On the face of it a Nick Cave gig shouldn’t have been this much fun. What with all the Old Testament bellowing and all that murdering. And lest we forget he is a confirmed Kylie killer. One minute he was duetting with her on Where The Wild Roses Grow and then by the end of the song he’s killed her with a rock and stuck a rose between her teeth. What a rotter.
He’s 50 now and has been perfecting his pervy horror shtick and spilling blood in a literate and unique style over 15 solo albums. For years people have argued that there is a sense of humour at work, but after listening to all that bloodshed and bile could a sold out Academy just be full of serial killers in disguise? And while we’re at it, if Cave can’t think of anything nice to write about, then shouldn’t he go to a garden centre or visit a National Trust property instead.
Evidently not. The latest album Dig Lazarus Dig is amongst his more user friendly. And Nick cave himself was positively jovial.
They opened with the clanking call and response chain gang sound of Night Of The Lotus Eaters and Dig Lazarus Dig. The Bad Seeds specialise in that swampy, alcoholic sound. Rain hammering on a cabin roof and face at the window stuff.
For this tour they’ve brought the full drum shop. Loads of percussion and some songs had 2 drummers (the excellent Jim Sacluvas and his legendary pink drum kit) and any Bad Seed not otherwise gainfully employed could usually be spotted banging something or other.
Dig Lazarus Dig has Cave in full declamatory preacher mode, as he tells the story of a cult figure and his downfall. “The women all went back to their homes and their husbands with secret smiles in the corner of their mouths. He ended up as so many of them do, back on the streets in a soup queue.... Poor Larry” He sounds like he’s having fun by the way h squeezes out the “Poor Larry” line
The swirling Tupelo is as threatening as the storm it describes and Red Right Hand suits the clankier sound of the current Bad Seeds sound. Cave switches between guitar, keyboard and stage prowling and fist shaking depending on the song. His civil war ‘tache remains resolutely lady scaring though. He’s got some completion in the beardy stakes though. Guitarist Warren Ellis seems to have a hermit attached to his chin.
Cave responds good-humouredly to the constant audience requests, although sadly not to the hopeful “Play the one from Shrek”. At one point he announces “It’s Rock ‘n’ Roll. It’s incredible what you can get away with.”
He adopted one fan’s shout of “You’re the man” and enthusiastically took it up as the theme for the evening. After each song the patter would be a variant on “I’m the Man,” or “No you’re the Man”
After playing Your Funeral My Trial he said, “It was a happy day when I wrote that song” before almost giggling “The bitch never talked to me again”. Oh yes he’s in a good mood. Book him for your next children’s party!
Lie Down Here And Be My Girl from the new album sounds excellent, powering along like it’s close relative Third Uncle by Eno. The sparse and delicate Moonland has the arresting opening line “When I first came up out of the meat locker. The city was gone”
The set closer More News From Nowhere has Cave waving bye bye to the audience (oh yes) in contrast to the Birthday Party days when he’d be more likely to be sticking a winklepickered boot into the front row.
Oldies encores included Get Ready For Love where the “All around the world” part got played liked AC/DC’s Whole Lotta Rosie and the frankly beautiful Into My Arms. In a parallel universe couples may well be cuddling up to that one. And some were at the Academy! But just to prove that he’s not ready for the Simon Bates gig yet, his last song was Stagger Lee. As the song veered from taut and brooding to it’s full bloody climax, the stage lighting went as mental as the band in full explosive flight. ...And the language. Dear oh dear! What a lot of mother loving. Unfortunately what we’ve got in that song, is a very bad man who leaves a trail of death and destruction; starting with the murder of the bar man at the Bucket Of Blood and finishing with some sexual bad manners and the line “Billy dropped down and slobbered on his head and Stag filled him full of lead”
(Amazingly this isn't actually the most unsettling use of the word "head" in pop music....That would be the line from the Jacques Brel song Next. "And I swear on the wet head of my first case of gonorrhoea")
As a song and performance it summed up just why Nick Cave is still such a good thing. Funny, hokey, unsettling and thoroughly enjoying playing with the possibilities of a musical and literary history and also well aware of his own image and the fun he can have with it. Backed by a band who rock like bastards.
Night Of The Lotus Eaters
Dig Lazarus, Dig
Tupelo
Todays Lesson
Red Right Hand
Midnight Man
Your Funeral My Trial
Deanna
Lie Down Here And Be My Girl
Moonland
The Ship Song
We Call Upon The Author
Papa Won't Leave You Henry
More News From Nowhere
Get Ready For Love
Hard On For Love
Straight To You
Lyre Of Orpheus
Into My Arms
Stagger Lee
Showing posts with label Nick Cave. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nick Cave. Show all posts
Thursday, May 08, 2008
Saturday, February 02, 2008
Nick Cave
Nick Cave is instantly recognisable, but also easy to pastiche. He’s a scowley stickman with a Basil Fawlty walk, all hubba hubba heh he heugh vocals sung into his collars like a death obsessed Harry Hill. I think he’s just got better over the years though as he’s moved from the confrontational howl of the Birthday Party and embraced his inner Johnny Cash.
The Birthday Party are one of those bands that I really regret not seeing live, (although I did have a ticket for a gig in 82. I can’t remember the holiday I was on, but I bet I’d remember the gig I missed to go on it) The band’s gigs teetered on the edge of onstage and offstage violence and the band themselves were just such an odd looking spectacle. There was Cave, flailing and writhing, baiting the audience and kicking out at stray heads while Tracy Pew, the static Gay bar cowboy thug (big hat, bigger 'tache), knocked out bass lines that could knock down buildings.
The thing is though, I don’t listen to the Birthday Party very often now. And if I do it’s the songs like Release The Bats, which is funny, cod Goth rockabilly horror (“Bite sex vampire bite" and it’s Elvis impersonating "Baby’s a cool machine").... The band hated it and resented the fact that their joke song became their biggest song. Nick The Stripper has a predatory strut and it could have come straight from the Buffalo Bill scenes in Silence Of The Lambs). It's got the catchy refrain of “Hideous to the eye”. (Now doesn’t that make you want to sing along?)
While there was undeniably a fierce sense of humour about the band, there was also just fierceness, and the nasty undercurrents of misogyny. It’s probably 20 years since I listened to a Birthday Party album all the way through. It was hard work then. And I don’t feel like that anymore. Either the hard work or the hatred. The band split in 1984 but I did get to see him at the Powerhouse with Sonic Youth supporting around 1985. And he did kick up a thrilling and unholy racket.
The forthcoming album Dig Lazarus Dig will be his fourteenth and over time the scratchy swampy blues of the earlier albums have become a more streamlined kind of rocking and his ballads have become less hammy. He's operating outside the normal rock n roll influences though. His lyrics are ripe with biblical imagery and lyrics that sound like screenplays for unmade films, or Jim Thompson short stories. Sometimes they're just funny. There She Goes My Beautiful World has the great line "John Wilmot penned his poetry riddled with the pox and Nabakov wrote on index cards at a lectern in his socks"
The major influence on Cave though is Johnny Cash. As well he should be. After all most books could be usefully replaced with a copy of Cash's autobiography. It would certainly simplify library shelving.
On his second album The First Born is Dead he covered Wanted Man by Johnny Cash. (Well actually written by Dylan but made his own by Cash.) It’s a really good cover, repaid in kind when Cash covered the electric chair song The Mercy Seat, stripping it of the hysteria of Cave’s original and replacing it with tense resignation. Interestingly enough though the piano on Cash’s version plays the hysterical role instead. Cash and Cave dueted on I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry on Cash's American IV album.
Cave and Shane MacGowan released a single Wonderful World in 1992 and Cave does a masterful version of rainy Night in Soho by The Pogues. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VoLRIXtAuxk
The spectacularly unflattering photos on his album sleeves over the years and his well-documented heroin use may have held him back from winning Handsome Man awards. But it could have been worse. While Dorian Gray had a picture in the attic, Nick Cave kept a guitarist on stage. Blixa Bargeld spent twenty years as a Bad Seed and still holds the distinction of the illest looking man in Pop
The duet with Kylie on Where The Wild Roses Grow was not only a hit in 1996 but it had a nation in up arms once they realised it’s murderous subject. You can’t kill Kylie! A Peoples Army of 40 year old blokes was raised to defend her. Some of them were straight!
The Boatman's Call from 1997 has the achingly beautiful Into My arms.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3-VZxkmmtI It's just piano and bass and has a hymn like stateliness but also a real delicacy. It also sets itself apart from most love songs by having the opening line "I don't believe in an interventionist God". Nick Cave sang it at the funeral of Michael Hutchence.
The album also has People Aint No Good, which crops up on Shrek 2. Another beautiful song. Sumptuous and perkily miserable. And just when you think, “Actually shouldn't Nick really be out there scaring the kids parents?” the closing track Green Eyes delivers the line
"Slip your frigid hands beneath my shirt. This useless old fucker with his twinkling cunt. Doesn't care if he gets hurt"
I'm not quite sure what he means.... but I'm fairly sure the song is not in Shrek The Third.
After establishing himself as the ultimate creepy crooner last years Grinderman project was an excuse for him to play filthy garage rock and play with a rocking pervy preacher persona. Grinderman features long time collaborators Warren Ellis and Jim Sclavunos and a fine array of lady scaring beards. No Pussy Blues from the Jools Holland show is tightly reined in chaos. Loud and layered, with wave after wave of guitar and feedback crashing in then holding back. It's what the Birthday Party used to do.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuDP7c3Zd8I
So even though I don't think I can listen to the Birthday party anymore I found that one of my favourite albums from last year was Grinderman with Nick Cave using some of his old tricks
The Birthday Party are one of those bands that I really regret not seeing live, (although I did have a ticket for a gig in 82. I can’t remember the holiday I was on, but I bet I’d remember the gig I missed to go on it) The band’s gigs teetered on the edge of onstage and offstage violence and the band themselves were just such an odd looking spectacle. There was Cave, flailing and writhing, baiting the audience and kicking out at stray heads while Tracy Pew, the static Gay bar cowboy thug (big hat, bigger 'tache), knocked out bass lines that could knock down buildings.
The thing is though, I don’t listen to the Birthday Party very often now. And if I do it’s the songs like Release The Bats, which is funny, cod Goth rockabilly horror (“Bite sex vampire bite" and it’s Elvis impersonating "Baby’s a cool machine").... The band hated it and resented the fact that their joke song became their biggest song. Nick The Stripper has a predatory strut and it could have come straight from the Buffalo Bill scenes in Silence Of The Lambs). It's got the catchy refrain of “Hideous to the eye”. (Now doesn’t that make you want to sing along?)
While there was undeniably a fierce sense of humour about the band, there was also just fierceness, and the nasty undercurrents of misogyny. It’s probably 20 years since I listened to a Birthday Party album all the way through. It was hard work then. And I don’t feel like that anymore. Either the hard work or the hatred. The band split in 1984 but I did get to see him at the Powerhouse with Sonic Youth supporting around 1985. And he did kick up a thrilling and unholy racket.
The forthcoming album Dig Lazarus Dig will be his fourteenth and over time the scratchy swampy blues of the earlier albums have become a more streamlined kind of rocking and his ballads have become less hammy. He's operating outside the normal rock n roll influences though. His lyrics are ripe with biblical imagery and lyrics that sound like screenplays for unmade films, or Jim Thompson short stories. Sometimes they're just funny. There She Goes My Beautiful World has the great line "John Wilmot penned his poetry riddled with the pox and Nabakov wrote on index cards at a lectern in his socks"
The major influence on Cave though is Johnny Cash. As well he should be. After all most books could be usefully replaced with a copy of Cash's autobiography. It would certainly simplify library shelving.
On his second album The First Born is Dead he covered Wanted Man by Johnny Cash. (Well actually written by Dylan but made his own by Cash.) It’s a really good cover, repaid in kind when Cash covered the electric chair song The Mercy Seat, stripping it of the hysteria of Cave’s original and replacing it with tense resignation. Interestingly enough though the piano on Cash’s version plays the hysterical role instead. Cash and Cave dueted on I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry on Cash's American IV album.
Cave and Shane MacGowan released a single Wonderful World in 1992 and Cave does a masterful version of rainy Night in Soho by The Pogues. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VoLRIXtAuxk
The spectacularly unflattering photos on his album sleeves over the years and his well-documented heroin use may have held him back from winning Handsome Man awards. But it could have been worse. While Dorian Gray had a picture in the attic, Nick Cave kept a guitarist on stage. Blixa Bargeld spent twenty years as a Bad Seed and still holds the distinction of the illest looking man in Pop
The duet with Kylie on Where The Wild Roses Grow was not only a hit in 1996 but it had a nation in up arms once they realised it’s murderous subject. You can’t kill Kylie! A Peoples Army of 40 year old blokes was raised to defend her. Some of them were straight!
The Boatman's Call from 1997 has the achingly beautiful Into My arms.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3-VZxkmmtI It's just piano and bass and has a hymn like stateliness but also a real delicacy. It also sets itself apart from most love songs by having the opening line "I don't believe in an interventionist God". Nick Cave sang it at the funeral of Michael Hutchence.
The album also has People Aint No Good, which crops up on Shrek 2. Another beautiful song. Sumptuous and perkily miserable. And just when you think, “Actually shouldn't Nick really be out there scaring the kids parents?” the closing track Green Eyes delivers the line
"Slip your frigid hands beneath my shirt. This useless old fucker with his twinkling cunt. Doesn't care if he gets hurt"
I'm not quite sure what he means.... but I'm fairly sure the song is not in Shrek The Third.
After establishing himself as the ultimate creepy crooner last years Grinderman project was an excuse for him to play filthy garage rock and play with a rocking pervy preacher persona. Grinderman features long time collaborators Warren Ellis and Jim Sclavunos and a fine array of lady scaring beards. No Pussy Blues from the Jools Holland show is tightly reined in chaos. Loud and layered, with wave after wave of guitar and feedback crashing in then holding back. It's what the Birthday Party used to do.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuDP7c3Zd8I
So even though I don't think I can listen to the Birthday party anymore I found that one of my favourite albums from last year was Grinderman with Nick Cave using some of his old tricks
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