Pianist and singer/songwriter known for Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

Born: July 27, 1960;

Died: September 2, 2018

CONWAY Savage, who has died aged 58, was a pianist, singer and songwriter who was most famous as a member of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, a group he joined in 1990 and remained with until his enforced retirement through illness in 2016. Less widely known, but also treasured by admirers of his work, was the range of solo material he released from 1993’s self-titled debut EP onwards, featuring music which reduced the Gothic aesthetic of the Bad Seeds to a form of intimate and atmospheric chamber music for piano.

A mainstay of the Melbourne rock scene throughout the 1980s, Conway’s path found him a number of connections to Cave and his band before he was ever invited to play with them. Among the many rock and country-flavoured bands he was involved with (including Scrap Museum, Dust on the Bible and Dave Last and the Legendary Boy-Kings), he played piano for Happy Orphans and The Feral Dinosaurs with drummer Jim White, who went on to play in Dirty Three with Cave’s regular violin player Warren Ellis.

It was these mutual friendships which resulted in Savage receiving a phone call to join the Bad Seeds as pianist on The Good Son tour in 1990 (Cave himself had played piano on the album), although he had already met and played with Cave once before, when the singer had joined Savage’s band to sing a few country covers at a friend’s wedding. “That’s Australia, mutual friends everywhere,” said Savage of the meeting. He was kept on as a full-time member of the band and made his recorded debut on the 1992 album Henry’s Dream, where he and Cave’s vocal duet formed the choral centrepiece of the track When I First Came to Town.

In total, Savage played on 11 albums by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, from Henry’s Dream until 2013’s Push the Sky Away (if 2004’s simultaneous release Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus is counted as two discrete albums); although not always as a pianist - for example on Nocturama (2003) he was credited with some backing vocals only, while Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! (2008) listed him as a bandmember but defined no roles. Where he did not play piano on songs, it is usually because Cave – or, on occasion, Ellis – was doing so.

Although his playing was a signature element of many Bad Seeds songs, particularly with the gothic menace it provided to Stagger Lee, perhaps Savage’s most singular contribution was the lead vocal part he took on The Willow Garden, the B-side to 1995’s Where the Wild Roses Grow. He said in interview at various points that he viewed Cave as an inspiration and a teacher, remarking on both his humour and his intensity, and noting that his own work as a solo performer did not come so naturally.

Savage had, he told an interviewer in 2008, “to work (my) way into it, slowly grow more confident in my abilities to write and perform, especially to write in the way that I want.” Shifting from a country focus to a more gothic style influenced by Tom Waits, his solo albums include Nothing Broken (2000), Wrong Man’s Hands (2004) and Rare Songs and Performances 1989-2004 (2005), the latter released on his own label Beheaded Communications. He also wrote and recorded with Australian musicians including the Triffids’ David McComb and the Go-Betweens’ Robert Forster, releasing the albums Soon Will Be Tomorrow (1998) with Suzie Higgie and Quickie for Duckie (2007) with Amanda Fox and Robert Tickner.

Born in rural Victoria in 1960 and raised in a small town called Fish Creek, Conway Victor Savage’s parents owned a number of hotel bars in the area, and it was in these that he found his first ever piano. Too shy to play it in public, he nevertheless started practising on his own. “What you got to do with music is continue on with what you got to do,” he said in interview in 2009. “I was doing this stuff before I did the Bad Seeds, you know. As Guy Clark said, ‘sing like you don’t need the money’.”

Savage was absent from the recording of the Bad Seeds’ 2016’s Skeleton Key album, and in 2017 was diagnosed with a brain tumour which kept him from touring with the band. He died in Melbourne. “Irascible, funny, terrifying, sentimental, warm-hearted, gentle, acerbic, honest, genuine – he was all of these things and quite literally ‘had the gift of a golden voice,’ high and sweet and drenched in soul’,” said the tribute to Savage posted on Cave’s official website on behalf of the band.

“On a drunken night, at four in the morning, in a hotel bar in Cologne, Conway sat at the piano and sang Streets of Laredo to us, in his sweet, melancholy style and stopped the world for a moment. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house.” Fans who saw the Glasgow Pavilion date of the Good Son tour in 1990 will have known the same experience, when Cave lost his voice and requested that Savage sing the same song on his behalf.

DAVID POLLOCK