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discogs · 7 years

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a trip through murder rates: crash course in nick cave

here is the playlist, beneath lies the story.

i hope you enjoy.

1. i have an evident bias to rowland and rowland’s friends, it’s a slight one that is emphasized by an deep spiritual attachment, therefore we must start with rowland s. howard and not our dear nicholas. there were two main melbourne acts, one of which was nick’s just now forming ‘boys next door’ (which he decided to create with friends tracy pew and mick harvey after he was kicked outtuv art school), the other is rowland and ollie olsen’s ‘young charlatans.’ rowland was responsible for the creation of the boys next doors’ biggest song “shivers,” here is a clip of rowland and ollie speaking while with the young charlatans. ( x )

2. rowland wrote what i believe to be the perfect song, adaptable to all outlooks, at the age of sixteen as a comment on the over the top nature of teenage love. the song is initially a sarcastic one, yet has been redone so many times over that generally speaking it looses it’s cynical nature. this recording is the one done by the young charlatans, it’s original form with rowland on vocals.

3. this is actually about nick cave, i swear it, and here is where we get into that more so. here is a cover of nancy sinatra’s “these boots are made for walking” done by the boys next door some time in ‘78. i don’t know why nick sings like that, i’m assuming he had no sense of his vocal range at this time, and i wish the young charlatans had gotten a video but unfortunately the band split up fairly quick due to disputes between rowland and ollie.

+ there’s this house party, or maybe it’s a show, there’s mixed stories on this. but the general consensus is that nick, unruly and screwed all up on speed had been eyeing rowland for some time at this event. it was after a testosterone gun show in the bathrooms where nick ripped out a sink, that he found his fist in rowland’s face demanding to know if he was a punk or not. naturally, s a thin boy raised by women rowland was a bit disgusted by nick’s display, however took him up on his offer to meet again the following day when nick apologised. this eventually led to the creation of the birthday party, but before that rowland had managed to get a word in with his bandmates about that one song, y’know the one ..

4. here we see nick, all marionette gestures and heavy eyeliner belting his heart out over lyrics written by the tiny post ‘66 fender wielding raven shown briefly in the video. it’s undeniable that nick seemed to take this a lot more genuinely than rowland did, or at least that’s what he intended to display. this is the more popular version of the song, much glossier and easier to imagine being played at a high school dance than the previous version. this was all fine and dandy, now, but songs that sound like roxy music aren’t cool, man ! besides, every member of this band displays a talent that is remarkably astounding. the song is beautiful, yet tight, and though this is spectacular there’s much more beneath.

5. this is track is one of the birthday party’s first singles, released along with several other birthday party songs on a compilation called hee-haw which mainly consisted of the band’s earlier work. the cover art here is done by nick.

6. this track is off of the birthday party’s second record entitled ‘junkyard,’ released in 1981 and expressing more fluidity within their musical style with a certain wounded animal characteristic to the music jolted by the viciousness of nick’s voice. it is around this time, or perhaps some time before, that the band had found themselves penniless in london and retreated to berlin.

+ tensions have been steadily arising from day one due to rowland and nick’s individual stubbornness over artistic expression, nick is searching for an escape from the birthday party as he despises the route their presentation has taken. as most even vaguely punk sounding bands often realise that their audience doesn’’t so much care for the music but instead the thrill of seeing someone hurtling themselves into the ground repeatedly. no one wanted their name to be engraved in a violent history, and lucky for nick he sound his way out in berlin.

7. for some years now, the west berlin music scene has been a bustling hub of creation and innovation. with acts like abwarts and malaria surrounding, a young and reverse individual finds himself forming what would the band pioneering not only unconventional instruments but the proto-industrial movement. the band was based off a fairly simple concept; destruction as a means of creation, a notion adopted from this (x) marxist era essay as well as the factory-line like gentrification of the surrounding brick paradise. thus einstuzende neubauten was formed, and by the first glance nick felt as though he’d net his match. this rubber clad being of fire and metal was blixa bargeld, who you will see in this particular clip. (x) is a performance that shows off the impulsive and chaotic nature of the band as well as their use of out of the ordinary instruments.

8. this meeting of kindred spirits leads to nick definitively deciding to part ways with the birtday party. in an admittedly dick move, nick decided to call he record ‘the bad seeds ep,” presumably hoping to get a better feel for where he was going with his career. rowland and him are hardly speaking and they both have one foot out the door. his song is off of this bad seeds section, where nick begins to show his talent for world building and story telling.

9. this track’s off the opposite end, the part which belongs more so to the birthday party than it does to the bad seeds. i love this track for all it’s inconsistency, it attacks you from all sides musically and leaves you feeling dazed lyrically for a lack of being able to keep up. to me, this is the best way to bookend the band’s career. it displays maturity in style like no other while also perfecting the sound now heavily associated with not only the birthday party but no wave music in general.

+ below are bonus videos and music x ( mutiny sessions ) x ( live version of shivers sung by rowland with the boys next door ) x ( another song off of einsturzende’s halber mensch, my favourite )

10. admittedly i have neglected nick’s first two records ‘from her to eternity’ and ‘the first born is dead,’ i have a storage complex with my favourite musicians where i won’t listen to their entire discography because if i get stir crazy for new material then i can get familiar with one of the records i haven’t really heard. this track is off of his third record called ‘your funeral, my trial.’ like the previous two this was recorded with the first of the bad seeds lineup comprising of nick cave, mick harvey (of the birthday party), barry adamson (of magazine), blixa bargeld (of einsturzende neubauten), and for a short time hugo race. this track is one of the bad seed’s finest in my opinion, strong on atmosphere and tone with a plot line following a distinct character who’s in a strange bind - a hallmark of nick’s songwriting. this album sound tracked wim wenders film ‘wings of desire,’ with a cameo from nick and rowland in the final act.

11. let’s catch up to rowland for a moment, who is working somewhat parallel to nick as the guitarist for a band called the crime & city solution. rowland only worked with the band for one record, ‘room of lights,’ while in berlin where he was met with his brother, harry, playing bass, mick harvey once more on guitar, and a boy from a band called swell maps on drums named epic soundtracks. this clip is from the aforementioned ‘wings of desire,’ after this rowland and the mentioned members (minus harvey, replaced by rowland’s long-time girlfriend genevive mcguckin) broke off and formed these immortal souls.

12. a lot of musicians have released cover albums, and from what i can tell almost all of kicking against the pricks is except for this track. i wanted to display this song as it shows the broadness of nick’s vocal expression, in that this song makes me want to hang myself.

+ this is a little linear note about rowland’s work after crime, epic soundtrack’s origins, and who the fuck is nikki sudden again ? x ( these immortal souls: marry me (lie ! lie !) ), the project rowland worked on immediately after crime & city x ( swell maps: cake shop girl ), the band that epic soundtracks and brother nikki ‘little johnny thunders’ sudden came from initially, pioneers of what would become noise rock and grunge. x ( the jacobites: for the roses), nikki’s band with friend dave kusworth x ( nikki sudden & rowland s. howard: a quick thing ), a track from an album rowland did with nikki called ‘kiss you kidnapped charabanc’ x ( lydia lunch & rowland s. howard: burning skulls ), a song from the brilliant record cut on a whim based on a sense of familiarity between the two

13. this music video was recorded in the studio the song was recorded in, which is in berlin. this song was inspired by a girlfriend of nick’s and how she made him feel, a very momentous affair it seems to have been,

14. nick continues to make music as the end of the 1980s draws near, the first record of this time period is 'the good son,’ who’s most popular song is undoubtedly 'the weeping song.’ that track is definitely worth a listen as well, it is one of nick’s more popular tracks but it’s a rare full display of blixa’s vocals and a great duet. this song, however, is the title song and has a beautiful choir-sound to it which is present all throughout this album.

15. my favorite nick cave record is tied between this one and one that comes over twenty years after this one, but i’ll be damned if i don’t give this record the utmost appraisal. the album is more definitive in narrative than nick’s previous records, it all seems to be written to fit a particular story line and the sense of momentum in the record is impeccable. this track tells the story of the catholic saint, christina the astonishing, a story that nick was very attached to. as we further our way through his career his interest in catholicism becomes more and more apparent.

16. this song is the slowest on the album 'let love in,’ which is one of his most popular records. the most known track by nick - 'red right hand’ - is also off this album, but in my opinion it’s not the best track off the record. this song is inspired by a story nick read in robert smythe hichens’ “the green carnation,” and the unsettling nature of the story lingers in this song. it’s the counterpart to a song earlier in the album entitled simply 'do you love me?’

17. the huge thing about nick cave is his fascination for murder, something that, the more i learn about and listen to him doesn’t seem to be that huge of a fixation of his. at least not anymore than the bible is. this album, however, murder ballads, is obviously homicide centric. this track features kyle minogue on vocals as eliza day, but she isn’t the only guest vocalist on the album. on another track, henry lee (which is a must hear as well), there is another guest vocalist. pj harvey comes into the maelstrom of nick’s life, and as is displayed in the video, they become seamlessly intertwined in a romance that nick describes as one of the best events of his life. however, in nick’s own words, 'all things move towards their end, i knew before i met her that i would loose her …’

18. after the short lived romance between nick and pj, she leaves him feeling devastated. no one knows for sure why it is they split, but nick sure as hell took it like a landslide. this song is one off of his last album of the 90s, the boatman’s call, which is essentially the pj harvey breakup album. this song has stark similarities to tom waits’ first record, which rings nothing but lovely to my mind.

19. i really. really love rowland s. howard. he means everything to me, this is a song off his first solo album. i don’t know why i chose this one, maybe it’s because the proceeding two songs off it are too difficult for me to hear. he is so talented, he is so beautiful, i don’t know where these impressions of horrendousness come from. rowland is the kindest soul to every walk this earth, but um, here we are with another beautiful display of the sharpness of his guitar playing, and that aching voice of his. he’s my favorite guitarist, and the reason why is that he does not need to sing to tell you how much he is hurting - his guitar does that all on it’s own. we’re about to get heavy. 1999.

+ nick’s doing this shit called grinderman. i’ll be honest with you, i’ve never heard a line of it. and why ? because that mustache is an atrocity to not only to this earth, but to the heavens, hell, and purgatory as well. so there’s a pretty big gap in his discography after boatman’s call.

20. 2009. alright. so. i’m going to tell you this one thing first; rowland s. howard did not deserve to die. he did not deserve death, he did not deserve any of the numerous heartaches and horrendous experiences that he went through. he went his life a genius, and was scarcely ever recognized for his immense talent and uniqueness. rowland died in 2009 due to a liver disease. he wasn’t able to get a transfer in time. and look, rowland was not ready to die. he wanted so much more, he wanted everything of the world that he hadn’t the chance to reach before. he knew he was going to die, but he did not want to. i will tell you this with my heart bared open and bleedin to you - i would give up my life to have rowland back on this earth in a heartbeat. this song is from the last album he ever released, an album which i still find very difficult to listen to. he did not deserve to die. i don’t know where it is he acquired this seemingly immense hatred of himself, and the contempt for whatever actions he committed. he was the kindest, most loving soul to ever walk this earth, and i refuse to accept his passing as anything other than a true strike of hate by god to humanity. he means wonders to me.

21. so um. sorry. but nick comes back, with that record that i told you competes with henry’s dream to me. it’s called “and no more shall we part” and it is a really difficult record to speak of due to the cohesive story line there seems to be within it. this is the final track of the album, and i believe it sums it up pretty well. i think the line in here; “i think of my friends who died of exposure, and i remember other ones who died from the lack of it.” is in relation to rowland in the latter half. this song is sorrowful, without a doubt. this is the last record blixa did with him, stuck through for years. god bless him.

+ nocturama did not do well, neither did abattoir blues. i know nothing about dig lazarus dig, these three records remind me of rickety stairs on the way up to self discovery. in his 2016 movie, 'one more time with feeling,’ he mentions how you have to grow accustomed to being a new person. you have to suss out your new self, if this new you smokes or if this new you gave up smoking years ago, things like that. trying to find his place again. he did, of course, adjust to this new nick. and the product is brilliant.

22. nick outdoes himself time after time, throughout his entire career he has bested himself. please, do not take the initial crudeness of some of the first lyrics as a reason to discard this song, it’s off of his 2013 album push the sky away is without a doubt one of the most beautiful things i have ever heard. this record is one that is vicarious to me, these days i hear it every day to sleep and sometimes constantly throughout the day.

23. nick’s last record, 'skeleton tree’ was already in development before the death of his son, arthur. many of the lyrics in the record echo his last book, 'the sick bag song,’ especially in this track where the girl who dances on the rings of saturn is a reoccurring anomaly in the book. this record took everyone by storm, if that storm is freezing and you’re trapped inside a cold black marble home. this is the end of the nick cave train ride, thank you if listened and read the whole way through. this is essentially my bare bones.

- LM

#introductions #currently under construction

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funnythingshere0-blog · 6 years

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Nick Cave at the Abbey: A funny, strange and beautiful evening

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Nick Cave at the Abbey: A funny, strange and beautiful evening

After a stirring recording of his poem Steve McQueen plays, the lights come up in the Abbey Theatre and Nick Cave is seated at a grand piano playing Sad Waters from 1986’s Your Funeral My Trial.

The stage is laid out to look like a bar, with an artificial counter and a high stool and some people sitting around tables. The rest of the audience observes from either side.

The song finished, Cave hops up and explains that recently he’s been experiencing something “intimate” and “communal” at his concerts. Doing a show in which audience members ask questions felt like the next step. He frowns. “It seemed like a great idea a few months ago but now seems really terrifying.”

The risks are evidenced by the first questioner who launches into a sweetly heartfelt expression of love for Cave. “A question mark at the end would be good,” Cave says, when it’s time for the next question. “Even an upward inflection at the end of the sentence would be helpful.”

And then, with his answer to the next question, Cave goes straight to the heart of the matter and talks about how, since the death of his 15-year-old son Arthur in 2015, performing has “literally been lifesaving.”

He discusses Andrew Dominik’s incredibly raw documentary film One More Time with Feeling, made in the aftermath of Arthur’s death, and how at the time he had “no idea of the effect that film had on other people. [There were] so many people in a similar situation… We are all connected in some way by our sense of suffering.”

This is the subtext of the night and several audience members preface their contributions by telling Cave how his work has helped them process grief. Not that the evening isn’t also riddled with joyful silliness. An early discussion of his song-writing relationship with Warren Ellis comes to an abrupt end when Cave points into the audience and says, “Hey, it’s the guy from Peaky Blinders!” Cillian Murphy, who probably just wants a quiet night out, looks quite embarrassed.

Stripped-down Cave songs emerge organically from the blizzard of questions. One comes out of a query about Cave’s ideal musical collaborator. The answer is the late folk musician Karen Dalton, but then he declares that he’ll sing a song about someone else he collaborated with. “It didn’t end well,” he says, before playing a pleasantly aggressive, staccato version of West Country Girl, a song written about onetime girlfriend PJ Harvey.

The roving mics come out again and Cave is back on his feet. “Come here to me,” says a bearded Dub, who’s curious if Cave has any stories about Shane MacGowan in the old days. “It didn’t matter how disgraceful he was, people just love him,” says Cave of his friend.

“How does it feel to know there have been a lot of children conceived to your music?” another man asks.

“It’s a beautiful thing,” says Cave. “What song was it?”

“Love Letter.”

“How many minutes did you make it through the song?”

“Let’s just say we had it on repeat,” he says, a little boastfully. “And it’s a long song.”

“Respect,” says Cave.

A more highbrow type asks about the importance of his increasingly more abstract lyrics. Abstraction, says Cave, allows the listener “to add their own imagination to the cauldron of the whole thing.”

Someone asks what his favourite song on No More Shall We Part is. “I’ll play it,” he says, and renders a lovely version of the title track. “You like that one?” he asks Cillian Murphy when he finishes.

A woman asks about religion and whether “God is in the house?”. “It’s increasingly difficult to talk about,” he says, before referencing religious conflict and the women forced into Magdalene laundries. But he goes on to say that while God and spirituality might be “happy delusions” they are nonetheless necessary concepts for him when he’s writing.

“They’ve been leaking out of the cracks and into my normal life. Spirits and ghost and magic and absurdity seem to be having more of an impact on me than I’d like to admit.”

Then he plays God is in the House, lifting his arms in Pentecostal style for some briefly piano-less acclamations towards the end.

The subject of grief is never far away. A bereaved man asks how long it took before Cave wasn’t too numb to write. “I never found [grief] numb,” says Cave. “It was too much to feel. A deeply physical situation. I was unable to do anything. I was so full of this thing.”

More recently, he says, “I’ve been able to leap across this nagging absence in my life to something really beautiful and transcendental… I’ve discovered a way to write about other things without turning my back on what happened… I hope you get to that place.”

Cave rejects the idea of a cultural boycott of Israel, because that would mean punishing dissident Israelis

A man asks if rumours he might be leaving Brighton for LA are true. Cave talks about how much he loves Brighton, but he adds that being there means regularly having to pass where Arthur died (he fell from a cliff after experimenting with LSD). “It’s very difficult to live there. I have an urge to leave but an urge to stay as well.”

Such deep moments are leavened by good-humoured daftness. A man gives him a tea towel. Someone asks what’s in Cave’s cup (“Throat tea, if you must know”).

A man presents him with Stuart Bailie’s book Music and Conflict in Northern Ireland. A woman asks for marriage advice. Someone in the front row keeps shouting up questions randomly without an assigned microphone. “You must be terrible to watch TV with,” says Cave. He sits at the piano and plays a softened version of Papa Won’t Leave You Henry.

The lights come up and a woman asks if the politics of Berlin had an influence on his music when he lived there in the late eighties. “I wish I could answer this question better. The truth is my time in Berlin is kind of foggy. I was immersed in my own sordid little world.”

He recalls how when recording The Good Son his bandmate Blixa Bargeld interrupted a vocal take to say, “The wall is coming down.” Cave responded with, “Fuck off, I’m trying to sing.”

A brave soul asks about Cave’s decision to play Israel last year and whether he’d do so again given recent atrocities. “Don’t answer him, Nick!” says an angry voice, but Cave answers everything. He would play Israel again, he says. He talks about the “grotesque” behaviour of Israel but also the “grotesque” behaviour of Hamas.

He talks about the Israelis who are protesting their own government and he coolly rejects the idea of a cultural boycott as advocated by Brian Eno, because that would mean punishing those Israelis. It’s the most uncomfortable moment of the night.

The woman in the front row says. “I’ve finally got a microphone” “Oh,” says Nick. “You.”

She asks about his first novel And the Ass Saw the Angel. He affectionately disparages his youthful writing before taking to the piano to play a mournful version of The Mercy Seat, a song he wrote contemporaneously with that novel.

A man asks him about addiction. “I haven’t taken drugs or a drink for twenty odd years,” he says. “It’s not something I need to work on on a daily basis … It’s pretty easy really.” Though he adds, “It took me a long time to work that out.”

A young woman tells him her favourite song is The Ship Song. “What’s yours?” she asks.

“It’s The Ship Song,” says Cave. “I’ll play it for you if you like?” He plays it for her and its beautiful.

Someone asks if Cave’s always dapper Bad Seeds have a dress code. Not officially, says Cave, but they slowly adapt nonetheless. Cave recalls that when the nowadays besuited Warren Ellis first played with them he was wearing a cropped ACDC T-shirt and a pair of shorts made from a flour sack. “Not only ugly but obscene,” he says of the shorts.

He plays Love Letter, the song to which an audience member’s child was conceived. A woman asks how he feels about the piano as an instrument.

“It provides a song-writing service,” he says. He differentiates himself from his bandmates who, he says, are obsessed with their instruments. “They can talk about [guitar pedals] for fucking hours… It’s mass pedal-philia on the bus. There’s your headline.”

Towards the end of the night, the man who gave him the book about Northern Ireland puts his hand up again, not to ask a question, but because he’s realised he left his tickets to the following night’s gig tucked into the book. He retrieves the tickets and gets a hug from Cave.

After two and a half hours, Cave plays the ominously comic Weeping Song and the beautifully forlorn Skeleton Tree. Then he says “Thank you” to a standing ovation and leaves the stage, the distance between the mythic performer and audience having collapsed completely. The best myths, after all, are deeply human. It’s been a funny, strange and beautiful evening.

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