Being a biography of the Australian singer, songwriter, actor and esteemed author. Ian Johnston is the brother of Gallon Drunk's James, himself sometime guitar-fill for redoubtable Bad Seed Blixa Bargeld. Not that this grants Johnston gets special privileges - this is no authorised work. But it does have Cave's tacit - albeit grudging - approval, and Johnston has spoken to just about everyone else: longtime collaborator, the super-cool Mick Harvey; erstwhile Bad Seed Barry Adamson; Anita Lane, former girlfriend, muse and valued accomplice; and film-makers John Hillcoat and Evan English, whose association stretches as far back as Cave's previous band, The Birthday Party.

And it's not a flattering tale they tell. The Birthday Party was a jolly adventure in drugs, alcohol, and more drugs and even more alcohol. Here if you want them are the king-size fuck-ups of guitarist Roland S. Howard, Cave and particularly leather-trousered bassist Tracy Pew. Stories are rampant about the congenial, erudite Pew's excesses, of OD-ing offstage and collapsing on. (His accidental death during an epileptic fit was made doubly ironic by his having cleaned-up and returned to university.)

The band came to England in the early 80s, released a string of exceptional records and inevitably self-destructed, leaving Cave, with Harvey, to go on to produce a whole second legacy.

The more professional Harvey emerges as the book's hero. Without him (and to a lesser extent Daniel Miller at MUTE) it's hard to imagine either the band or Cave would have achieved such dizzy heights. Wandering into red light districts after a fix, violent shows, drunken binges - it was all grist to the mill, but quite where the songs, where his astounding Southern Gothic novel And The Ass Saw The Angel (part Wiseblood, part Elvis) comes from is the big unanswered question.

Unsurprisingly the cleaner Cave gets the more the book begins to falter. His drug abuse reached a crescendo around the time of Tender Prey, the film Ghosts...of the Civil Dead, and an infamous street attack on an NME journalist. From there on Cave's less self-abusive, his backers became a proper band at last, and the former self-styled Black Crow King settled down to domestication in Brazil and London with one Viviane Caneriro and their young son Luke.

Little is as humdrum as musicians "in the studio" and Bad Seed virtually grinds to a halt as the band become more cohesive, more adventurous, and Cave's writing more touching and certainly funnier. The corollary is that Johnston's own work collapses with it. Professionalism does not a good story make.

Unfortunately, Bad Seed ends with speculation after the new murder ballads LP, speculation and rumour already usurped by fact. Cave's recent Top of The Pops debut is sadly absent, such are the vagaries of publishing deadlines.

A career then is maybe only blessed with perspective when it's over. Looking from here The Birthday Party were ripe for picking, and that and Nick Cave: The Heroin Years (and a substantial, pretty comprehensive looking discography) make Bad Seed three-quarters of a commendable read.