Australian singer songwriter and Bad Seeds member Anita Lane dies at 61
Anita ‘Dirty’ Lane, Australian singer-songwriter and one-time Bad Seeds member, has passed away at 61.
Lane was a long-time collaborator of Nick Cave’s, co-writing two of his best-known songs ‘From Her to Eternity’ and ‘Stranger Than Kindness’, as well as others including ‘A Dead Song’, ‘Dead Joe’ and ‘Kiss Me Black’.
The Bad Seeds appeared on her debut Dirty Sings EP in 1988, and guitarist Mick Harvey produced her albums Dirty Pearl (1993) and Sex O’Clock (2001), songs as menacing as they were exquisite, speaking to other women about independence and boldness.
Lane was born in Melbourne, singing and writing songs at the age of 16.
She attended the Prahran College of Advanced Education, where a classmate was Rowland S. Howard.
In 1977, she met Cave – at the time in his late teens and singing with The Boys Next Door – and they struck up an intermittent relationship while she opened him up the power of poetry.
Both were rebels, both said punk made them come alive, and both were determined to carve out their own paths in life rather than the ones their families had decided was for them.
When the band became The Birthday Party in 1980, Lane accompanied them to Europe.
Rolling Stone paid tribute to “her sinister mystique”, the way “she showed shy girls how to come on scary” and equated her role in The Bad Seeds with Anita Pallenberg’s in The Rolling Stones.
“She was a lot more than a muse — she was the girl who schooled these boys in the art of badness, the queen of this underground.”
Lane appeared on the soundtrack of their 1988 Australian film Ghosts… of the Civil Dead and guested on records by Die Haut, Barry Adamson, Head On and Einstürzende Neubauten.
In the 1990s she moved to Byron Bay and lived out her life quietly.
Cave, who wrote about her in ‘Cabin Fever’ posted on social media on her passing: “From her to eternity. We love you, Anita.”
Harvey shared a picture of Lane from 1995 with more than 40 hearts, captioning it “one for every year I’ve loved you”.