Lyre

Greek vase with muse playing the phorminx, a type of lyre
String instrument
Hornbostel–Sachs classification	321.2 (Composite chordophone sounded with a plectrum)
Developed	Sumer, Iraq
Related instruments
Çeng Konghou Harp Chang (instrument)

A lyrist on the Standard of Ur, believed to date to between 2600–2400 BCE

The Hagia Triada Mycenaean sarcophagus, 14th century BCE, depicting the earliest lyre with seven strings, held by a man with long robe, third from the left.

The lyre (Greek: λύρα) is a stringed musical instrument known for its use in Greek classical antiquity and later. The word comes from the Greek "λύρα" (lyra)^[1] and the earliest reference to the word is the Mycenaean Greek ru-ra-ta-e, meaning "lyrists", written in Linear B syllabic script.^[2] The earliest picture of a lyre with seven strings appears in the famous sarcophagus of Hagia Triada (a Minoan settlement in Crete). The sarcophagus was used during the Mycenaean occupation of Crete (1400 BC).^[3][4] The recitations of the Ancient Greeks were accompanied by lyre playing. The lyre of classical antiquity was ordinarily played by being strummed with a plectrum, like a guitar or a zither, rather than being plucked, like a harp. The fingers of the free hand silenced the unwanted strings in the chord. The lyre is similar in appearance to a small harp but with distinct differences.

The word lyre can either refer specifically to a common folk-instrument, which is a smaller version of the professional kithara and eastern-Aegean barbiton, or lyre can refer generally to all three instruments as a family.

In organology, lyres are defined as "yoke lutes", being lutes in which the strings are attached to a yoke which lies in the same plane as the sound-table and consists of two arms and a cross-bar.

The term is also used metaphorically to refer to the work or skill of a poet, as in Shelley's "Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is"^[5] or Byron's "I wish to tune my quivering lyre,/To deeds of fame, and notes of fire"^[6]

Classification[link]

Lyre from various times and places are regarded by some organologists (specialists in the history of musical instruments) as a branch of the zither family, a general category that includes not only zithers, but many different stringed instruments, such as lutes, guitars, kantele, and psalteries.

Others view the lyre and zither as being two separate classes. Those specialists maintain that the zither is distinguished by strings spread across all or most of its soundboard, or the top surface of its sound chest, also called soundbox or resonator, as opposed to the lyre, whose strings emanate from a more or less common point off the soundboard, such as a tailpiece. Examples of that difference include a piano (a keyed zither) and a violin (referred to by some as a species of fingerboard lyre). Some specialists even argue that instruments such as the violin and guitar belong to a class apart from the lyre because they have no yokes or uprights surmounting their resonators as "true" lyres have. This group they usually refer to as the lute class, after the instrument of that name, and include within it the guitar, the violin, the banjo, and similar stringed instruments with fingerboards. Those who differ with that opinion counter by calling the lute, violin, guitar, banjo, and other such instruments "independent fingerboard lyres," as opposed to simply "fingerboard lyres" such as the Welsh crwth, which have both fingerboards and frameworks above their resonators.

One point on which organologists universally agree is that lyres are closely related to harps (and, in some views, lutes). The other point of agreement is that harps are different from lyres in having strings emanating directly up from the soundboard and residing in a plane that is near perpendicular to the soundboard, as opposed to lyres, lutes, zithers and similar instruments, whose strings are attached to one or more points somewhere off the soundboard (e.g.., wrest pins on a zither, tailpiece on a lyre or lute) and lie in a plane essentially parallel to it. They also agree that neither the overall size of the instrument nor the particular number of strings on it are essential to the classification of these instruments. For example, small Scottish and Irish harps can be held on the lap, while some ancient Sumerian lyres appear to have been as tall as a seated man (see Kinsky; also Sachs, History ..., under "References"). Regarding the number of strings, the standard 88-key piano has many more strings than even the largest harp, and harps have many more strings than lyres.

Construction[link]

Statue of the Olympian deity Apollo holding a cithara, a professional version of the lyre (c. 1820).

A classical lyre has a hollow body or sound-chest (also known as soundbox or resonator), which, in ancient Greek tradition, was made out of turtle shell.^[7] Extending from this sound-chest are two raised arms, which are sometimes hollow, and are curved both outward and forward. They are connected near the top by a crossbar or yoke. An additional crossbar, fixed to the sound-chest, makes the bridge which transmits the vibrations of the strings. The deepest note was that farthest from the player's body; as the strings did not differ much in length, more weight may have been gained for the deeper notes by thicker strings, as in the violin and similar modern instruments, or they were tuned by having a slacker tension. The strings were of gut. They were stretched between the yoke and bridge, or to a tailpiece below the bridge. There were two ways of tuning: one was to fasten the strings to pegs which might be turned; the other was to change the place of the string upon the crossbar; probably both expedients were used simultaneously.

According to ancient Greek mythology, the young god Hermes created the lyre from a slaughtered cow from Apollo's sacred herd, using the intestines for the strings—eventually Apollo discovered who had stolen his cow, but Hermes was forgiven after he gave Apollo the instrument. Lyres were associated with Apollonian virtues of moderation and equilibrium, contrasting with the Dionysian pipes and aulos, both of which represented ecstasy and celebration.

Locales in southern Europe, western Asia, or north Africa have been proposed as the historic birthplace of the genus. The instrument is still played in north-eastern parts of Africa.

Some of the cultures using and developing the lyre were the Aeolian and Ionian Greek colonies on the coasts of Asia (ancient Asia Minor, modern day Turkey) bordering the Lydian empire. Some mythic masters like Musaeus, and Thamyris were believed to have been born in Thrace, another place of extensive Greek colonization. The name kissar (kithara) given by the ancient Greeks to Egyptian box instruments reveals the apparent similarities recognized by Greeks themselves. The cultural peak of ancient Egypt, and thus the possible age of the earliest instruments of this type, predates the 5th century classic Greece. This indicates the possibility that the lyre might have existed in one of Greece's neighboring countries, either Thrace, Lydia, or Egypt, and was introduced into Greece at pre-classic times.

Number of strings on the classical lyre[link]

The number of strings on the classical lyre varied at different epochs, and possibly in different localities—four, seven and ten having been favorite numbers. They were used without a fingerboard, no Greek description or representation having ever been met with that can be construed as referring to one. Nor was a bow possible, the flat sound-board being an insuperable impediment. The pick, or plectrum, however, was in constant use. It was held in the right hand to set the upper strings in vibration; when not in use, it hung from the instrument by a ribbon. The fingers of the left hand touched the lower strings (presumably to silence those whose notes were not wanted).

There is no evidence as to the stringing of the Greek lyre in the heroic age. Plutarch says that Olympus and Terpander used but three strings to accompany their recitation. As the four strings led to seven and eight by doubling the tetrachord, or series of four tones filling in the interval of a perfect fourth, so the trichord is connected with the hexachord or six-stringed lyre depicted on many archaic Greek vases. The accuracy of this representation cannot be insisted upon, the vase painters being little mindful of the complete expression of details; yet one may suppose their tendency would be rather to imitate than to invent a number. It was their constant practice to represent the strings as being damped by the fingers of the left hand of the player, after having been struck by the plectrum which he held in the right hand. Before Greek civilization had assumed its historic form, there was likely to have been great freedom and independence of different localities in the matter of lyre stringing, which is corroborated by the antique use of the chromatic (half-tone) and enharmonic (quarter-tone) tunings pointing to an early exuberance, and perhaps also to a bias towards refinements of intonation.

Central and Northern Europe[link]

Other instruments known as lyres have been fashioned and used in Europe outside the Greco-Roman world since at least the Iron Age.^[8] The remains of a 2300 year old lyre was discovered on the Isle of Skye, Scotland in 2010 making it Europe’s oldest surviving stringed musical instrument.^[9][10] Material evidence suggests lyres became more widespread during the early Middle Ages, and one view holds that many modern stringed instruments are late-emerging examples of the lyre class. There is no clear evidence that non-Greco-Roman lyres were played exclusively with plectra, and numerous instruments regarded by some as modern lyres are played with bows.

Lyres appearing to have emerged independently of Greco-Roman prototypes were used by the Teutonic, Gallic, Scandinavian, and Celtic peoples over a thousand years ago. Dates of origin, which probably vary from region to region, cannot be determined, but the oldest known fragments of such instruments are thought to date from around the sixth century of the Common Era. After the bow made its way into Europe from the Middle-East, around two centuries later, it was applied to several species of those lyres that were small enough to make bowing practical. There came to be two broad classes of bowed European yoke lyres: those with fingerboards dividing the open space within the yoke longitudinally, and those without fingerboards. The last surviving examples of instruments within the latter class were the Scandinavian talharpa and the Finnish jouhikko. Different tones could be obtained from a single bowed string by pressing the fingernails of the player's left hand against various points along the string to fret the string.

The last of the bowed yoke lyres with fingerboard was the "modern" (ca. 1485 – ca. 1800) Welsh crwth. It had several predecessors both in the British Isles and in Continental Europe. Pitch was changed on individual strings by pressing the string firmly against the fingerboard with the fingertips. Like a violin, this method shortened the vibrating length of the string to produce higher tones, while releasing the finger gave the string a greater vibrating length, thereby producing a tone lower in pitch. This is the principle on which the modern violin and guitar work.

While the dates of origin and other evolutionary details of the European bowed yoke lyres continue to be disputed among organologists, there is general agreement that none of them were the ancestors of modern orchestral bowed stringed instruments, as once was thought.

Lyres around the world[link]

• Arabian peninsula: tanbūra
• Bangladesh: ektara
• Egypt: kissar, tanbūra, simsimiyya
• England: rote
• Estonia: talharpa
• Ethiopia: begena, dita, krar
• Finland: Jouhikko
• India: ektara, Yazh
• Iraq: sammu, tanbūra, zami, zinar
• Israel: kinnor
• Kenya: kibugander, litungu, nyatiti, obokano
• Norway: Giga
• Pakistan: barbat, ektara, tanbūra
• Scotland: Gue
• Sudan: kissar, tanbūra
• Tanzania: litungu
• Uganda: endongo, ntongoli
• Wales: crwth
• Yemen: tanbūra, simsimiyya

• 

  Reproduction of the lyre from the royal burial at Sutton Hoo, late 6th/early 7th century AD

• 

  Pushkin lyre

Other instruments called lyres[link]

After the ancient lyre fell in disuse, the name was used to label unrelated instruments, mostly bowed lutes such as the Byzantine lyra, the Pontic lyra, the Constantinopolitan lyra, the Cretan lyra, the lira da braccio, the Calabrian lira, the lijerica, the lyra viol, the lirone.

See also[link]

• Lyre-guitar
• Asor

References[link]

1. ^ λύρα, Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, on Perseus Digital Library
2. ^ Palaeolexicon, Word study tool of ancient languages
3. ^ Image of Hagia Triada Sarcophagus, University of Arkansas
4. ^ J.A. Sakellarakis. "Herakleion Museum. Illustrated Guide to the Museum." p.113,114. Ekdotike Athinon. Athens, 1987.
5. ^ Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ode to the West Wind, I, 57–61.
6. ^ Lord Byron (1807), Hours of Idleness: To His Lyre.
7. ^ http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/lyre
8. ^ http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-17537147
9. ^ http://news.stv.tv/scotland/highlands-islands/301843-europes-oldest-stringed-instrument-discovered-on-scots-isle/
10. ^ http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-17537147

Bibliography[link]

•  Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Lyre". Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. 
• Andersson, Otto. The Bowed Harp, translated and edited by Kathleen Schlesinger (London: New Temple Press, 1930).
• Bachmann, Werner. The Origins of Bowing, trans. Norma Deane (London: Oxford University Press, 1969).
• Jenkins, J. "A Short Note on African Lyres in Use Today." Iraq 31 (1969), p. 103 (+ pl. XVIII).
• Kinsky, George. A History of Music in Pictures (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1937).
• Sachs, Curt. The Rise of Music in the Ancient World, East and West (New York: W.W. Norton, 1943).
• Sachs, Curt. The History of Musical Instruments (New York: W.W. Norton, 1940).

External links[link]

• Anglo Saxon Lyres at Yahoo!Groups

Look up lyre in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Lyres

Sir David Attenborough
Attenborough in May 2003
Born	(1926-05-08) 8 May 1926 (age 86) Isleworth, London
Nationality	British
Alma mater	Clare College, Cambridge (natural sciences) London School of Economics (social anthropology)
Occupation	Broadcaster Naturalist
Title	Member of the Order of Merit Companion of Honour Commander of the Royal Victorian Order Commander of the Order of the British Empire Fellow of the Royal Society Fellow of Zoological Society of London
Spouse	Jane Elizabeth Ebsworth Oriel (m. 1950–1997, her death)
Children	Robert Attenborough Susan Attenborough

Sir David Frederick Attenborough ( /ˈætənbərə/) OM, CH, CVO, CBE, FRS, FZS, FSA (born 8 May 1926) is a British broadcaster and naturalist.

His career as the face and voice of natural history programmes has endured for more than 50 years. He is best known for writing and presenting the nine Life series, in conjunction with the BBC Natural History Unit, which collectively form a comprehensive survey of all life on the planet. He is also a former senior manager at the BBC, having served as controller of BBC Two and director of programming for BBC Television in the 1960s and 1970s.

Attenborough is widely considered a national treasure in Britain, although he himself does not care for the term.^[1][2][3] He is a younger brother of director, producer and actor Richard Attenborough.^[4]

Early life and family[link]

Attenborough was born in Isleworth, west London, but grew up in College House on the campus of the University College, Leicester, where his father, Frederick, was principal.^[5] He is the middle of three sons (his elder brother, Richard, became an actor and his younger brother, John, an executive at Italian car manufacturer Alfa Romeo).^[6] During World War II his parents also adopted two Jewish refugee girls from Europe.^[7][8]

Attenborough spent his childhood collecting fossils, stones and other natural specimens. He received encouragement in this pursuit at age seven, when a young Jacquetta Hawkes admired his "museum". A few years later, one of his adoptive sisters gave him a piece of amber filled with prehistoric creatures; some 50 years later, it would be the focus of his programme The Amber Time Machine.

Attenborough was educated at Wyggeston Grammar School for Boys in Leicester and then won a scholarship to Clare College, Cambridge in 1945, where he studied geology and zoology and obtained a degree in natural sciences.^[9] In 1947, he was called up for national service in the Royal Navy and spent two years stationed in North Wales and the Firth of Forth.

In 1950, Attenborough married Jane Elizabeth Ebsworth Oriel; the marriage lasted until her death in 1997. The couple had two children, Robert and Susan.^[8] Robert is a senior lecturer in bioanthropology for the School of Archaeology and Anthropology at the Australian National University in Canberra.^[10]

First years at the BBC[link]

After leaving the Navy, Attenborough took a position editing children's science textbooks for a publishing company. He soon became disillusioned with the work, however, and in 1950, he applied for a job as a radio talks producer with the BBC. Although he was rejected for this job, his CV later attracted the interest of Mary Adams, head of the Talks (factual broadcasting) department of the BBC's fledgling television service. Attenborough, like most Britons at that time, did not own a television, and he had seen only one programme in his life.^[11] However, he accepted Adams' offer of a three-month training course, and in 1952 he joined the BBC full-time. Initially discouraged from appearing on camera because Adams thought his teeth were too big,^[12] he became a producer for the Talks department, which handled all non-fiction broadcasts. His early projects included the quiz show Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? and Song Hunter, a series about folk music presented by Alan Lomax.

Attenborough's association with natural history programmes began when he produced and presented the three-part series The Pattern of Animals. The studio-bound programme featured animals from London Zoo, with the naturalist Julian Huxley discussing their use of camouflage, aposematism and courtship displays. Through this programme, Attenborough met Jack Lester, the curator of the zoo's reptile house, and they decided to make a series about an animal-collecting expedition. The result was Zoo Quest, first broadcast in 1954, which Attenborough presented at short notice, due to Lester being taken ill.

In 1957, the BBC Natural History Unit was formally established in Bristol. Attenborough was asked to join it, but declined, not wishing to move from London where he and his young family were settled. Instead he formed his own department, the Travel and Exploration Unit,^[13] which allowed him to continue to front Zoo Quest as well as produce other documentaries, notably the Travellers' Tales and Adventure series.

In the early 1960s, Attenborough resigned from the permanent staff of the BBC to study for a postgraduate degree in social anthropology at the London School of Economics, interweaving his study with further filming.^[14] However, he accepted an invitation to return to the BBC as controller of BBC Two before he could finish the degree.

BBC administration[link]

Attenborough became the controller of BBC Two in March 1965, but had a clause inserted in his contract that would allow him to continue making programmes on an occasional basis. Later the same year, he filmed elephants in Tanzania, and in 1969, he made a three-part series on the cultural history of the Indonesian island of Bali. For the 1971 film A Blank on the Map, he joined the first Western expedition to a remote highland valley in New Guinea to seek out a lost tribe.

BBC Two was launched in 1964, but had struggled to capture the public's imagination. When Attenborough arrived as controller, he quickly abolished the channel's quirky kangaroo mascot and shook up the schedule. With a mission to make BBC Two's output diverse and different from that offered by other networks, he began to establish a portfolio of programmes that defined the channel's identity for decades to come. Under his tenure, music, the arts, entertainment, archaeology, experimental comedy, travel, drama, sport, business, science and natural history all found a place in the weekly schedules. Often, an eclectic mix was offered within a single evening's viewing. Programmes he commissioned included Man Alive, Call My Bluff, Chronicle, Life, One Pair of Eyes, The Old Grey Whistle Test, Monty Python's Flying Circus and The Money Programme. When BBC Two became the first British channel to broadcast in colour in 1967, Attenborough took advantage by introducing televised snooker, as well as bringing rugby league to British television on a regular basis via the BBC2 Floodlit Trophy.

One of his most significant decisions was to order a 13-part series on the history of Western art, to show off the quality of the new UHF colour television service that BBC Two offered. Broadcast to universal acclaim in 1969, Civilisation set the blueprint for landmark authored documentaries, which were informally known as "tombstone" or "sledgehammer" projects. Others followed, including Jacob Bronowski's The Ascent of Man (also commissioned by Attenborough), and Alistair Cooke's America. Attenborough thought that the story of evolution would be a natural subject for such a series. He shared his idea with Chris Parsons, a producer at the Natural History Unit, who came up with the title Life on Earth and returned to Bristol to start planning the series. Attenborough harboured a strong desire to present the series himself, but this would not be possible so long as he remained in a management post.

In 1969, Attenborough was promoted to director of programmes, making him responsible for the output of both BBC channels. His tasks, which included agreeing budgets, attending board meetings and firing staff, were now far removed from the business of filming programmes. When Attenborough's name was being suggested as a candidate for the position of Director General of the BBC in 1972, he phoned his brother Richard to confess that he had no appetite for the job. Early the following year, he left his post to return to full-time programme-making, leaving him free to write and present the planned natural history epic.

Return to broadcasting[link]

After his resignation, Attenborough became a freelance broadcaster and immediately started work on his next project, a pre-arranged trip to Indonesia with a crew from the Natural History Unit. It resulted in the 1973 series Eastwards with Attenborough, which was similar in tone to the earlier Zoo Quests but without the animal-collecting element.

On his return, he began to work on the scripts for Life on Earth. Due to the scale of his ambition, the BBC decided to partner with an American network to secure the necessary funding. While the negotiations were proceeding he worked on a number of other television projects. He presented a series on tribal art (The Tribal Eye, 1975) and another on the voyages of discovery (The Explorers, 1975). He also presented a BBC children's series about cryptozoology entitled Fabulous Animals (1975), which featured mythical creatures such as the griffin and kraken.^[15] Eventually, the BBC signed a co-production deal with Turner Broadcasting and Life on Earth moved into production in 1976.

Life series[link]

Beginning with Life on Earth in 1979, Attenborough set about creating a body of work which became a benchmark of quality in wildlife film-making and influenced a generation of documentary film-makers. The series also established many of the hallmarks of the BBC's natural history output. By treating his subject seriously and researching the latest discoveries, Attenborough and his production team gained the trust of the scientific community, who responded by allowing him to feature their subjects in his programmes. In Rwanda, for example, Attenborough and his crew were granted privileged access to film Dian Fossey's research group of mountain gorillas. Innovation was another factor in Life on Earth's success: new film-making techniques were devised to get the shots Attenborough wanted, with a focus on events and animals that were hitherto unfilmed. Computerised airline schedules, which had only recently been introduced, enabled the series to be elaborately devised so that Attenborough visited several locations around the globe in each episode, sometimes even changing continents mid-sentence. Although appearing as the on-screen presenter, he consciously restricted his pieces to camera to give his subjects top billing.

The success of Life on Earth prompted the BBC to consider a follow-up, and five years later, The Living Planet was screened. This time, Attenborough built his series around the theme of ecology, the adaptations of living things to their environment. It was another critical and commercial success, generating huge international sales for the BBC. In 1990, The Trials of Life completed the original Life trilogy, looking at animal behaviour through the different stages of life. The series drew strong reactions from the viewing public for its sequences of killer whales hunting sea lions on a Patagonian beach and chimpanzees hunting and violently killing a colobus monkey.

In the 1990s, Attenborough continued to use the "Life" moniker for a succession of authored documentaries. In 1993, he presented Life in the Freezer, the first television series to survey the natural history of Antarctica. Although past normal retirement age, he then embarked on a number of more specialised surveys of the natural world, beginning with plants. They proved a difficult subject for his producers, who had to deliver five hours of television featuring what are essentially immobile objects. The result, The Private Life of Plants (1995), showed plants as dynamic organisms by using time-lapse photography to speed up their growth.

Prompted by an enthusiastic ornithologist at the BBC Natural History Unit, Attenborough then turned his attention to the animal kingdom and in particular, birds. As he was neither an obsessive twitcher, nor a bird expert, he decided he was better qualified to make The Life of Birds (1998) on the theme of behaviour. The order of the remaining "Life" series was dictated by developments in camera technology. For The Life of Mammals (2002), low-light and infrared cameras were deployed to reveal the behaviour of nocturnal mammals. The series contains a number of memorable two shots of Attenborough and his subjects, which included chimpanzees, a blue whale and a grizzly bear. Advances in macro photography made it possible to capture natural behaviour of very small creatures for the first time, and in 2005, Life in the Undergrowth introduced audiences to the world of invertebrates.

At this point, Attenborough realised that he had spent 20 years unconsciously assembling a collection of programmes on all the major groups of terrestrial animals and plants — only reptiles and amphibians were missing. When Life in Cold Blood was broadcast in 2008, he had the satisfaction of completing the set, brought together in a DVD encyclopaedia called Life on Land. In an interview that year, Attenborough was asked to sum up his achievement, and responded:

The evolutionary history is finished. The endeavour is complete. If you'd asked me 20 years ago whether we'd be attempting such a mammoth task, I'd have said "Don't be ridiculous!" These programmes tell a particular story and I'm sure others will come along and tell it much better than I did, but I do hope that if people watch it in 50 years' time, it will still have something to say about the world we live in.^[16]

However, in 2010 Attenborough asserted that his First Life — dealing with evolutionary history before Life on Earth — should also be included within the "Life" series. In the documentary Attenborough's Journey he stated, "This series, to a degree which I really didn't fully appreciate until I started working on it, really completes the set."^[17]

Other documentaries[link]

Alongside the "Life" series, Attenborough has continued to work on other television documentaries, mainly in the natural history genre. He wrote and presented a series on man's influence on the natural history of the Mediterranean basin, The First Eden, in 1987. Two years later, he demonstrated his passion for fossils in Lost Worlds Vanished Lives.

Attenborough narrated every episode of Wildlife on One, a BBC One wildlife series which ran for 253 episodes between 1977 and 2005. At its peak, it drew a weekly audience of eight to ten million, and the 1987 episode "Meerkats United" was voted the best wildlife documentary of all time by BBC viewers.^[18] He has also narrated over 50 episodes of Natural World, BBC Two's flagship wildlife series. (Its forerunner, The World About Us, was created by Attenborough in 1969, as a vehicle for colour television.^[19]) In 1997, he narrated the BBC Wildlife Specials, each focussing on a charismatic species, and screened to mark the Natural History Unit's 40th anniversary.

As a writer and narrator, he continued to collaborate with the BBC Natural History Unit in the new millennium. Alastair Fothergill, a senior producer with whom Attenborough had worked on The Trials of Life and Life in the Freezer, was making The Blue Planet (2001), the Unit's first comprehensive series on marine life. He decided not to use an on-screen presenter due to difficulties in speaking to camera through diving apparatus, but asked Attenborough to narrate the films. The same team reunited for Planet Earth (2006), the biggest nature documentary ever made for television and the first BBC wildlife series to be shot in high definition. In 2011, Fothergill gave Attenborough a more prominent role in Frozen Planet, a major series on the natural history of the polar regions. Attenborough appeared on screen and authored the final episode, in addition to performing voiceover duties.

In 2009, he co-wrote and narrated Life, a ten-part series focussing on extraordinary animal behaviour,^[20] and narrated Nature's Great Events, which showed how seasonal changes trigger major natural spectacles.^[21]

By the turn of the millennium, Attenborough's authored documentaries were adopting a more overtly environmentalist stance. In State of the Planet (2000), he used the latest scientific evidence and interviews with leading scientists and conservationists to assess the impact of man's activities on the natural world. He later turned to the issues of global warming (The Truth about Climate Change, 2006) and human population growth (How Many People Can Live on Planet Earth?, 2009). He also contributed a programme which highlighted the plight of endangered species to the BBC's Saving Planet Earth project in 2007, the 50th anniversary of the Natural History Unit.

Attenborough is also forging a new partnership with Sky, working on documentaries for the broadcaster's new 3D network, Sky 3D. Their first collaboration was Flying Monsters 3D, a film about pterosaurs which debuted on Christmas Day of 2010.^[22] A second film, The Bachelor King 3D, followed a year later, and further collaborations are planned.

Current projects[link]

Attenborough celebrates his 60th year in broadcasting in 2012, and continues to work on a number of television, film and radio projects. The anniversary will be marked by the BBC with the screening of Attenborough: 60 Years in the Wild, a three part series which looks at how wildlife filmmaking techniques, discoveries in the field of biological sciences and our relationship with the natural world have all developed over the past 60 years.^[23]

Further collaborations with Sky 3D are also in the pipeline. First will come Kingdom of Plants 3D, a three-part series filmed at the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew which debuts on 26 May 2012 and will be simulcast on Sky Atlantic HD.^[24] A series on the wildlife of the Galapagos Islands has also been announced^[25] and the Sky 3D film The Bachelor King 3D, which Attenborough wrote and narrated, will get a theatrical release in 2012. All Attenborough's 3D projects are being co-produced by Atlantic Productions, as is a second series of First Life, which will explore the origins of the mammals.^[26]

2012 will also herald the third series of David Attenborough's Life Stories for BBC Radio 4 and the new commission David Attenborough's Natural Curiosities on Eden.^[27]

Other work[link]

From 1983, Attenborough worked on two environmentally themed musicals with the WWF and writers Peter Rose and Anne Conlon. Yanomamo was the first, about the Amazon rainforest, and the second, Ocean World, premiered at the Royal Festival Hall in 1991. They were both narrated by Attenborough on their national tour, and recorded on to audio cassette. Ocean World was also filmed for Channel 4 and later released.

In 1990, he highlighted the case of Mahjoub Sharif as part of the BBC's Prisoners of Conscience series.^[28]

In January 2009, the BBC commissioned Attenborough to provide a series of 20 ten-minute monologues covering the history of nature. Entitled David Attenborough's Life Stories, they are broadcast on Radio 4 in the Friday night slot vacated by Alistair Cooke's Letter from America.^[29] Part of Radio 4's A Point of View strand, the talks are also available as podcasts.^[30]

He appeared in the 2009 Children's Prom at the BBC Promenade Concerts and in the Last Night of the Proms on 12 September 2009, playing a floor polisher in Sir Malcolm Arnold's "A Grand, Grand Overture" (after which he was "shot" by Rory Bremner, who was playing the gun).

Attenborough also serves on the advisory board of BBC Wildlife magazine.

Achievements, awards and recognition[link]

Attenborough's contribution to broadcasting and wildlife film-making has brought him international recognition. He has been called "the great communicator, the peerless educator"^[31] and "the greatest broadcaster of our time".^[32] His programmes are often cited as an example of what public service broadcasting should be, even by critics of the BBC, and have influenced a generation of wildlife film-makers.^[33]

Honorary titles[link]

In 2010 it was reported that Attenborough has been given 29 honorary degrees by British universities, more than any other person.^[34] In 1980, he was honoured by the Open University, with whom he has had a close association throughout his career. He also has honorary Doctor of Science awards from the University of Cambridge (1984), the University of Oxford (1988)^[35], the University of Bath (1981)^[36] and the University of St Andrews (2011).^[37] In 2006, the two eldest Attenborough brothers returned to their home city to receive the title of Distinguished Honorary Fellows of the University of Leicester, "in recognition of a record of continuing distinguished service to the University."^[38] David Attenborough was previously awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters degree by the university in 1970, and was made an honorary Freeman of the City of Leicester in 1990.

Attenborough has received the title Honorary Fellow from Clare College, Cambridge (1980), the Zoological Society of London (1998), the Linnean Society (1999), the Institute of Biology (2000) and the Society of Antiquaries (2007).

Recognition[link]

Attenborough has featured as the subject of a number of BBC television programmes. Life on Air (2002) examined the legacy of his work and Attenborough the Controller (2002) focused on his time in charge of BBC Two. He also featured prominently in The Way We Went Wild (2004), a series about natural history television presenters, and 100 Years of Wildlife Films (2007), a special programme marking the centenary of the nature documentary. In 2006, British television viewers were asked to vote for their Favourite Attenborough Moments for a UKTV poll to coincide with the broadcaster's 80th birthday. The winning clip showed Attenborough observing the mimicry skills of the superb lyrebird.

Attenborough was named as the most trusted celebrity in Britain in a 2006 Reader's Digest poll,.^[39] and the following year he won The Culture Show's Living Icon Award.^[40] He has also been named among the 100 Greatest Britons in a 2002 BBC poll and is one of the top ten "Heroes of Our Time" according to New Statesman magazine.^[41]

He has the distinction of having a number of newly discovered species and fossils being named in his honour. In 1993, after discovering that the Mesozoic reptile Plesiosaurus conybeari had not, in fact, been a true plesiosaur, the paleontologist Robert Bakker renamed the species Attenborosaurus conybeari.^[42] A fossilised armoured fish discovered at the Gogo Formation, Western Australia in 2008 was given the name Materpiscis attenboroughi, after Attenborough had filmed at the site and highlighted its scientific importance in Life on Earth.^[43] The Materpiscis fossil is believed to be the earliest organism capable of internal fertilisation.

He has also lent his name to a species of Ecuadorian flowering tree, Blakea attenboroughi, one of the world's largest-pitchered carnivorous plants, Nepenthes attenboroughii,^[44] and one of only four species of long-beaked echidna, the critically endangered Zaglossus attenboroughi, discovered by explorer and zoologist Tim Flannery in the Cyclops Mountains of New Guinea in 1998.

In September 2009, London's Natural History Museum opened the Attenborough Studio, part of its Darwin Centre development.^[45]

Awards[link]

• 1970: BAFTA Desmond Davis Award
• 1974: Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE)
• 1980: BAFTA Fellowship
• 1983: Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS)
• 1985: Knighthood^[46]
• 1991: Commander of the Royal Victorian Order (CVO) for producing Queen Elizabeth II's Christmas broadcast for a number of years from 1986
• 1991: Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences^[47]
• 1996: Companion of Honour (CH) "for services to nature broadcasting"
• 1998: International Cosmos Prize
• 2003: Michael Faraday Prize awarded by the Royal Society
• 2004: Descartes Prize for Outstanding Science Communication Actions
• 2004: Caird Medal of the National Maritime Museum
• 2005: Order of Merit (OM)^[48]
• 2005: Nierenberg Prize for Science in the Public Interest
• 2006: National Outdoor Book Award (Nature and the Environment category), Life in the Underground
• 2006: National Television Awards Special Recognition Award
• 2006: Institute of Ecology and Environmental Management^[49] - Institute Medal in recognition of his outstanding contribution to the public perception and understanding of ecology
• 2006: The Culture Show British Icon Award
• 2007: British Naturalists' Association Peter Scott Memorial Award
• 2009: BAFTA Specialist factual award for Life In Cold Blood
• 2009: Prince of Asturias Award^[50]
• 2010: Fonseca Prize
• 2010: Queensland Museum Medal^[51][52]
•  ???? RSPB Medal^[53][54]
• 2011: Society for the History of Natural History Founders' Medal

Views and advocacy[link]

Environmental causes[link]

Attenborough's programmes have often included references to the impact of human society on the natural world. The last episode of The Living Planet, for example, focuses almost entirely on humans' destruction of the environment and ways that it could be stopped or reversed. Despite this, he has been criticised for not giving enough prominence to environmental messages. Some environmentalists feel that programmes like Attenborough's give a false picture of idyllic wilderness and do not do enough to acknowledge that such areas are increasingly encroached upon by humans.^[55]

However, his closing message from State of the Planet was forthright:

The future of life on earth depends on our ability to take action. Many individuals are doing what they can, but real success can only come if there's a change in our societies and our economics and in our politics. I've been lucky in my lifetime to see some of the greatest spectacles that the natural world has to offer. Surely we have a responsibility to leave for future generations a planet that is healthy, inhabitable by all species.

Attenborough has subsequently become more vocal in his support of environmental causes. In 2005 and 2006, he backed a BirdLife International project to stop the killing of albatross by longline fishing boats.^[56] He gave public support to WWF's campaign to have 220,000 square kilometres of Borneo's rainforest designated a protected area.^[57] He also serves as a vice-president of BTCV, vice-president of Fauna and Flora International, president of Butterfly Conservation and president of Leicestershire and Rutland Wildlife Trust. In 2003 he launched an appeal to create a rainforest reserve in Ecuador in memory of Christopher Parsons, the producer of Life on Earth and a personal friend, who had died the previous year. The same year, he helped to launch ARKive,^[58] a global project instigated by Parsons to gather together natural history media into a digital library. ARKive is an initiative of Wildscreen, of which Attenborough is a patron.^[59] He later became patron of the World Land Trust, and an active supporter. He supported Glyndebourne in their successful application to obtain planning permission for a wind turbine in an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, and gave evidence at the planning inquiry arguing in favour of the proposal.

Attenborough has repeatedly said that he considers human overpopulation to be the root cause of many environmental problems. In The Life of Mammals, he made a plea for humans to curb population growth so that other species will not be crowded out. In 2009, he became a patron of Population Matters, (formerly known as the Optimum Population Trust), a UK charity advocating sustainable human populations.

He has written and spoken publicly about the fact that, despite past scepticism, he believes the Earth's climate is warming in a way that is cause for concern, and that this can likely be attributed to human activity.^[60] He summed up his thoughts at the end of his 2006 documentary "Can We Save Planet Earth?" as follows:

In the past, we didn't understand the effect of our actions. Unknowingly, we sowed the wind and now, literally, we are reaping the whirlwind. But we no longer have that excuse: now we do recognise the consequences of our behaviour. Now surely, we must act to reform it — individually and collectively, nationally and internationally — or we doom future generations to catastrophe.

In a 2005 interview with BBC Wildlife magazine, Attenborough said he considered George W. Bush to be the era's top "environmental villain". In 2007, he further elaborated on the USA's consumption of energy in relation to its population. When asked if he thought America to be "the villain of the piece", he responded:

I don't think whole populations are villainous, but Americans are just extraordinarily unaware of all kinds of things. If you live in the middle of that vast continent, with apparently everything your heart could wish for just because you were born there, then why worry? [...] If people lose knowledge, sympathy and understanding of the natural world, they're going to mistreat it and will not ask their politicians to care for it.^[61]

Religion and creationism[link]

In a December 2005 interview with Simon Mayo on BBC Radio Five Live, Attenborough stated that he considers himself an agnostic.^[62] When asked whether his observation of the natural world has given him faith in a creator, he generally responds with some version of this story, making reference to the Loa loa parasitic worm:

My response is that when Creationists talk about God creating every individual species as a separate act, they always instance hummingbirds, or orchids, sunflowers and beautiful things. But I tend to think instead of a parasitic worm that is boring through the eye of a boy sitting on the bank of a river in West Africa, [a worm] that's going to make him blind. And [I ask them], 'Are you telling me that the God you believe in, who you also say is an all-merciful God, who cares for each one of us individually, are you saying that God created this worm that can live in no other way than in an innocent child's eyeball? Because that doesn't seem to me to coincide with a God who's full of mercy'.^[63]

He has explained that he feels the evidence all over the planet clearly shows evolution to be the best way to explain the diversity of life, and that "as far as [he's] concerned, if there is a supreme being then he chose organic evolution as a way of bringing into existence the natural world."

In a BBC Four interview with Mark Lawson, Attenborough was asked if he at any time had any religious faith. He replied simply, "No."^[64] He has also said "It never really occurred to me to believe in God".^[65]

In 2002, Attenborough joined an effort by leading clerics and scientists to oppose the inclusion of creationism in the curriculum of UK state-funded independent schools which receive private sponsorship, such as the Emmanuel Schools Foundation.^[66] In 2009, Attenborough stated that the Book of Genesis, by saying that the world was there for people to dominate, had taught generations that they can "dominate" the environment, and that this has resulted in the devastation of vast areas of the environment.^[67] Attenborough further explained to the science journal Nature, "That's why Darwinism, and the fact of evolution, is of great importance, because it is that attitude which has led to the devastation of so much, and we are in the situation that we are in."^[68][69]

Also in early 2009, the BBC broadcast an Attenborough one-hour special, Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life. In reference to the programme, Attenborough stated that "People write to me that evolution is only a theory. Well, it is not a theory. Evolution is as solid a historical fact as you could conceive. Evidence from every quarter. What is a theory is whether natural selection is the mechanism and the only mechanism. That is a theory. But the historical reality that dinosaurs led to birds and mammals produced whales, that's not theory."^[70] He strongly opposes creationism and its offshoot "intelligent design", saying that a survey that found a quarter of science teachers in state schools believe that creationism should be taught alongside evolution in science lessons was "really terrible".^[70]

In March 2009, Attenborough appeared on Friday Night with Jonathan Ross. Attenborough stated that he felt evolution did not rule out the existence of a God and accepted the title of agnostic saying, "My view is: I don't know one way or the other but I don't think that evolution is against a belief in God."^[71]

Attenborough has joined evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and other top scientists in signing a campaign statement coordinated by the British Humanist Association (BHA). The statement calls for "creationism to be banned from the school science curriculum and for evolution to be taught more widely in schools."^[72]

BBC and public service broadcasting[link]

Attenborough is a lifelong supporter of the BBC, public broadcasting and the television licence. He has said:

PSB, to me, is not about selecting individual programme strands here or there, financing them from some outside source and then foisting them upon commercial networks. Public Service Broadcasting, watched by a healthy number of viewers, with programmes financed in proportion to their intrinsic needs and not the size of the audience, can only effectively operate as a network — a network whose aim is to cater for the broadest possible range of interests, popular as well as less popular, a network that measures its success not only by its audience size but by the range of its schedule.^[73]

Public service broadcasting is one of the things that distinguishes this country and makes me want to live here. I have spent all my life in it. I would be very distressed if public service broadcasting was weakened. I have been at the BBC since 1952, and know the BBC is constantly being battered. It is today.^[74]

If you could demonstrate that the BBC was grossly extravagant there might be a case for saying OK take it away. But in fact the BBC per minute in almost every category is as cheap as you can find anywhere in the world and produces the best quality. If you take the money away, which part of the BBC will you remove? The BBC has gone through swingeing staff cuts. It has been cut to the bone, if you divert licence fee money elsewhere, you cut quality and services. There is always that threat from politicians who will say your licence fee is up for grabs. We will take it. There is a lot of people who want to see the BBC weakened. They talk of this terrible tax of the licence fee. Yet it is the best bargain that is going. Four radio channels and god knows how many TV channels. It is piffling.^[74]

There have always been politicians or business people who have wanted to cut the BBC back or stop it saying the sort of things it says. There's always been trouble about the licence and if you dropped your guard you could bet our bottom dollar there'd be plenty of people who'd want to take it away. The licence fee is the basis on which the BBC is based and if you destroy it, broadcasting... becomes a wasteland.^[75]

Attenborough expressed regret at some of the changes made to the BBC in the 1990s by Director-General John Birt, who introduced an internal market at the corporation, slimmed and even closed some departments and outsourced much of the corporation’s output to private production companies, in line with the Broadcasting Act 1990. He has said:

There is no question but that Birtism . . . has had some terrible results. On the other hand, the BBC had to change. Now it has to produce programmes no one else can do. Otherwise, forget the licence fee.^[76]

The Bristol Unit has suffered along with the rest of the BBC from recent staff cuts. Yet it remains confident in the belief that the BBC will maintain it, in spite of the vagaries of fashion, because the Corporation believes that such programmes deserve a place in the schedules of any broadcaster with pretensions of providing a Public Service. In due course, similar specialist Units were also established in London, in order to produce programmes on archaeology and history, on the arts, on music and on science. They too, at one time, had their successes. But they have not survived as well as the Unit in Bristol. The statutory requirement that a certain percentage of programmes must come from independent producers has reduced in-house production and the Units necessarily shrank proportionately in size. As they dwindled, so the critical mass of their production expertise has diminished. The continuity of their archives has been broken, they have lost the close touch they once had worldwide with their subjects and they are no longer regarded internationally as the centres of innovation and expertise that they once were.^[77]

When Birt gets up and says the whole of the BBC was a creative mess and it was wasteful, I never saw any evidence of that. I absolutely know it wasn’t so in my time. Producers now spend all their time worrying about money, and the thing has suffered for it.^[78]

In 2008, he criticised the BBC’s television schedules:

I have to say that there are moments when I wonder — moments when its two senior networks, first set up as a partnership, schedule simultaneously programmes of identical character, thereby contradicting the very reason that the BBC was given a second network. Then there are times when both BBC One and BBC Two, intoxicated by the sudden popularity of a programme genre, allow that genre to proliferate and run rampant through the schedules. The result is that other kinds of programmes are not placed, simply because of a lack of space. Do we really require so many gardening programmes, make-over programmes or celebrity chefs? Is it not a scandal in this day and age, that there seems to be no place for continuing series of programmes about science or serious music or thoughtful in-depth interviews with people other than politicians?^[73]

In 2009, Attenborough commented on the general state of British television, describing the newly introduced product placement on commercial television as something he considered an "appalling" idea 20 years earlier:

I think it's in great trouble. The whole system on which it was built — a limited number of networks, with adequate funding — is under threat. That funding is no longer there. As stations proliferate, so audiences are reduced. The struggle for audiences becomes ever greater, while money diminishes. I think that's a fair recipe for trouble. Inevitably, this has an impact on the BBC … Fortunately, the BBC doesn't think natural history programmes must compete with Strictly Come Dancing in terms of audience. The BBC says, 'Make proper, responsible natural history programmes.'^[79]

Other causes[link]

In May 2005, Attenborough was appointed as patron of the UK's Blood Pressure Association, which provides information and support to people with hypertension.^[80]

Attenborough is also an honorary member of BSES Expeditions, a youth development charity that operates challenging scientific research expeditions to remote wilderness environments.

Parodies and artistic portrayals[link]

Attenborough's accent and hushed, excited delivery have been the subject of frequent parodies by comedians, most notably Spike Milligan, Marty Feldman and The Goodies. Attenborough is portrayed by Michael Palin in the final episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus, where he searches the African jungle for the legendary Walking Tree of Dahomey (Quercus Nicholas Parsonus), sweating excessively and accompanied by native guides wearing saxophones. David Attenborough has also been parodied in a series of GEICO insurance commercials, showing a nature show host, clearly patterned on Attenborough.

"Time Flies", a sketch by David Ives, features a pair of anthropomorphic mayflies engaging in a courtship ritual, while watching themselves on television in a documentary narrated by David Attenborough.^[81]

The character of Nigel Thornberry, a nature documentarian on Nickelodeon's The Wild Thornberrys is strongly influenced by Attenborough.

He has also been parodied by the Australia 1980s sketch show The Comedy Company where Ian McFadyen portrays a character called David Rabbitborough, who goes about examining the "wildlife" of various Australian urban stereotypes.

The video game Discworld, based on the series of books by Terry Pratchett, parodies his unique delivery to explain different aspects of the Discworld Universe, such as L-Space.

Mythbusters host Adam Savage often imitates Attenborough when speaking about his co-host Jamie Hyneman, which Jamie verified in the YouTube Special Episode.

Filmography[link]

Attenborough is known foremost for writing and presenting the ten Life series, which are presented in chronological order below:

• Life on Earth (1979)
• The Living Planet (1984)
• The Trials of Life (1990)
• Life in the Freezer (1993)
• The Private Life of Plants (1995)
• The Life of Birds (1998)
• The Life of Mammals (2002)
• Life in the Undergrowth (2005)
• Life in Cold Blood (2008)
• First Life (2010)

His voice is synonymous with wildlife documentaries for British audiences, and the principal series with which his narration is associated include:

• Wildlife on One (1977–2005)
• BBC Wildlife Specials (1995–2008)
• The Blue Planet (2001)
• Planet Earth (British version) (2006)
• Nature's Great Events (2009)
• Life (2009)
• Frozen Planet (2011)

Books[link]

Bibliography[link]

• Zoo Quest to Guyana (Lutterworth Press, 1956)
• Zoo Quest for a Dragon (Lutterworth Press, 1957)
  • (book club edition with 85 extra pages, Quest for the Paradise Birds, 1959)
• Zoo Quest in Paraguay (Lutterworth Press, 1959)
  • paperback (Penguin Books, 1982)
• Quest in Paradise (1960)
• People of Paradise (Harper & Brothers, 1960)
• Zoo Quest to Madagascar (1961)
• Quest Under Capricorn (1963)
• Fabulous Animals (BBC, 1975) ISBN 0-563-17006-9
• The Tribal Eye (1976)
• Life on Earth (1979)
• Discovering Life on Earth (1981)
• Journeys to the past: Travels in New Guinea, Madagascar, and the northern territory of Australia (1983) Penguin Books ISBN 0-14-00.64133
• The Living Planet (1984)
• The First Eden: The Mediterranean World and Man (1987)(Little Brown & Co (T); 1st American ed edition (March 1990))
• The Atlas of the Living World (1989)
• The Trials of Life (Collins, 1990) ISBN 0-00-219912-2
• The Private Life of Plants (BBC Books, 1994) ISBN 0-563-37023-8
• The Life of Birds (BBC Books, 1998) ISBN 0-563-38792-0
• The Life of Mammals (BBC Books, 2002) ISBN 0-563-53423-0
• Life on Air: Memoirs of a Broadcaster (autobiography; 2002) ISBN 0-563-53461-3
  • paperback: ISBN 0-563-48780-1
  • updated edition: ISBN 978-1-84607-652-7
• Life in the Undergrowth (BBC Books, 2005) ISBN 0-563-52208-9
• Amazing Rare Things - The Art of Natural History in the Age of Discovery with Susan Owens, Martin Clayton and Rea Alexandratos (The Royal Collection, 2007) Hardback - ISBN 978-1-902163-46-8; Softback - ISBN 978-1-902163-99-4
• Life in Cold Blood (BBC Books, 2007) ISBN 978-0-563-53922-3
• Life Stories, (HarperCollins Publishers, 2009) ISBN 978-0-00-733883-2
• New Life Stories, (Collins, 2011) ISBN 978-0-00-742512-9

Introductions[link]

Attenborough has written the introduction or foreword for a number of books, including:

• Buxton, Cindy; Annie Price (1983). Survival South Atlantic. London :: Granada,. pp. xiii,237p.,[64]p. of plates : ill(some col.), maps,col.ports. ; 26cm.. ISBN 0-246-12087-8. 
• African Jigsaw: A Musical Entertainment, Peter Rose and Anne Conlon (published: 1986, Weinberger)
• Tomorrow Is Too Late, Various (The Macmillan Press, 1990)
• Life in the Freezer: Natural History of the Antarctic, Alastair Fothergill (BBC Books, 1993), ISBN 0-563-36431-9
• Birds of Paradise: Paradisaeidae (Bird Families of the World series) Clifford B. Frith, Bruce M. Beehler, William T. Cooper (Illustrator) (Oxford University Press, 1998) ISBN 0-19-854853-2
• The Blue Planet, Andrew Byatt, Alastair Fothergill, Martha Holmes (BBC Books, 2001) ISBN 0-563-38498-0.
• Light on the Earth (BBC Books, 2005), two decades of winning images from the Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition, ISBN 0-563-52260-7
• Planet Earth, Alastair Fothergill (BBC Books, 2006), ISBN 0-563-52212-7

Audio recordings[link]

• Tarka the Otter by Henry Williamson (available on audiocassette, 1978)
• Yanomamo (musical entertainment, 1983) by Peter Rose and Anne Conlon; on-stage narration and published audio recording
• Ocean World (musical entertainment, 1990) by Peter Rose and Anne Conlon; on-stage narration (including at The Royal Festival Hall), for audio recording and video broadcast (both published)
• Peter and the Wolf for BBC Music Magazine (free CD with the June 2000 issue).

In addition, Attenborough has recorded some of his own works in audiobook form, including Life on Earth, Zoo Quest for a Dragon and his autobiography Life on Air: Memoirs of a Broadcaster.

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: David Attenborough

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: David Attenborough

• David Attenborough at the Internet Movie Database
• BBC Books David Attenborough website
• BBC Life on Air website
• BBC biography
• Wildfilmhistory.org biography
• BBC interviews with Attenborough in 1976 and 1998
• PBS interview with Attenborough in 1998
• A Life in TV: Sir David Attenborough, BAFTA
• BBC Wildlife Finder - David Attenborough's favourite moments
• Tribute from the World Land Trust
• David Attenborough profile on Eden Channel website
• List of David Attenborough's programmes on Eden Channel website

Nick Cave
Nick Cave at an event in New York City, 2009
Background information
Born	(1957-09-22) 22 September 1957 (age 54) Warracknabeal, Victoria, Australia
Genres	Post-punk, gothic rock,[1][2] alternative rock, garage rock
Occupations	Singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, writer, actor, composer
Instruments	Guitar, piano, keyboards, vocals
Years active	1973–present
Labels	Mute
Associated acts	Boys Next Door, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Grinderman, The Birthday Party

Nicholas Edward "Nick" Cave (born 22 September 1957) is an Australian musician, songwriter, author, screenwriter, composer and occasional film actor.

He is best known for his work as a frontman of the critically acclaimed rock band Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, established in 1983, a group known for its eclectic influences and musical styles. Before that, he had fronted the group The Birthday Party in the early 1980s, a band renowned for its highly gothic,^[1][2] challenging lyrics and violent sound influenced by free jazz, blues, and post-punk. In 2006, he formed the garage rock band Grinderman that released its debut the following year. Cave's music is generally characterised by emotional intensity, a wide variety of influences and lyrical obsessions with religion, death, love and violence.^[3]

Upon Cave's induction into the ARIA Hall of Fame, ARIA Awards committee chairman Ed St John said, “Nick Cave has enjoyed—and continues to enjoy—one of the most extraordinary careers in the annals of popular music. He is an Australian artist like Sidney Nolan is an Australian artist—beyond comparison, beyond genre, beyond dispute."^[4]

Youth, education and family[link]

Cave was born in the small town of Warracknabeal in the state of Victoria, Australia, to Dawn Cave (née Treadwell) and Colin Frank Cave. He has two brothers: Tim (b. 1952) and Peter (b. 1954), and a sister, Julie (b. 1959). As a child, he lived in Warracknabeal and then Wangaratta in rural Victoria. His father was an English teacher and administrator, with a love of literature, and his mother was a librarian. Cave's paternal grandfather's surname was originally Landvoigt, he later in his life became known as Frank Jason Cave.^[5][6][7][8]

Raised as an Anglican, Cave sang in the boys choir at Wangaratta Cathedral. He grew to detest the attitudes of small-town Australia, and he was often in trouble with the local school authorities,^[9] so his parents sent him to boarding school at Melbourne's Caulfield Grammar School in 1970. Cave joined the school choir under choirmaster Norman Kaye, and also benefited from having a piano in his home. The following year he became a "day boy" when his family moved to Murrumbeena, a suburb of Melbourne. Cave was 19 when his father was killed in a car accident; at the moment he was informed of this, his mother Dawn Cave was bailing him out of a St Kilda police station for a charge of burglary. Cave would later recall that his father "died at a point in my life when I was most confused", and "the loss of my father created in my life a vacuum, a space in which my words began to float and collect and find their purpose".^[10]

After his secondary schooling, Cave studied painting (Fine Art) at the Caulfield Institute of Technology (now Monash University, Caulfield campus) in 1976, but dropped out in 1977 to pursue music. He also began using heroin around this time.^{[citation needed]} On 28 March 2008, he received an honorary Doctor of Laws from this university.

Music career[link]

Early years and The Birthday Party (1973–83)[link]

In 1973, Cave met Mick Harvey (guitar), Phill Calvert (drums), John Cochivera (guitar), Brett Purcell (bass), and Chris Coyne (saxophone); fellow students at Caulfield Grammar. They founded a band with Cave as singer. Their repertoire consisted of proto-punk cover versions of songs by Lou Reed, David Bowie, Alice Cooper, Roxy Music and Alex Harvey, among others. Later, the line-up slimmed down to four members including Cave's friend Tracy Pew on bass. In 1977, after leaving school, they adopted the name The Boys Next Door and began playing predominantly original material. Guitarist and songwriter Rowland S. Howard joined the band in 1978, expanding to five members.

From 1977 until their dissolution in 1983 (by which time they were known as The Birthday Party) the band explored various styles. They were a part of Melbourne's post-punk music scene in the late 1970s, playing hundreds of live shows in Australia before changing their name to the Birthday Party in 1980 and moving to London, then West Berlin. Cave's Australian girlfriend and muse Anita Lane accompanied them to London. The band were notorious for their provocative live performances which featured Cave shrieking, bellowing and throwing himself about the stage, backed up by harsh pounding rock music laced with guitar feedback. Cave utilised old testament imagery with lyrics about sin, curses and damnation.^[1] The lyrics were full of "American gothic imagery", talking about horror stories.^[1] The single "Release the Bats" with its story about "vampire sex" was "influential" in the emerging "gothic scene".^[1][2] At that time, Cave also became a regular member of a gothic club in London called The Batcave.^[11]

After establishing a cult following in Europe and Australia, The Birthday Party disbanded in 1984. Howard and Cave found it difficult to continue working together and both were rather worn down from alcohol and drug use.

Cave and the Seeds (1984-present)[link]

Cave performing in 1986

The band with Cave as their leader and frontman has released fourteen studio albums. Their most recent album, Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! was released on 8 April 2008. Though their sound tends to change considerably from one album to another, the one constant of the band is an unpolished blending of disparate genres, and song structures which provide a vehicle for Cave's virtuosic, frequently histrionic theatrics. NME used the sentence "gothic psycho-sexual apocalypse" to describe the "menace" present in the lyrics of the title track.^[12]

Critics Stephen Thomas Erlewine and Steve Huey write, "With the Bad Seeds, Cave continued to explore his obsessions with religion, death, love, America, and violence with a bizarre, sometimes self-consciously eclectic hybrid of blues, gospel, rock, and arty post-punk, although in a more subdued fashion than his work with the Birthday Party".^[3] Pitchfork Media calls the group one of rock's "most enduring, redoubtable" bands, with an accomplished discography.^[13] A documentary film about the band The Road to God Knows Where/Life at paradiso directed by Uli M Schueppel, about their 1989 tour, was voted in the year 2008, under the 20 best musicmovies of all the time of the reader and journalists of Total Film.

Cave and the band curated an edition of the famous All Tomorrow's Parties music festival, the first in Australia, throughout the country in January 2009.

Solo work and Grinderman[link]

In addition to his performances with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Cave has, since the 1990s, performed live 'solo' tours with himself on piano/vocals, Warren Ellis on violin/accordion and various others on bass and drums. The current trio are Bad Seeds' Martyn P. Casey, Jim Sclavunos and Ellis (nicknamed the Mini-Seeds). In 2006, this line-up, now including Cave on electric guitar, continued his 'solo' tours performing Bad Seeds material.

In the same year three other Bad Seeds, Mick Harvey, Thomas Wydler and James Johnston, undertook Harvey's first 'solo' tours of Europe and Australia performing material from his own albums. Melbourne double bassist Rosie Westbrook completed the quartet.

An album of new material by Cave's 'solo' quartet, now named Grinderman, was released in March 2007.

Nick Cave 'solo' and Grinderman both played at the All Tomorrow's Parties music festival in April 2007. This was Grinderman's first public performance. Bobby Gillespie from Primal Scream accompanied Grinderman on backing vocals and percussion.

In December 2011, after performing at Meredith Music Festival, Cave announced that Grinderman were over.^{[14][dead link]}

Soundtrack involvement[link]

Many of Nick Cave's songs have found their way into movie soundtracks. One of the earliest to feature Cave's distinctive style by incorporating him as part of the movie's music scene—circa 1979—was Dogs in Space, a film by Richard Lowenstein.^[15] Cave performed parts of the Boys Next Door song "Shivers" twice during the film, once on video and once live.

Another early fan of Cave's was German director Wim Wenders, who lists Cave, along with Lou Reed and Portishead, as among his favorites.^[16] Two of Cave's songs were featured in his 1987 film Wings of Desire.^[17] Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds also make a cameo appearance in this film. Two more songs were included in Wenders' 1993 sequel Faraway, So Close!, including the title track. The soundtrack for Wenders' 1991 film Until the End of the World features Cave's "(I'll Love You) Till the End of the World." His most recent production, Palermo Shooting, also contains a Nick Cave song, as does his 2003 documentary The Soul of a Man.^[18]

Cave's songs have also appeared in a number of Hollywood blockbusters and major TV shows. For instance, his "There is a Light" appears on the 1995 soundtrack for Batman Forever, and "Red Right Hand" appeared in a number of films and TV shows, including The X-Files, Dumb & Dumber; Scream, its sequels Scream 2 and 3, and Hellboy (performed by Pete Yorn). In Scream 3, the song was given a reworking with Cave writing new lyrics and adding an orchestra to the arrangement of the track. This version appears on The Bad Seeds B-Sides and Rarities album. The song "People Ain't No Good" was featured in the animated movie Shrek 2, as well as in one of the episodes of the television series The L Word. Cave also sang a cover of The Beatles' "Let It Be," for the 2001 film I Am Sam.

Original material written for movie productions includes the song "To Be By Your Side," for the soundtrack of the 2001 French documentary Le Peuple Migrateur (called Winged Migration in the US). Cave composed the soundtrack for the 2005 film The Proposition with fellow Australian and Bad Seed Warren Ellis. Cave and Ellis once again collaborated on the music for the 2007 film The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Also in 2007, Cave and Ellis wrote the soundtrack for the feature documentary The English Surgeon. The duo also provided original music for The Road in 2009 and the soundtrack for the audiobook of Cave's novel The Death of Bunny Munro.^[19]

Most recently, his song "Up Jumped the Devil" was featured in the Remedy-developed 2010 video game Alan Wake.

Cave's song "O Children" was featured in the 2010 movie, though not in the official soundtrack, of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 1.

Work with other artists[link]

Nick Cave has also played with Shane MacGowan, in a cover version of Bob Dylan's "Death is Not the End", and Louis Armstrong's "What a Wonderful World". Cave has also performed "What a Wonderful World" live with The Flaming Lips. Cave recorded a cover version of the Pogues song "Rainy Night in Soho", written by MacGowan.

Nick Cave at a solo concert in Mainz, Germany on 11 November 2006.

MacGowan also sings a version of "Lucy", released on B-Sides and Rarities. On 3 May 2008, during the Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! tour Shane MacGowan joined Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds on stage to perform "Lucy" at Dublin Castle in Ireland. Pulp's single "Bad Cover Version" includes on its B-side a cover version by Cave of that band's song "Disco 2000". On the Deluxe Edition of Pulp's Different Class another take of this cover can be found.

In 2000, one of Cave's heroes, Johnny Cash, covered Cave's "The Mercy Seat" on the album American III: Solitary Man, seemingly repaying Cave for the compliment he paid by covering Cash's "The Singer" (originally "The Folk Singer") on his Kicking Against the Pricks album. Cave was then invited to be one of many rock and country artists to contribute to the liner notes of the retrospective The Essential Johnny Cash CD, released to coincide with Cash's 70th birthday. Subsequently, Cave cut a duet with Cash on a version of Hank Williams' "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry" for Cash's American IV: The Man Comes Around album (2002). A similar duet, the American folk song "Cindy", was released posthumously on the "Johnny Cash: Unearthed" boxset. Cave's song "Let the Bells Ring" is a posthumous tribute to Cash. Cave has also covered the song "Wanted Man" which is best known as performed by Johnny Cash but is a Bob Dylan composition.

In 2004, Cave gave a hand to Marianne Faithfull on the album, Before the Poison. He co-wrote and produced three songs ("Crazy Love", "There is a Ghost" and "Desperanto"), and the Bad Seeds are featured on all of them. He is also featured on "The Crane Wife" (originally by The Decemberists), on Faithfull's 2008 album, Easy Come, Easy Go.

Cave collaborated with the band Current 93 on their album All the Pretty Little Horses, where he sings the title track, a lullaby. For his 1996 album Murder Ballads, Cave recorded "Where The Wild Roses Grow" with Kylie Minogue, and "Henry Lee" with P.J. Harvey.

Cave also took part in the "X-Files" compilation CD with some other artists, where he reads parts from the Bible combined with own texts, like "Time Jesum...", he outed himself as a fan of the series some years ago, but since he does not watch much TV, it was one of the only things he watched. He collaborated on the 2003 single "Bring It On", with Chris Bailey, formerly of the Australian punk group, The Saints. Cave contributed vocals to the song "Sweet Rosyanne", on the 2006 album Catch That Train! from Dan Zanes & Friends, a children's music group.

In 2011, Cave recorded a cover of the Zombies' "She's Not There" with Neko Case, which was used at the end of the first episode of the fourth season of True Blood.

Literary career[link]

Cave released his first book, King Ink, in 1988. It is a collection of lyrics and plays, including collaborations with Lydia Lunch. In 1997, he followed up with King Ink II, containing lyrics, poems, and the transcript of a radio essay he did for the BBC in July 1996, "The Flesh Made Word," discussing in biographical format his relationship with Christianity.

Cave reading from The Death of Bunny Munro in New York City, 2009.

While he was based in West Berlin, Cave started working on what was to become his debut novel, And the Ass Saw the Angel (1989). Significant crossover is evident between the themes in the book and the lyrics Cave wrote in the late stages of the Birthday Party and the early stage of his solo career. "Swampland", from Mutiny, in particular, uses the same linguistic stylings ('mah' for 'my', for instance) and some of the same themes (the narrator being haunted by the memory of a girl called Lucy, being hunted like an animal, approaching death and execution). On 21 January 2008, a special edition of Cave's novel And the Ass Saw the Angel was released.^[20] Cave's second novel The Death of Bunny Munro was published on 8 September 2009 by Harper Collins books.^[21][22] It tells the story of a sex-addicted salesman, was also released as a binaural audio-book produced by British Artists Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard and an iPhone app.^[23] The book originally started as a screenplay Cave was going to write for John Hillcoat.^[24]

As proof of his interest in scripture, so evident in his lyrics and his prose writing, Cave wrote the foreword to a Canongate publication of the Gospel according to Mark, published in the UK in 1998. The American edition of the same book (published by Grove Press) contains a foreword by the noted American writer Barry Hannah.

Cave and Ellis composed scores for a production by the Icelandic theatre company Vesturport of Woyzeck by Georg Büchner, performed at the Barbican Theatre in the Barbican Arts Centre in London in 2005,^[25] and a stage adaptation of Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis at the Lyric Hammersmith in London in 2006.^[26]

Cave is a contributor to the 2009 rock biography on The Triffids Vagabond Holes: David McComb and the Triffids, edited by Australian academics Niall Lucy and Chris Coughran.^[27]

Acting and screenwriting[link]

Cave has made occasional appearances as an actor, most prominently in the 1989 film Ghosts ... of the Civil Dead, written and directed by John Hillcoat, and in the 1991 film Johnny Suede with Brad Pitt.

Cave appeared in the 2005 homage to Leonard Cohen, Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man, in which he performed "I'm Your Man" solo, and "Suzanne" with Julie Christensen and Perla Batalla. He also appeared in the 2007 film adaptation of Ron Hansen's novel The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, where he sings a song about Jesse James. Cave and Warren Ellis are credited for the film's soundtrack.

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds are also featured in Wim Wenders' 1987 film Wings of Desire.

Displaying a keen interest in other aspects of film, Cave wrote the screenplay for The Proposition, a film set in the colonial Australian Outback. Directed by John Hillcoat and filmed in Queensland in 2004, it premiered in October 2005 and has since been released worldwide to critical acclaim.^[28] The movie reviewer for British newspaper The Independent called it "peerless," "a star-studded and uncompromisingly violent outlaw film."^[29] It even features on a website promoting tourism to the area.^[30] The generally ambient soundtrack was recorded by Cave and Warren Ellis.

At the request of friend Russell Crowe, Cave wrote a script for a proposed sequel to Gladiator which was rejected by the studio.^[31]

His interest in the work of Edward Gorey led to his participation in the BBC Radio 3 programme, guest+host=ghost, featuring Peter Blegvad and the radiophonic sound of the Langham Research Centre.^[32]

Cave has also lent his voice in narrating an award winning animated film called The Cat Piano. It was directed by Eddie White and Ari Gibson (of The People's Republic Of Animation), produced by Jessica Brentnall and has music by Benjamin Speed.^[33]

Cave wrote the screenplay for The Wettest County in the World.,^[34] which has been renamed "Lawless", and has completed the script for a new film titled Death of a Ladies' Man and will rewrite the script of The Crow remake.

Currently, Cave is collaborating with Andy Serkis to develop a screen version of the Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht musical, The Threepenny Opera.^[35]

Personal life[link]

Cave dated Anita Lane from the late 1970s to mid 1980s. She had an undeniably strong influence upon Cave and his work, often cited as his "muse".^{[citation needed]} Despite this, Cave and Lane recorded together on only a few occasions. Their most notable collaborations include Lane's 'cameo' verse on Cave's Bob Dylan cover "Death Is Not The End" from the album Murder Ballads, and a cover of the Serge Gainsbourg/Jane Birkin song "Je t'aime, moi non plus/ I love you, nor do I". Lane co-wrote the lyrics to the title track for Cave's 1984 LP, From Her to Eternity, as well as the lyrics of the song "Stranger Than Kindness" from Your Funeral, My Trial. Cave, Lydia Lunch and Lane wrote a comic book together, entitled AS-FIX-E-8, in the style of the old "Pussy Galore"/Russ Meyer movies.

After completing his debut novel And the Ass Saw the Angel, Cave left West Berlin shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall and moved to São Paulo, Brazil, where he met Brazilian journalist Viviane Carneiro. The two have a son, Luke (b. 10 May 1991), but never married. Cave's son Jethro (born in 1991) lives with his mother, Beau Lazenby, in Australia and has a career in modelling.^[36]

Cave briefly dated PJ Harvey during the mid 1990s. The love affair and their break-up inspired him to write the album The Boatman's Call.

He met British model Susie Bick in 1997. A cover star of the Damned's 1985 album Phantasmagoria and a Vivienne Westwood model, she gave up her job when they married in summer 1999. They have twin sons, Arthur and Earl (born in 2000).^[37][38] Cave and Bick lived for some time on a houseboat near Hove. They currently live in Brighton and Hove, England.

Cave performed "Into My Arms" at the televised funeral of Michael Hutchence, but refused to play in front of the cameras. Cave is godfather of Hutchence's only child, Heavenly Hiraani Tiger Lily.^[39]

In the past, Cave identified as a Christian. In his recorded lectures on music and songwriting, he has claimed that any true love song is a song for God and has ascribed the mellowing of his music to a shift in focus from the Old to the New Testaments. He does not belong to a particular denomination and has distanced himself from "religion as being an American thing, in which the name of God has been hijacked".^[40] He said in a recent Los Angeles Times article: "I'm not religious, and I'm not a Christian, but I do reserve the right to believe in the possibility of a god. It's kind of defending the indefensible, though; I'm critical of what religions are becoming, the more destructive they're becoming. But I think as an artist, particularly, it's a necessary part of what I do, that there is some divine element going on within my songs".^[41]

Discography[link]

Cave performing in 2008

Soundtracks/scores[link]

• And the Ass Saw the Angel, readings of the novel (1988), plus theatre score (1993) – text by Cave, music composed by Harvey and Ed Clayton-Jones
• To Have and to Hold, soundtrack (1996) – composed with Harvey & Bargeld
• Woyzeck, theatre score (2005) – composed with Warren Ellis^[42] (Not available on CD or vinyl.)
• The Proposition, soundtrack (2005) – composed with Ellis
• Metamorphosis, theatre score (2006) – composed with Ellis^[43] (Not available on CD or vinyl.)
• The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, soundtrack (2007) – composed with Ellis
• The English Surgeon, soundtrack (2007) – composed with Ellis^[44] (Not available on CD or vinyl; only available on White Lunar; see below.)
• The Girls of Phnom Penh, soundtrack (2009) – composed with Ellis^[45] (Not available on CD or vinyl; only available on White Lunar; see below.)
• The Death of Bunny Munro, soundtrack (2009) – composed with Ellis^[46]
• The Road, soundtrack (2009) – composed with Ellis^[47] (Soundtrack released in January 12, 2010)^[48]
• White Lunar, soundtrack compilation (2009) – composed with Ellis^[49] (2CDs. Disc one contains high lights from The Proposition, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, and The Road. Disc 2 contains work from The English Surgeon and The Girls of Phnom Penh, as well as four unreleased pieces "from the archives".^[50]
• The Metamorphosis, (Forvandlingen- Norwegian national theatre) soundtrack (2012) –

Contributions/appearances[link]

• Die Haut and Nick Cave: Burnin' the Ice (1982), features Nick Cave's vocals on songs 1,3,5,6 (Stow-A-Way, Truck Love, Pleasure Is The Boss, Dumb Europe).
• Smack My Crack (1987), features Nick Cave performing "The Altra Virago Or The Vargus Barking Spider".
• Wings Of Desire (1987), Nick Cave appears in the film, where he performs "The Carny" and "From Her To Eternity".
• "Helpless" single by Neil Young. He did this in 1989 for the Neil Young tribute album The Bridge.
• Leonard Cohen: I'm your Fan (1991), Nick Cave "Tower Of Song".
• Until The End Of The World (1991), Nick Cave "(I'll Love You) Till The End Of The World".
• In Weiter Ferne, So Nah! (aka Faraway So Close!) (1993), Nick Cave "Faraway So Close" and "Cassiel's Song".
• Zero Effect (1994), Nick Cave "Into My Arms".
• Batman Forever soundtrack (1995). Cave contributes the track "There is a Light".
• Scream (1996), Nick Cave "Red Right Hand".
• X-Files Songs In The Key Of X (1996), Nick Cave "Red Right Hand".
• September Songs: The Music of Kurt Weill (1997) produced by Hal Willner. Cave contributes a cover version of "Mack the Knife".
• Nick Cave i Przyjaciele (Nick Cave and Friends) (1991). A tribute album by Polish musicians. Cave appears on tracks 1 & 10. (Into My Arms, The Weeping Song)
• The Acid House (1999), Nick Cave/Barry Adamson "Sweetest Embrace".
• A Tribute to Polnareff, a Tribute album to Michel Polnareff. Nick Cave contributes a cover version of "Goodbye Marylou".
• Ute Lemper's Punishing Kiss (2000). Cave co-wrote (with Bruno Pisek) "Little Water Song".
• He Died With A FelaFel In His Hand (2001) Nick Cave "The Mercy Seat (Live)" & "Into My Arms".
• Intimite (aka Intimacy) (2001), Nick Cave "In The Ghetto".
• "To Be By Your Side" – from the OST for French documentary film Le Peuple Migrateur (2001).
• I Am Sam (2002). Cave contributes a cover version of The Beatles' "Let It Be", which was later issued as a single with a cover version of "Here Comes the Sun" as the B-side.
• "Bad Cover Version" single by Pulp (2002). Cave contributes a cover version of Pulp's "Disco 2000".
• American IV: The Man Comes Around (2003) Duet with Johnny Cash on "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry".
• "Kiss of Love" (duet with Sam Brown) from Jools Holland's 2003 album Small World Big Band Friends 3 – Jack O The Green.
• Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds appear on the Martin Scorsese series The Blues (2003) singing J. B. Lenoir's "I Feel So Good".
• Shrek 2 (2004), Nick Cave "People Aint' No Good".
• The Passion Of The Christ - Songs Inspired By (2004), Nick Cave "Darker With The Day".
• Harry Smith Project Vol 1 (2006), Nick Cave "John The Revelator" and Vol 2 "Shine On Me".
• Cave performs "I'm Your Man" and "Suzanne" in the documentary/concert film Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man (2006).
• Q Covered - Best Of 86/06 (2006), Nick Cave sings Pulp's "Disco 2000".
• Rogue's Gallery: Pirate Ballads, Sea Songs, and Chanteys (2006). Cave contributes the tracks "Fire Down Below" and "Pinery Boy".
• Seasick Steve's song "Just Like A King", from the album I Started Out With Nothin' (2008)includes Cave's vocals.
• Californication Season 2 (2009), Nick Cave "Moonland".
• Mojo Presents The Score 20 Ultra Cool Soundtracks (2009), Nick Cave "Let It Be".
• Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds song "Up Jumped The Devil" was featured in the video game Alan Wake. (2010)
• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 1 (2010). Cave contributed the song "O Children".
• Leonard Cohen By En Boca De (2011), Nick Cave "Avalanche".
• Trentemoller - Late Night Tales (2011), Nick Cave & Warren Ellis "The Proposition #1".
• Nick Cave joins Neko Case to cover the The Zombies song She's Not There for HBO show True Blood.^[51] (2011)