Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds
Alternative / Rock
Following on from the hard-graft, no-shirking, pull-your-socks-up, one album a year work-regime ushered in by Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds with the release of 2003’s Nocturama we have something that few could have expected - two albums that can both be regarded as self-contained masterpieces; two storming, driving, relentless, devotional, slinky, subtle, heartbreakingly-beautiful records that, lyrically, switch from the cynical to the sanguine, the defeated to the defiant, dealing in love, war, beauty, children, romance, rejection, Pethedine, poetry, panties, God, Auden, Johnny Cash, cold potatoes, too-much-money, not enough money, writer’s block, flowers, animals and more flowers. But maybe we’re projecting here.
But first, back to 2003’s Nocturama. It would, said the Bad Seeds, be a return to the prowling, feral, many-headed collaborative spirit of the band, a spirit that rose from the ashes of Australian legends The Birthday Party in 1983, reborn in the band’s visceral tempestuous debut From Her To Eternity and ever-present, spitting and snarling, in a series of startling landmark albums throughout the 80s and 90s. And whilst 1997’s The Boatman’s Call and 2001’s No More Shall We Part were regarded by many as a creative peak for Cave as both a songwriter and an arranger there was still that need for the band to, well, get their groove back.
Nocturama had groove in spades. Learned and recorded in a week, produced with former Birthday Party producer Nick Launay, this was an album freed of inhibitions, a glorious blast of untamed, feral collaborative power, the sound of eight crack musicians – Cave, Blixa Bargeld, Mick Harvey, Thomas Wydler, Martyn P Casey, Conway Savage, Jim Sclavunos and Warren Ellis – let off the leash and enjoying it thoroughly.
And so, with a new power and energy harnessed within the band, at the start of 2004 Nick Cave took a small team of Bad Seeds – violinist Warren Ellis, drummer Jim Sclavunos and bassist Martyn P Casey off to the tiny Misere studio in Paris as a songwriting event
“Nick arrived in Paris with a pile of words and a bunch of chords,” explains Warren Ellis. “I’d recently bought a mandolin and a bazouki that I’d been driving my wife nuts with and we played non-stop for four or five days. With Nocturama we’d cleaned out [our] system a bit and got back to what it was like earlier in the Bad Seeds’ career. Nick had a momentum and force he couldn’t achieve in his office. It was great to see him picking words out of nowhere and creating these songs.”
In four days Cave, Ellis, Casey and Sclavunos had recorded ten CDs worth of original material. "It gave the group a chance to be involved in the fundamental part of the writing process and that served this record well.” says Cave.
However, The Bad Seeds 2004 are a rather different set up from the band who recorded Nocturama with Blixa Bargeld leaving and former Gallon Drunk frontman James Johnston joining.
Whereas Nocturama was deliberately written fast and furious, Cave spent “a long time” locked away writing the songs that would eventually become Abattoir Blues/The Lyre Of Orpheus. The band also worked closer together in rehearsal, crafting the definitive Bad Seeds sound. Helping out on this front was producer Launay, who suggested the Bad Seeds record in the spring in Paris, on the gloriously run-down analogue equipment of Ferber Studios.
The result is a raw, organic, pulsing sound that may well be the best the Bad Seeds have ever sounded, with the added oomph of a troupe of young gospel singers from The London Community Gospel Choir. Crafting the songs around the gospel singers required rehearsals, an alien concept for such an adept group of improvisational musicians as The Bad Seeds.
“Getting the Bad Seeds to rehearsal is very difficult,” says Cave, “but we had our days of rehearsal with the gospel singers which allowed us to incorporate them into the development of the songs. A lot of the music was worked around that gospel element which took the songs to very different places. We wanted to create a music that was raw and driving and supercharged using the gospel singers to add a lightness and levity to the whole thing".
As the band began mixing at Astoria Studios, it soon became apparent that this was more than just one album.
A good example of this new playfulness is the first single, Nature Boy, a joyous, rolling pop song about how beauty will save the world. “It reminded us of Come Up And See Me by Cockney Rebel,” says Cave, “ which we’re all fans of, of course. It is a contagious and sexy piece of straight pop and it felt good to do something like that"
And it’s there that we must leave Nick Cave track-by-track extemporisations, as these are albums you must discover on your own. There will be some who favour the heavy, rolling, plenteous Abattoir Blues. After the scorching, jarring hosanna of opening track, Get Ready For Love you’ll find an album brimming with such rich wonders as Cannibal's Hymn's bewitching lonesome funk, the strident shaggy-dog grind-gospel of Hiding All Away (listen out for the point where Cave’s lyrics cause the gospel singers to crack up with laughter) and the song’s astonishing, breathtaking coda. Then there’s the ghostly ballad Let the Bells Ring, which just might be a lament for the passing of Johnny Cash, the greasy nightmare bestiary that is Fable of The Brown Ape, the ghostly end-of-days drift of Messiah Ward and There She Goes, My Beautiful World, perhaps the most beautiful song ever written about writer’s block and self doubt. And let’s not forget a title track that paints a sweetly-sinister portrait of self-doubt and self-mockery in a world of crumbling values, a song that might well contain the most sinister “Woke up this morning…” couplet of recent years
Then there’ll be those who’ll wish to lose themselves in the brushed, soft folds of The Lyre Of Orpheus, pulled into depths by the bare-boards blackly-comic mythic lament of the opening, title track, still deeper by Warren Ellis’s Roland Kirk-esque flute trills on Breathless before being submerged in the album’s joyously simple, piano-led love song (Babe You Turn Me On), a mordant, twistedly-beautiful lament bemoaning the author’s vast wealth (Easy Money), the chanting, flamenco reworking of Auden’s Funeral Blues (Supernaturally), a hypnotic folk-hex of weakened, devotional love (Spell) before the final, choral end-of-days People Get Ready masterpiece, O Children.
Nick Cave has kept smart company over the years, clustered in maleficent, smart-dressed covens, penning dark tales for outsider souls, ever since his days in that gloriously apocalyptic early-80s Australian desperados, The Bad Seeds. But whether we’re talking about the early swamp blues and tenement howls of 1984’s Bad Seeds debut, From Her To Eternity and 1985’s The Firstborn Is Dead, the carny grotesques and nightmare alleys of 1986’s Your Funeral My Trial, the yearning, dope-sick heartbreak of 1988’s Tender Prey, the sinistral pop melodrama of 1990’s The Good Son or the visceral walking blues of 1992’s Henry’s Dream and 1994’s Let Love In, the labyrinthine blood narratives of 1996’s Murder Ballads or the stripped down heartbreak of 1997’s The Boatman’s Call, the chilling, majestic epic that was 2002’s No More Shall We Part or the let’s-go-to-work brutality of last year’s Nocturama, whether we call upon any point in Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds there’s nothing that betters this. And don’t just believe the press notes guy.
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