Anita Lane and Nick Cave began dating each other in the late ’70s, before Cave’s band the Boys Next Door became the Birthday Party. When the Birthday Party started up, Lane was never a member, but she co-wrote some of their songs, including “A Dead Song” and “Dead Joe.” When Cave started up the Bad Seeds, Lane was briefly a member of the band, playing keyboards and singing backup vocals, and co-wrote “From Her To Eternity,” the title track from their 1984 debut. Cave and Lane eventually broke up, but they kept working together well into the mid-’90s, with Lane popping up on Bad Seeds tracks and co-writing “Stranger Than Kindness.” She also worked with Einsterzende Neubaten and Die Haut. She released solo records like the 1988 EP Dirty Songs and two albums, 1993’s Dirty Pearl and 2001’s Sex O’Clock. Yesterday, Lane died at the age of 61. No cause of death has been reported.

In his Red Hand Files newsletter today, Cave has written movingly about Lane. Here’s some of it:

Everyone wanted to work with her but it was like trying to trap lightning in a bottle. Mick Harvey managed to coral her into the recording studio, but these precious offerings are a fraction of what she was.

She was the smartest and most talented of all of us, by far.

Walked into the most prestigious art college in Australia — on a whim — and talked her way into being given a place there. Bought an easel, some butcher’s paper, some crayons, put on a dress, did her hair and never went back in.

She thought the best ideas were the ones that never saw the light of day.

She was the brains behind The Birthday Party, wrote a bunch of their songs, wrote ‘From Her to Eternity’, ‘The World’s a Girl’, ’Sugar in a Hurricane’ and my favourite Bad Seeds song, ‘Stranger Than Kindness’, but was much more than that.

You can read Cave’s whole piece here.