It has beem battered by wind, rain and fire, pulled back many times from the brink of destruction.

Yet it is still in possession of its original attraction - the Vermillion Square Ballroom at its seaward end - Hastings pier has aged glamorously, if not gracefully.

So it makes sense that Nick Cave, a 47-year-old rocker who has weathered the tide of musical fashion for more than three decades, should choose this place to "set the first iron in the fire" of his latest, 20-date tour.

His beloved West Pier can no longer support the weight of eight musical titans and their newly-acquired gospel choir.

Besides, as promoters Melting Vinyl explain: "We offered him other venues but he seemed to want something away from the hub of Brighton - something almost secret".

"Well, I don't know how secret it is now," says Bad Seed Warren Ellis.

"I mean, I'm out here in Paris, just waiting for my orders. But if you know about it and there's hundreds of people coming - it's secret with a very small s', I would say."

Although he continues to cut a mysterious figure, Cave is certainly no longer just his fan-base's secret. Twenty albums' worth of glowing reviews can only go ignored by the mainstream for so long.

Stretching from the clamorous snarls of his formative band The Birthday Party to the joyous rock-outs and bare-board ballads of new double album Abattoir Blues / The Lyre Of Orpheus, Cave's is an incredibly consistent back-catalogue: A collection of coroner's hearings and psychiatric reports in which love - a form of sickness, a form of madness - is always the unhappy diagnosis.

"The soul of a song is in most cases very simple," Ellis says. "But it's tapping in to get to that soul that takes an amazing songwriter. To constantly get in there - to have an ongoing relationship with the creative process and continually come up with the goods - that's what I find so incredible about Nick.

"I mean, The Bad Seeds can dress things up in many ways, but you can't make scones from s***."

True enough. But part of Cave's genius has been to keep such good company over the years, summoning around him a group of the world's most accomplished, maverick musicians.

There's guitarist Mick Harvey, for instance, who has been in Cave's bands since their boyhood in Australia and who regularly wins awards for his film soundtracks. There's drummer and percussionist Jim Sclavunos, formerly of The Cramps and Sonic Youth, who has recently been writing for The Guardian on the music of Athens' hash dens and brothels.

And there's Ellis, frontman with Australian instru-mentalists The Dirty Three, a classically-trained musician whose ferocious style nevertheless suggests a career of taming the violin rather than training himself.

Ellis also knew of Cave from Australia ("he was such a character around town - always in these rather insalubrious places") and replaced Cave's own mother as some-time violinist during the recording of 1994's Let Love In ("very hard shoes to fill - a great woman").

He became a fully paid-up member during 1997's The Boatman's Call, where his plaintive violin phrases settled on Cave's break-up ballads like melancholy flies, and branched out, under the more exploratory sessions for the current album, into mandolin, bazouki and flute.

"Nick should take all the credit for that," he laughs. "I hadn't picked up the flute for years but Nick got it out of me with the lights down low, a pile of incense and a bunch of flowers."

The Bad Seeds are scattered across Australia, America, Berlin, Paris and London. But every so often the call comes in from Hove and the eight draw together, careworn and clandestine in dark glasses and threadbare suits, to cast their dark shadows over England.

Then you witness what the records can only hint at - a torrent of masculine musical force that can rock you into a stupor with its sonic assaults or bring tattooed punks swooning to their knees.

Ellis, in the middle, tattered bow aloft, generates clouds of resin in place of a smoke machine as Cave, towering even in The Bad Seeds' midst, kicks his Cuban heels in the air and petitions heaven and hell with a bony index finger.

"It's a very beautiful relationship," says the album's producer, Nick Launay. "They play like jazz musicians, everybody adding their own unique element. People just don't do it that way anymore."

"It's like how marriages work," Ellis says. "There are moments when Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds just works and there's moments where you just have to punch each other on the nose.

"Everybody has their own idiosyncratic way of playing and on stage it is like an old train slowly taking off.

"It careers along at its own speed, with its own momentum. You jump on or off and it just keeps on going.

"There does seem to be a feeling of it being a musical adventure. I don't think the band has ever just played the hits."

In days gone by, the band's tours were punctuated by spells in jail, Cave's lyrics would come from drunken games with the thesaurus, and their professional videos would regularly disappear in a haze of debauchery.

But now Cave is a family man. He has a 13-year-old son, Luke, from his first marriage, and twin boys, Arthur and Earl, by Susie Bick, his wife of five years. The foundations of his songs are now laid in an office between the hours of nine and five.

And, on the last tour, the only evidence of drug intake were the ten cigarettes which, at the beginning of each concert, would wait neatly in line on his grand piano.

"What was going on back then fails to be relevant now," Ellis says. "If it weren't, the band certainly wouldn't be around. You have to be respectful to all things in your life because if one bit falls apart than it can pretty quickly become a meteoric fall and we're a band in its 40s with babies and mortgages.

"Nick's a wonderful dad - he's quite inspiring in that respect. If we were as selfcentred with our kids as we are when we're playing, it would be a social disaster."

But Ellis, who once had all his suits nicked before a gig in Madrid ("literally the only clothes shop I could find was a sex shop - Nick was trying to persuade me to wear a nurse's outfit on stage") says there's still never a dull moment with The Bad Seeds.

An album on which the instrument of the title ends up being unceremoniously inserted into the hero's orifice', Abattoir Blues / The Lyre Of Orpheus sees Cave exercising his lyrical wit to the full. But, as Ellis observes, "I think Nick's humour goes over people's heads sometimes".

"The Australian sense of humour can be seen as rather odd - Nick's jokes are just too dry. It's like trying to sell mittens to someone who lives in the desert."

Cave long ago left his country of birth for less sunny climes but Ellis - understandably proud of their shared nationality - reckons Cave's unrivalled career comes down to his formative years in Oz.

"Australians don't know where to stop," he says. "We don't do things by half measures - we always do things in the most extreme way. If we do something, we do it to the bitter end."

It'll probably be the wildest night out you'll have this year but, for Nick Cave and his 40-something Bad Seeds, the end of the pier is just the beginning of the road.

Nick Cave has also guest curated a special programme for Cinecity 2004, the Brighton film festival which runs from Nov 19 - Dec 5.

Cave's selections, which explore Berlin on film, will include Wings Of Desire, in which he stars as a Berlin club-singer, Listen With Pain, a documentary following the 20-year career of Einsturzende Neubauten, ex-Bad Seed Blixa Bargeld's band, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder's 15 hour epic, Berlin Alexanderplatz. For full details, log on to the web site at www.cine-city.co.uk.

*Start time TBA, tickets cost £25. Call 01159 129000 or 0871 2200260