Category: Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds

Nick Cave was a truly creative force in the first decade of the 21st Century releasing an album every 18 months or so with the backing of The Bad Seeds or with the Grinderman offshoot.  It is a body of work that, due to its volume, doesn’t always quite hit the mark in comparison to the material from the 80s and 90s but it is never less than fascinating to listen to, especially in the live setting where he and his band established themselves as one of the must see acts with every tour bringing something different thanks to the revolving door policy of band and tour members.

One of my favourite songs of his is the lead-off single from the 2008 LP:

mp3 : Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – Dig Lazarus Dig!!!

It bounces along a right old pace, paying homage to the sort of more direct tunes that Grinderman had been performing in the previous couple of years – in particular the call and chant nature of the vocal – and has a chorus that was tailor-made for A-listing on daytime radio.  Except, this is Nick Cave and unless he duets with Kylie or Polly then there’s no chance of ever hearing him outside of Radio 6….

Ever wondered what the hell this crazy cut-up vocal is all about?  The great man explained all at the time of its release:-

Ever since I can remember hearing the Lazarus story, when I was a kid, you know, back in church, I was disturbed and worried by it. Traumatized, actually. We are all, of course, in awe of the greatest of Christ’s miracles – raising a man from the dead – but I couldn’t help but wonder how Lazarus felt about it. As a child it gave me the creeps, to be honest.

I’ve taken Lazarus and stuck him in New York City, in order to give the song, a hip, contemporary feel. I was also thinking about Harry Houdini who spent a lot of his life trying to debunk the spiritualists who were cashing in on the bereaved. He believed there was nothing going on beyond the grave. He was the second greatest escapologist, Harry was, Lazarus, of course, being the greatest.

I wanted to create a kind of vehicle, a medium, for Houdini to speak to us if he so desires, you know, from beyond the grave. Sometimes, late at night, if you listen to the song hard enough, you can hear his voice and the sad clanking of his chains. “I don’t know what it is but there is definitely something going on upstairs”, he seems to be saying. It is, most of all, an elegy to the New York City of the 70’s.

So there you have it…………..

Incidentally, the version of the song put on the blog is the limited edition 7″ single version which comes in at some 32 seconds shorter than the album version (that’s the anorak in me coming to the fore I’m sad to say).

Here’s yer b-side:-

mp3 : Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – Accidents Will Happen

NOT a cover of the Elvis Costello classic, although that didn’t stop EC’s folk a few years back issuing me with a dmca notice demanding that the Nick song be taken down (I knew it was from EC’s folk as the other three songs the notice referred to were all from a posting to do with him!!)

Enjoy…as I will Nick Cave when I go see him in Edinburgh at the end of this month.

I recently went to the cinema for the first time in seven years. My last time was at one of the premieres of Control during the Toronto Film Festival in 2007, an occasion when I was uncontrollably (pun intended) sobbing at the end.

This time it was to venture out to see 20,000 Days on Earth, a mix of drama and documentary portraying a fictionalised 24 hours in the life of Nick Cave. It proved to be quite enjoyable, heightened by some wonderful live performances of a number of songs from the 2013 LP Push The Sky Away. The film has a number of funny self-deprecating moments including when Nick talks about his brief brush with fame thanks to the duet with Kylie Minogue which took him onto Top of The Pops and into the living rooms of millions of people, many of whom bought their first ever Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds album only to go off the band immediately.

That album was Murder Ballads and I make no apologies for digging a piece out of the archives of the old place from back in January 2007 and adapting it slightly.

Murder Ballads was released in 1996. It came at a time when Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds were growing in reputation and the main man’s profile was expanding into the pages of all of the mainstream broadsheet papers in the UK. When he announced that he was recording an album of death songs, everyone braced themselves for unbridled doom and gloom.

The fact that the taster for the album was a single recorded with Kylie Minogue stunned everyone. The fact that the single got into the charts and led to Nick making a couple of appearances on Top Of The Pops stunned everyone and Nick.

Personally, I loved the single. I had been a fan of Kylie for years (Jacques The Kipper will testify to that having once got a specially made t-shirt for me as a birthday present). It’s hard to imagine nowadays, but Kylie in the mid 90s was not the global phenomenon she is today…and I do firmly believe that while they both gained from recording with each other in terms of public recognition (Nick) and critical acclaim (Kylie), it was the pop princess who benefited most.

I imagine a few of Kylie’s mainstream fans would have bought this album and been appalled by it. Equally, I hope that a lot of listeners would have gone in with an open-mind and come out impressed. But it was a record which sold more than most of the other Bad Cave recordings (and which subsequently is very easy to find very cheap in charity stores as casual fans having not listened to it in almost 20 years clear some space in their homes!!).

The opening track, Song Of Joy, must be the most misleading song title ever. A funereally paced number about a man coming home and discovering his wife and three daughters had been mutilated by a serial killer. It’s an astonishingly bleak song, but a very brave one to include at the start of the album. If the casual listener was stunned by that, they had no idea what came next…

There’s loads of blood, gore, mindless violence, sex and bad language in track two. It’s like a mini-Tarantino movie in 5 minutes. Stagger Lee is a fantastic record – and is even more astonishing live. There’s loads of versions out there on the likes of you tube for your enjoyment including a personal favourite from Channel 4’s The White Room back in the mid 90s. But while it is an astonishingly good version, it doesn’t come close to catching how intense this song is when you’re in the audience at a gig.

There’s another extreme u-turn from Stagger Lee with tracks 3, 4, and 5, (Henry Lee, Lovely Creature and Where The Wild Roses Grow) all of which are ballads. And while there are deaths and murders in each of them, they could easily pass for love songs on any other record.

Track 6 is one of Mrs Villains’s all-time favourite songs and one that she was overjoyed to hear played live at Glasgow Barrowlands back in 2001.

I read someone else describe The Curse of Millhaven as polka-metal. And it’s true!! It’s an immense tale of a serial killer committing all sorts of atrocities in a small rural town. It’s just about the most catchy sing-a-long song that Nick has ever written, but it’s the frantic playing of the Bad Seeds that make this so special. Violence and gore never sounded so much fun.

A pause for breath with The Kindness of Strangers and Crow Jane at Tracks 7 & 8 before the tune that I think most divides fans of Nick Cave.

O’Malley’s Bar is either a fantastic opus or the most over-indulgent piece of crap ever recorded.

A man walks into a bar buys and drink. He then shoots the bar owner and everyone else unlucky enough to be in the vicinity. He does it cos he gets a sexual kick out of it. He doesn’t have a grudge against any of his victims. Many of the deaths are described in gruesome graphic detail. I couldn’t begin to tell you how many bodies there are at the end. But they’re piled up all around the bar. And then the cops come…..but I’m not spoiling the ending. Go and listen to all 14 mins and 28 seconds yourself. Oh and in the accompanying lyric booklet, I counted 158 lines for this song alone. With no chorus. As for the music….well there’s not much of real tune, it’s like an extended jamming session. But it’s incredibly effective.

The LP closes with a strange one. Death Is Not The End is a cover of an obscure Bob Dylan record, and lead vocals are taken by 7 different singers. It’s also the only song on the album that doesn’t have an actual death in it…..

Almost 20 years after its release, and I’m still not tired of Murder Ballads. I’m not saying its a perfect album. But it’s far better than many might have you believe. It’s an astonishing piece of work in terms of the breadth of music on offer. And it’s the music that matters most.

And so here’s Mrs Villain’s favourite:-

mp3: Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – The Curse of Millhaven

Enjoy.

A story appearing in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat in 1895 read:

William Lyons, 25, a levee hand, was shot in the abdomen yesterday evening at 10 o’clock in the saloon of Bill Curtis, at Eleventh and Morgan Streets, by Lee Sheldon, a carriage driver.

Lyons and Sheldon were friends and were talking together. Both parties, it seems, had been drinking and were feeling in exuberant spirits. The discussion drifted to politics, and an argument was started, the conclusion of which was that Lyons snatched Sheldon’s hat from his head. The latter indignantly demanded its return.

Lyons refused, and Sheldon withdrew his revolver and shot Lyons in the abdomen. When his victim fell to the floor Sheldon took his hat from the hand of the wounded man and coolly walked away. He was subsequently arrested and locked up at the Chestnut Street Station. Lyons was taken to the Dispensary, where his wounds were pronounced serious. Lee Sheldon is also known as ‘Stag’ Lee.

Lyons eventually died of his injuries. Shelton was tried, convicted, and served prison time for this crime. This otherwise unmemorable crime is remembered in a song.

The version recorded by Mississippi John Hurt in 1928 is considered by some commentators to be definitive, containing as it does all of the elements that appear in other versions.

A cover with different lyrics was a chart hit for Lloyd Price in 1959; Dick Clark felt that the original tale of murder was too morbid for his American Bandstand audience, and insisted that they be changed to eliminate the murder. In this version, the subject was changed from gambling to fighting over a woman, and instead of a murder, the two yelled at each other, and made up the next day. However, it was the original, unbowdlerized, version of Lloyd Price’s performance that reached #1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 and was ranked #456 on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.

But “Stag O Lee” songs may have predated even the 1895 incident, and Lee Sheldon may have gotten his nickname from earlier folk songs. The first published version of the song was by folklorist John Lomax in 1910 by which time the song was well-known in African-American communities along the lower Mississippi River.

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, by contrast, present an even more violent and an homoerotic version of the tale on the 1996 LP Murder Ballads. It also appears to be set in the 1830s…..

mp3 : Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – Stagger Lee

Over the years, this has become a live favourite on just about every Bad Seeds tour, with subtle little changes making the performance just a little bit different each time. One of the most stunning versions came on the Abattoir Blues tour, where the band were augmented by backing singers from a gospel choir and the results were truly breathtaking:-

mp3 : Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – Stagger Lee (live)

Nearly nine minutes long. And not a single second was wasted.

See you all in hell.