There’s nothing like having to buy your CDs all over again to make you feel the passing of time. The first four Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds albums have been carefully sponged down and freshened up by founding member Mick Harvey, as well as being given a 5.1 mix for people who own more speakers than chairs, plus all the relevant b-sides and new 40 minute documentaries by Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard.

That’s a whole lot of Nick which is fine by us since, as the years have passed, it’s become clear he’s a peerless artist, not merely in thrall to Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan but, in artistic terms, their successor. And a man who, in 30 years, has yet to release a bad album. There’s no one else we could say that about.

It’s difficult to appreciate how 1984’s ‘From Her To Eternity’ must’ve sounded in comparison to Cave and Harvey’s previous incarnation as the bedlamic endurance test that was The Birthday Party. By those standards it sounded almost mellow and tuneful. It isn’t, of course. It’s barely music. Listening to the relentless pounding of ‘Saint Huck’ or, well, the relentless pounding of the title track is like being attacked by the school instrument cupboard and the angriest man in the world. It’s brilliant.

The following year’s ‘The First Born is Dead’ is really where it all starts, though. Opening song ‘Tupelo’ sets out the stall, or possibly the pulpit, that Cave’s been operating from ever since. Apocalyptic Biblical imagery meets Blues motifs, Elvis, death, murder, rape, love and hate. Few talk about how great a writer Nick was back then, but this is serious, solid, timeless stuff; one of the few modern lyricists whose words can be read as well as heard. Which is probably why, at this point in his career, he took time out to begin the quite brilliant novel ‘And the Ass Saw the Angel’, which expanded the ideas of ‘Tupelo’ to create a Faulkneresque world of dust and dead babies.

And since he wasn’t writing any new songs, the Bad Seeds released an album of cover versions. What were they thinking? It seems they were thinking they needed to re-load the musical canon. The 80s alternative scene was largely pretentious, ephemeral and myopic. With ‘Kicking Against the Pricks’ in 1986, Cave effectively told the crimped and back combed generation to get their over-pierced ears round some proper music, namely: Johnny Cash, Jimmy Webb, Roy Orbison… old people who were good. More often than not they improved on the originals, or made evil twins of them. And with the magnificent Blixa Bargeld taking lead vocals, they even managed to make The Velvet Underground’s ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’ sound more claustrophobically intense. The band also used ‘…Pricks’ to flex their sound, allowing the enormous walls of noise to give way to tender, sincere (albeit intoxicated) balladry. It’s this ability to make you cry with one song then kick you in the teeth with another that would become the blueprint for every Bad Seeds album from now on.

‘Your Funeral My Trial’ was originally a double vinyl EP (because they did that sort of thing back then). There’s an unsettling feeling of controlled menace on this record, and a fair amount of despair. With ‘Sad Waters’ Cave begins to tap into the sorrowful yearning nature of love songs that he would describe in a later lecture, with the Portugese word “saudade”. ‘The Carny’ is a compelling short story that sounds like an outtake from his novel, and their version of Tim Rose’s ‘Long Time Man’ is a thrilling glimpse at the swirling, building, morbidly ecstatic performance that would characterise their next album ‘Tender Pray’ and Cave’s first masterpiece: ‘The Mercy Seat’.

If you already own any of these albums, the considerable ‘sonic upgrade’, as they say in magazines, is completely worth the investment. No longer do these records scream: “we were made in the 80s when no one had a clue how to make recorded music sound good”, and all is revealed in splendidly violent detail. If you don’t own any of these albums then your CD collection has a horrible hole in it. You owe it to yourself to fill your horrible hole.