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Nick Cave ventures into the outback

Nick Cave is best known as a singer-songwriter but one of his latest projects sees him as a screenwriter, for the gritty Australian Western The Proposition, showing at the Sundance Film Festival.

Nick Cave has always had a flair for drama. For more than 20 years, the Australian singer-songwriter has been writing songs that manage to combine violence, melancholy and love into lyrical narratives. And on the concert stage, Cave can be tender and terrifying all within the confines of one song. So, it's not a surprise that the 48-year-old performer has managed to distil his brooding emotions into his latest writing venture, an Australian Western called The Proposition.

"I write narrative songs a lot of the time and I'm just at ease in my writing when I'm telling a story," he says.

"These types of moods, from my point of view, make for the most potent stories. They're dramatic. And that's what my music is, dramatic. Each song is a little drama."

The Proposition is certainly an adrenaline shot of drama. The film, which is being screened at this year's Sundance Film Festival in Utah, US has all the ingredients of a classic western - epic themes of conflict between law and outlaw, loyalty and betrayal.

Set in the Australian outback of the 1880s, it tells the story of a bounty hunter's dilemma: kill his violent older brother or see his younger one hanged. It's a bloody tale but it has a tender heart.

Screenwriting is definitely a digression for Nick Cave, a man who made his name in the early 1980s as a pioneering Goth rocker with his band The Birthday Party. After the group disbanded Cave assembled The Bad Seeds, a post punk supergroup distinctive for its disturbing but highly literary songs of love, religion and death. Over the last 20 years, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds have been relentless, producing nearly an album every year, from their debut From Her to Eternity to the dark romanticism of The Boatman's Call in 1997.