Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds: 10 of the best
Bibles, death and obsession … it could only be Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, really, couldn’t it? Here are 10 songs to treasure
1. Saint Huck
The Birthday Party were an unholy force of evil noise, but by 1983 Nick Cave had grown tired of their mess and muck. Exhausted from the drug-related bickering and strangled by his relationship with guitarist Rowland S Howard, he and drummer Mick Harvey fled to start anew and formed the Bad Seeds’ first fixed lineup with ex-Magazine bassist Barry Adamson, guitarist Hugo Race and Einstürzende Neubauten’s Blixa Bargeld. It was Bargeld who held the key to Cave’s liberation: a divine saviour disguised as a haughty oddball with a fondness for making music with ear-splitting electronic drills, and responsible for a bleaker sound than the Birthday Party’s abrasive racket. It’s his shrieking, discordant clang that underpins Saint Huck, the first song the Bad Seeds recorded together, as Cave hams it up like a crazed preacher in the throes of zealous rapture. Mark Twain’s much-loved Huckleberry Finn is transformed from innocent do-gooder into devilish ne’er-do-well, a lost soul who abandons the path of righteousness and finds himself wading through the stinking, sinful swamp of the “dirty ol’ man latrine” instead, until a bullet is lodged in his brain.
2. Tupelo
Cave has never been content with mere suffering or misery: he’s a songwriter who wants to turn tragedy into something ghastlier and grander, a detective forever on the hunt for clues and signs that the end is nigh and Doomsday is upon us. Tupelo, then, takes the tale of Elvis Presley’s birth – a strange night in which Mississippi was hit by a torrid flood and his older twin brother, Jesse Garon, was delivered stillborn 35 minutes before – and reimagines it as an apocalyptic warning. “A big black cloud come,” snarls Cave as thunder crashes, lightning flashes and rain falls, but it’s the otherworldly dread that makes Tupelo into something far more menacing than inclement weather. It’s the idea that something monstrous is stirring; that someone – or something – is about to be born that’s so terrible it’s causing nature to protest and the elements to revolt. Just like WB Yeats’s The Second Coming imagined the birth of a vengeful beast that would bring anarchy to the world, so baby Elvis becomes a terrible force making its presence known. “Why the hen won’t lay no egg / Can’t get that cock to crow / The nag is spooked and crazy,” sings Cave over a vamping, biblical din, before hinting at a darker terror: the fate of Jesse Garon, the baby who never was and an unwilling sacrifice because nothing could survive the arrival of Elvis. “Well Saturday gives what Sunday steals / And a child is born on his brothers heels / Come Sunday morn the first-born dead.” The King is born, and nothing will be the same again.
3. The Mercy Seat
One of the secrets of the Bad Seeds’ success is how fluid their membership is. Some 15 musicians have, at some point, formed part of the ever-changing lineup, to freshen up their sound with anew ideas, fresh tics and weirder kicks. For their fifth album, Tender Prey, they brought in Kid Congo Powers (formerly of the Cramps and the Gun Club) and multi-instrumentalist Roland Wolf to help push the Bad Seeds’ sound into bolder territory. The Mercy Seat sounds genuinely sick: diseased and malformed, with shivering strings and a stark, serpent-like piano line from Mick Harvey that tries to wind and slither out of the noise-rush. Cave takes on the role of a killer condemned to death row, droning like a demented narcissist as he flits from crazed delusion (“The face of Jesus in my soup”) to feverish Old Testament gibbering (“An eye for an eye / A tooth for a tooth”) until the gruesome end (“And the mercy seat is glowing / And I think my head is smoking”). Cave is arguably the finest narrative songwriter of his generation, but the power of The Mercy Seat is in how fragmented it is: it’s less a story than an avant-garde poem, a jumble of thoughts spilling out of some poor sod’s head, and here he’s less singer than he is a method actor chewing over a meaty soliloquy at the grimmest curtain call of all.
4. The Ship Song
It’s a tricky blighter, the Bad Seeds’ 1990 album The Good Son, and it kicked up a fair old stink among Cave followers upon its release. How could the snarling, sneering preacher of despair and dismay turn soft and sentimental? Why would he turn his back on blood-and-guts wails of noise for tender ballads and dark-hearted pop? In hindsight, though, it’s a school of thought purely for the dimwits unable to realise there’s a delicate beauty to the Bad Seeds that is just as powerful as the hellfire-and-brimstone melodrama. And as The Ship Song shows, softer doesn’t necessarily mean slushier: it’s almost too intense, a stark, swelling piano ballad that walks a tightrope between lump-in-the-throat romanticism and unsustainable devotion, and Cave sings every word as if he’s been compelled by some higher force to use his last breath to explain how besotted he is. “Your face has fallen sad now / For you know the time is nigh / When I must remove your wings / And you, you must try to fly,” he sings, and he knows that nothing that blazes this fiercely can last, that a love so obsessive and compulsive isn’t built to survive. Cave has delivered dozens and dozens of blood-soaked scriptures and sleazy sermons on the mount, but few which have the honesty, bravery and skin-prickling power of this one.
5. Stagger Lee
Cover versions have always held a special place in Bad Seeds lore. Over the years they’ve twisted old songs by Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Pulp and Leadbelly into new shapes, and there’s an argument that the most important work in their early canon is 1986’s covers-only album Kicking Against the Pricks: a project which didn’t yield anything with the might of Tupelo or From Her to Eternity but helped free them from the gothic shtick they’d been saddled with. If there’s just one iconic Bad Seeds cover, though, it’s Stagger Lee, an obscene take on an old American folk song that details the grisly slaying of Billy Lyons by “Stag” Lee Shelton in 1895. There’s an irksome tendency to revere Cave as a pure misanthrope, a humourless high priest of gloom, but he’s often at his best when he’s actually having fun, and Stagger Lee is one of his guiltiest thrills: guitars slither and strike like coiled rattlesnakes while he purrs obscenity after obscenity, rolling around in the filth of nasty sex, rampant murder and man-on-man fellatio and having a depraved ball. “I’m a bad motherfucker, don’t you know / And I’ll crawl over 50 good pussies just to get to one fat boy’s asshole,” he bellows near the end, as seedy, violent and vulgar as he’s ever sounded. You’ll feel queasy as hell with yourself for enjoying it just as much.
6. Loverman
Let Love In from 1994 is the highest of Bad Seeds’ tidemarks, and a 10 of the Best could easily be half-filled from its tracklisting alone: compared to its predecessor, Henry’s Dream, it’s more cohesive and complex, full of strange flourishes and more nuanced arrangements, from the masterful and mysterious Red Right Hand to the abrasive, vicious assault of Jangling Jack and the dark, gathering stormclouds of Ain’t Gonna Rain Anymore. But on an album full of classics, Loverman feels the most disturbing. Unlike The Ship Song, it’s lust rather than love that’s clouded the senses, and Cave howls and groans like he’s been possessed by Twin Peaks’s BOB, taken over by an evil spirit and creeping and crawling like a sex-sick devil. The music grows and growls, from eerie and quiet to giant crashes and crescendos, and Cave mutters the verses as if he’s sweating out a fever before his voice turns disturbingly, disgustingly seductive as he whispers: “R is for rape me, m is for murder me”. Metal titans Metallica were so impressed that they’d record a cover version in 1998, but all of the bluster and heavy riffs in the world can’t match the creepy way Cave comes on like a sweet-talking Beelzebub with a mind full of foul thoughts.
7. Henry Lee
Go, now, and watch the video for Henry Lee and you can witness the first sparks of something special starting to catch light: a connection between a pair of reckless souls who put so much of themselves in their own art it’s enough to make you squirm. PJ Harvey and Cave have shared an eerily similar career path – two artists who both clung to abrasive, aggressive noise to begin with, unsure how else to express themselves, before becoming more varied, more mellow and more experimental over time – and after this, they’d begin a doomed relationship that ended in messy heartbreak. And yet here they tread a nervy line between awkwardness and intimacy: Harvey looking like Cave’s doppelganger with their matching ghoulish white skin and black swept-back hair, dressed in matching suits, twisting and winding themselves round one another. They could never have become romantically embroiled and their performance would still capture a dangerous kind of chemistry. The song itself is a revamped version of the folk song Young Hunting, and the alchemy is etched into the recording too: a gentle, gorgeous piano ballad that feels like it belongs to a dusty old saloon in old America, and two singers cooing at each other like the ghosts of Bonnie and Clyde. A dark duet of regret and recrimination between two kindred spirits.
8. Into My Arms
It’s a torch song, but that phrase conjures up unhelpfully soppy connotations of Bon Iver sitting in his cabin mooning over lost love, of Chris Martin bleating vaguely about failed relationships, of faceless singer-songwriters whinging about where it all went wrong. Into My Arms is a torch song like no other: a love song that encompasses the end of his long-term relationship with Vivien Carneiro, his failed affair with Harvey and scepticism about religion. Only Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah has mixed broken bonds with broken faith so powerfully, and even that’s a far grander, showier declaration than Into My Arms. There’s something unbearably brittle about hearing Cave, the quintessential priapic showman, sounding so lost and lonely that he’s prepared to turn to a god he doesn’t believe in for help. The piano stirs and swells like an old church hymn, and lyrically it’s powerfully simple: “I don’t believe in an interventionist God / But I know, darling, that you do / But if I did I would kneel down and ask him / Not to intervene when it came to you.”
9. Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!!
Grinderman are probably the best thing that’s happened to the late-era Bad Seeds. They started as an offshoot project sharing largely the same lineup (Warren Ellis, Jim Sclavunos and Martyn P Casey) and soon became a growling, sex-crazed sideshow, a dirty little affair so ragged, raucous and raunchy that it breathed new life into the Seeds, too, after the nadir of the snooze-inducing Nocturama and the gothic rock of Abattoir Blues/ The Lyre of Orpheus. Released just a year after Grinderman’s 2007 self-titled debut, there’s a swagger to the album Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! that Cave and his men hadn’t plundered for yonks: a brashness and bawdiness missing from their downbeat mid-00s period. And so while We Call Upon the Author – an interrogation of a god who can’t be arsed to busy himself with the world’s problems – is arguably the best song on the album, there’s something so shriekingly camp about the title track that it feels like the most important, a shot of daft, witty testosterone that perked up a band in danger of becoming too dour. It’s fast-and-loose garage rock, one chugging riff on a sweaty loop, with madcap noises and horns exploding in the background, as Cave reimagines the biblical mainstay Lazarus as the helpless fool Larry, pissed off that he’s been brought back to life in the gaudy 21st century as he stumbles from sex to drugs to prison to death. Poor Larry.
10. Jubilee Street
It’s a special type of band who can make one of their strongest albums after nigh-on 30 years and 14 previous records, but the Bad Seeds have always been several pages ahead of their contemporaries, leaving others to copy their dog-eared old chapters while they focus on freshening things up. Push the Sky Away isn’t goth-rock schlock or wounded balladeering: it’s a lush, layered and textured album that’s deeper and more mysterious than any of their previous works, pushing into the hidden nooks and crannies of Cave’s mind for subtler but no-less-dark subject matter. The centrepiece, Jubilee Street, shows a band who are more comfortable with their craft than ever before, despite the exit of founder member Mick Harvey. It glowers and glimmers, with Warren Ellis’s otherworldly violin line soaring and screeching like a funeral march. Cave’s not always had much compassion for the rotten scoundrels who slime over his songs, but here there’s an empathy in his voice for the down-on-her-luck prostitute his narrator once knew: it quivers as he hopes for rebirth and sings: “I am beyond recriminations … I’m transforming, I’m vibrating,” while the score shudders towards some higher plane of being.
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