Nick Cave is "a fan" of The Flaming Lips and Nell Smith's cover of "Girl in Amber"

At the start of the month The Flaming Lips and a 13-year-old fan of theirs called Nell Smith announced Where the Viaduct Looms, an album of Nick Cave covers, and their cover of "Girl in Amber" is the first taster of the covers album.

On his The Red Hanf Files Q+A site, Cave responded to a fan asking about the covers album and their cover of "Girl in Amber", leading Cave to reveal that he's "a fan".

Cave wrote, "I didn’t know about this project, so thank you for alerting me to it. I have a whole lot of time for The Flaming Lips - really like a lot of their stuff, have been an admirer since watching them play most evenings on the Lollapalooza Festival tour in ’94, maybe even sang with them there, and wrote a song for one of their records. This version of "Girl in Amber" is just lovely, I was going to say Nell Smith inhabits the song, but that’s wrong, rather she vacates the song, in a way that I could never do. I always found it difficult to step away from this particular song and sing it with its necessary remove, just got so twisted up in the words, I guess. Nell shows a remarkable understanding of the song, a sense of dispassion that is both beautiful and chilling. I just love it. I’m a fan."

Last month Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds announced their B-Sides & Rarities Part II album with a previously unreleased track titled "Vortex".