Anita Lane,

Rocker Who Was More Than a Muse,

Is Dead at 61

Ms. Lane was Nick Cave’s

collaborator and girlfriend during
his formative period and helped
define his sound. She also made
records of her own.

The singer and songwriter Anita

Lane, best known for her
collaborations with Nick Cave, in
an undated photo.Credit...Peter
Milne/M.33

Anita Lane, who collaborated with

the Australian rocker Nick Cave on
some of his most striking songs
and made distinctive records of
her own, applying her sometimes
girly, sometimes sultry vocal style
to lyrics that could be haunting,
gloomy, sexual or tongue-in-
cheek, died last month in
Melbourne, Australia. She was 61.

Her label, Mute Records, announced her death in a posting on its

website on April 29 but did not say when she died or give
the cause. She lived in Melbourne.

Ms. Lane met Mr. Cave in 1977, when both were

teenagers. She was his girlfriend during the period when
he was coming to prominence with the band the Birthday
Party and continued to write with him after he formed
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds in 1984.

“She was the smartest and most talented of all of us, by far,” Mr.
Cave wrote in an emotional tribute on his website.
She contributed lyrics to a number of Birthday Party and Bad
Seeds songs, including the title track from the first Bad Seeds
album, “From Her to Eternity” (1985), and she helped define Mr.
Cave’s dark, intense style. Mr. Cave was particularly enamored of
a song for which she wrote all the lyrics, “Stranger Than
Kindness” (1986), so much so that he has continued to perform it
and borrowed its title for an autobiographical book published last
year that documented memorabilia from his career. It’s an
abstract song (arranged by Blixa Bargeld) that seems to be about
both passion and estrangement, and ends this way:

Your sleeping hands journey

They loiter
Stranger than kindness
You hold me so carelessly close
Tell me I’m dirty
I’m a stranger
I’m a stranger
I’m a stranger to kindness

Ms. Lane was sometimes described with a particular term, which

Mr. Cave commented on in his tribute. “Despised the concept of
the muse but was everybody’s,” he wrote.

Yet she sometimes made her way into the recording studio
herself, releasing two albums, “Dirty Pearl” in 1993 and “Sex
O’Clock” in 2001 (both produced largely by Mick Harvey, Mr.
Cave’s Bad Seeds bandmate).

“Dirty Pearl” compiled studio recordings she had made over 12

years in Berlin (where she lived for many years), London,
Melbourne and Sydney, Australia. Shane Danielsen, reviewing it
in The Sydney Morning Herald, called Ms. Lane “a highly
distinctive vocalist, purring in a manner at once erotic and
unsettling.”

The British newspaper The Express, reviewing “Sex O’Clock,” said

of Ms. Lane, “She’s groovy like a chic sixties chanteuse and funky
like a seventies disco queen but still sounds dead modern, and
the songs are redolent of lust and boudoirs.”

Erik Jensen, reviewing the same record in the German publication

Politiken, said, “As a counterbalance to the many half-naked
Barbies of the time on MTV, Anita Lane’s mature seduction is a
pleasure.”

Anita Lane was born on March 18, 1960, in East Melbourne to

Rowland and Pearl (Petts) Lane.

According to Ian Johnston’s book “Bad Seed: The Biography of

Nick Cave” (1995), when she was 17 she talked her way into the
Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne, lying about her age
because she was too young. Mr. Cave too was studying art. A
portrait she painted of him in 1977 is included in his “Stranger
Than Kindness” book, along with her comment about him: that if
he were hit by a bus, he would be compelled to write about it in
his own blood before he died.

She was 17 and he was 19 when they met. Punk rock had
blossomed.

“I guess everyone came to life out of punk rock, all that feeling
that was going around at the time,” she said years later. “It was
funny for us because we weren’t poor, working class or very
upset. What were we? I don’t know.”

She didn’t stick with art school long after meeting Mr. Cave,
whose band at the time was called the Boys Next Door but soon
became the Birthday Party. When the band left Melbourne to try
London in the early 1980s, Ms. Lane soon joined Mr. Cave there.
She contributed lyrics to some of the songs on the band’s debut
album, “Prayers on Fire,” released in 1981.

She also began turning up in Mr. Cave’s songs in other ways.

“In ‘Six-Inch Gold Blade’ Cave narrated a violent tale of extreme

sexual jealousy, desire and hatred combined in the brutal murder
of a girl not too dissimilar in appearance to Anita Lane,” Mr.
Johnston wrote in his biography. “Although his obsession with
Anita had manifested itself in a number of earlier songs, ‘Six-Inch
Gold Blade’ marked her first obvious appearance as a narrative
character.”

Such depictions didn’t bother Ms. Lane.

“To other people it may have been really shocking,” she said,
“but I liked the idea of how shocking it was.”

The two would sometimes collaborate even after their romantic

relationship ended in 1983. Ms. Lane also worked with other
artists, especially Mr. Harvey. She contributed vocals to several
tracks on his “Intoxicated Man,” a 1995 album reimagining songs
by the French star Serge Gainsbourg. Four years earlier she and
Barry Adamson released a single of “These Boots Are Made for
Walking,” the Nancy Sinatra hit.

Her record company said Ms. Lane is survived by a son with

Johannes Beck, Raphael; and two sons with Andrea Libonati,
Luciano and Carlito.