 1988, saying she “wanted to glorify insecurity rather than being confident and successful” with her musicianship. The EP contained a cover of Sister Sledge’s Lost in Music featuring Cave on piano, one of a number of evocative cover versions Lane would record during her life, such as Marvin Gaye’s Sexual Healing and Gil Scott-Heron’s Home Is Where the Hatred Is.

Dirty Sings was later compiled alongside new tracks and other 80s collaborations on her debut album, Dirty Pearl, released in 1993. One of the B-sides from the single The World’s a Girl was a cover of Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin’s duet Je T’aime … Moi Non Plus, with Cave. A second solo album, Sex O’Clock, followed in 2001.

Lane also collaborated with members of the Bad Seeds outside the group, singing on the debut album by Barry Adamson, Moss Side Story (1989) as well as his soundtrack to the film Delusion (1991). She also sang on Intoxicated Man and Pink Elephants, a pair of tribute albums to Gainsbourg by Bad Seeds member Mick Harvey, and contributed to Tabula Rasa, a 1993 album by Einstürzende Neubauten fronted by Bad Seeds member Blixa Bargeld, with whom she had written Stranger Than Kindness.

Her label Mute paid tribute, calling her “a beautiful unworldly spirit with the tenderest of voices … She would sum up an emotion, a situation, a lifetime, in one effortless sentence when others would struggle to show meaning using long ranging books of poetry and testaments of prose.”