Back in the early days of The Bad Seeds Anita Lane was for a short time a member of the band along with Nick Cave, Mick Harvey, Rowland S Howard and Blixa Bargeld. She painted, wrote and contributed to lyrics- she co- wrote From Her To Eternity, a key early Bad Seeds song- and wrote one Bad Seeds song in its entirety, Stranger Than Kindness, from 1986's Your Funeral... My Trial.
Stranger Than Kindness is a key Bad Seeds song, the lyric a list of the problematic issues of being in a close personal relationship with an addict with some vivid imagery- 'bottled light from hotels', 'soft cold bones', no home and no bread, passion dying in the light and being a stranger to kindness. Musically its wired and tense, Cave's voice deep and flat over detuned strings and guitars. It's a powerful and moving song, one that seems to retain its mystery no matter how many times you hear it (although Nick says that it has revealed more of itself to him over time).
The Bad Seeds have performed it live since the mid- 80s, In 2013 they played it at KCRW, a Santa Monica radio station set that became a full live album release. Over the decades and line up changes it's changed a little, slightly less of the edge of chaos feel of the original version.
Anita was from Melbourne and went to college with Rowland S. Howard. When she first met Nick in 1977 they began a relationship. She was in The Birthday Party and moved to London with Cave and the band, leaving The Bad Seeds after the release of their first album and the group's relocation to West Berlin. Her impact on Nick was profound and even after their personal (and intermittent) relationship hit the rocks she remained a presence in his life- and the lives of various related bands. She released two solo albums, played and recorded with Mick Harvey and returned to The Bad Seeds with vocals on two songs on Murder Ballads in 1996. Mick's song from last year, When We Were Beautiful And Young, a moving lament for the power of youth and reflection on aging and mortality, is at least partly about her.
Anita died in 2021. She appears on last year's Bad Seeds album Wild God, on the song O Wow O Wow (How Wonderful She Is), a celebration of her with her voice (taken from an answerphone message) speaking for the final minute of the song about a flat she and Nick shared next to Brixton Prison and how they attempted to write a contract of love but never got beyond drawing the border on the piece of paper. The song also contains an opening line that jars somewhat, each time I hear it- apparently I'm not the only one who was a bit thrown by the line. Nick recently wrote about it at The Red Hand Files.
I watched Wings Of Desire over the Christmas holiday- it was on one of the many Channel 4 channels having been remastered and restored in 2022. It's a film I haven't seen since it came out in 1989 and am pretty sure I've only seen once before (probably at Liverpool University film club which had a long running mid- week film night I used to go to in '88 and '89).
Wings Of Desire was made by Wim Wenders, a mark of quality in itself, and is set in West Berlin in 1989 (the events of November 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent break up of the Eastern Bloc and the USSR don't appear in the film at all, no hint of a major shift in geo- politics. The Berlin Wall does feature in the film and West Berlin's unique feel and status are undeniably an important aspect of the film. Interestingly, much of West Berlin is semi- derelict with shots of vast areas of waste ground in what is now central Berlin, Potsdammerplatz for example). The film is in German mainly, subtitled, with brief bits of conversation in English (especially when Columbo, Peter Falk, features). It's shot mainly in beautiful black and white with some scenes in equally beautiful colour. Wenders cinematography and eye for a shot is second to none. It's also very slow, especially by modern cinema's standards, a film that feels like for long periods nothing much happens, the main characters drift around a lot, contemplating and deliberating.
The film centres of two angels, one played by Bruno Ganz (best known to British audiences for his portrayal of Hitler in Downfall), who populate West Berlin and are invisible to adults but can be seen by children, listening to the thoughts of West Berliners, occasionally intervening to comfort humans in distress, sometimes failing to prevent people from spiraling. Many of the people in the film seem to be alone, estranged from family and friends, everyone isolated in a city isolated from the rest of the country. A circus is in town and the angel Bruno Ganz plays falls in love with the trapeze artist, a woman played by Solveig Dommartin, and wants to become mortal so he can feel human pleasures. A film about the Second World War is being filmed, starring Peter Falk, who knows the angels are there even though he can't see them. At times, shots of Berlin from 1945 newsreel are cut into the film. The black and white scenes, including some shot inside the enormous modernist West Berlin library and some sot near the Wall, are the world as seen by the angels. The colour scenes are the world as seen by humans. I'll leave my plot synopsis there- no spoilers.
The soundtrack is mainly by Jurgen Knieper who wrote much of the score and then re- wrote much of it having been shown rushes by Wenders. It's an ambient/ instrumental score with found sounds and dialogue from the film which works well as a standalone. This is Der Himmel Uber Berlin (The Sky Above Berlin), a haunting and rather lovely five minutes which sounds exactly like the soundtrack to angels on the rooftops of buildings at the frontline of The Cold War should sound.
Wim Wenders said he couldn't make a film in West Berlin in the late 80s and not include Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds. The Bad Seeds appear in colour and in black and white, the characters turning up at a gig in a dilapidated dancehall. In this scene (in colour) Bruno Ganz arrives at the club while Nick and the boys play The Carny. Solveig is on the crowd too. Then they play From Her To Eternity, throbbing, restless, junkyard blues, young Nick Cave at the stage's lip in full heroin preacher mode playing to West Berlin's goth/ punk/ alternative underworld. Otto Sander, another angel, appears on stage.
Bad Seed guitarist Rowland S. Howard had a second band, Crime And The City Solution. They also appear in Wings Of Desire, playing the ominous Six Bells Chime, a sort of West Berlin/ Weimar Spaghetti Western song. Roland spins round the stage wielding guitar and cigarette. Solveig dances, The angels listen in.
The soundtrack features both bands with nine Jurgen Knieper pieces of music, snippets of conversation and dialogue from the film (just as the soundtrack to Wender's Paris, Texas did), plus several other pieces of music (expanded on CD), a soundtrack works really well away from the film as well as part of it. Both film and soundtrack are moving, atmospheric and have something to say about the human condition. What more could you want?
The end of year list is a bit of an indulgence but also a good way to look back, revisit albums and songs and enjoy again the music that's made my year. People like lists. The exact positions are very arbitrary. What does it matter if I think something was the 26th or 27th best album of the year? It doesn't. But pulling together my favourite releases of the calendar year is always a fun thing to do and a good way to draw a line under the year. Last year I wrote a massive piece with multiple sections, categories, sub- categories and sub- lists, the total number of releases heading up towards three figures. I must have had more time to think about it and to write it last year than I do now. This year I've slim- lined it to two lists, one for albums and one for singles/ EPs/ remixes, each numbering thirty.
Some years feel like singles years and some feel like album years- 2024 has been a big year for albums, some big hitters and 80s/ 90s bands and artists with big comebacks. I like to think I keep up with new music to some extent and the number of 'old' artists in this list makes me wonder how accurate that is, whether I'm kidding myself about that. But, as they say, it is what it is. Inevitably I will have missed something out from one of these two lists, if not both. Equally inevitably, I will buy an album in the new year that came out in 2024 which should have been in the top 30. Nothing is ever fixed. Maybe that's the way it should be, a constantly fluid and shifting list.
Singles, EPs and remixes
30 Silvertooth: Shut Um Down (A Dub From Outer Space)
29 The Liminanas and Bertand Belin: J'Adore Le Monde
28 Richard Norris: Weatherall's Last Stand
27 Jezebell: Weekend Machines EP
26 Causeway: Dancing With Shadows
25 Hinds with Grian Chatten: Stranger
24 David Harrow and Hugo Nicolson: Revolvalution EP and Rude Audio Remixes
23 Cole Odin and Marshall Watson: Voyager
22 Mick Harvey: When We Were Beautiful And Young
21 Electric Blue Vision: Trance Stance
20 BTCOP: The Custom 88 EP and Rude Audio Remixes
19 Mildlife: Return To Centauri
18 Puerto Montt City Orchestra: Hey You (10:40 Remix)
17 Pandit Pam Pam: Pass A Wish EP
16 Theis Thaws: Fly To Ceiling (David Holmes Remix)
15 Ammomite: You Don't Know Me (David Holmes Remix)
14 Ride: Last Frontier
13 C.A.R.: Anzu (Hardway Bros Remixes)
12 Acid Klaus: PTSD By Proxy EP
11 Raxon: Your Fault
10 Peak High: Dance Hall Days
9 Psychederek: Alt! EP
8 Iraini Mancini: Undo The Blue (Beyond The Wizard's Sleeve Re- animation)
7 Lisa Moorish: Sylvia (David Holmes Remix)
6 A Certain Ratio: It All Comes Down To This
5 Galliano: Cabin Fever Dub
A limited edition 7" single that was a very timely release with its line, 'don't want to take my country back man/ Want to take my country forwards', arriving to coincide with the Farage race riots in the summer, Galliano making a return to action and being a voice of reason. The song sampled Andrew Weatherall's remix of the band from 1992's Skunk Funk and borrowed Joe Strummer's vocal phrasings from This Is Radio Clash, and was a very unexpected treat.
4 Amyl and The Sniffers: Big Dreams
As was this, a single ahead of the Melbourne pub punk's third album that showed a different side to the band. Over a picked, circling guitar riff and some spacious production Amy sang a punk rock torch song for all those people stuck in dead end towns and dead end jobs amid a cost of living crisis who want to get out and realise they're another year older and still stuck. The video for Big Dreams, with the band on motorbikes in the desert, was pure rock 'n' roll cool.
3 Alex Kassian: E2- E4 (A Reference To E2- E4 By Manuel Gottsching)/ Mad Professor remixes
Twelve minutes and twenty one seconds of perfection- pulsing spaced out synths lines that lit up the summer. Not that summer really happened in the north of the UK this year. But when E2- E4 played it felt like it did.
2 Orbital, David Holmes, DJ Helen and Mike Garry: Tonight In Belfast
Tonight In Belfast, Mike Garry's beautifully moving poem and voice over David Holmes' remix of Orbital's Belfast, a re- imagining of the Hartnoll brothers 1991 masterpiece is as good as anything else released this yea. It could easily be my number one. David remixed Belfast for the Orbital 30 project, updating it for the 2020s. DJ Helen got Mike Garry to speak his Tonight poem over the top. Mike's words speak to me in all sorts of ways. When I first heard it, so many of the lines for me were about Isaac, it seemed almost like he'd written it for me. Transcendent and emotional, everything music can/ should be. Magical.
'Tonight I want to paint pictures of you/ Write poems and songs and novels all about you/I wanna hold you up so high you're gonna need a spacesuit'
'I love to speak your name aloud/ Simply 'cos I love its sound/ It feels like I'm kinda calling yer/ It feels like I'm kinda talking to ya/ It feels like I'm trying to break through/ You know across this divide'
'I'll tell you what/ Let's slip beyond the confines of this world/Let's forget every single thing we've learned/ Let's rewrite the way this world can turn'
1 Fat White Family: Bullet Of Dignity (Beyond The Wizard's Sleeve Re- Animation)
This came out in June, a 12" remix of one of the songs from Fat White Family's latest album Forgiveness Is Yours. The Beyond The Wizard's Sleeve Remix takes Bullet Of Dignity, already a fucked up, sordid and groovy number and spins it further, kicking off with percussion, timbales, early 90s kick drum and then a squelchy bassline that oozes dance floor action. It builds, echoes rattling around and the rhythm gathering steam, some piano stabs and then finally, after a drop out and pause, Lias' vocal comes in, a blur of standout lines and attention grabbing phrases- 'You say you're just thirty one/ What's that in cannibal years?' I have no idea what it's about but it keeps giving with imagery, lines about fatal caricatures and suicidal cassettes, words walking in pairs, and how the dialogue's dubbed. There's a Middle Eastern/ North African guitar line that appears and re- appears. At five minutes it takes off even further, the groove and rhythms bouncing around, moving ever forwards.
There are a couple of singles that should really be heading up the singles list but they're both going to appear as part of the albums near the top end of this second list, as much for variety as anything.
Albums
Edit: I've forgotten to include any of 100 Poems brilliant trio of albums from this year- I knew I'd forget something! Out of the three the most recent, Balearic As A System Of Belief, just about edges it. Album number 31.
30 The Jesus And Mary Chain: Glasgow Eyes
29 Fat White Family: Forgiveness Is Yours
28 Reverb Delay: The Storm Has Passed
27 SubDan: Inhale, Exhale, Repeat
26 Duncan Gray: Five Fathoms Full
25 Saint Etienne: The Night
24 Richard Norris: Oracle Sound Volume Three
23 Khruangbin: A La Sala
22 Mick Head and The Red Elastic Band: Loophole
21 The Woodentops: Fruits Of the Deep
20 Dirt Bogarde: Love, Sweat And Beers
19 M- Paths: Submerge
18 Coyote: Hurry Up And Live
17 Klangkollektor: Dub Tapes Volume 1
16 Various Artists: Virtual Dreams Volume II (Ambient Explorations In The House And techno Age, Japan 1993- 1999
15 David Holmes: Blind On A Galloping Horse Remixes
14 Fontaines DC: Romance
13 Richard Sen: India Man
12 A Certain Ratio: It All Comes Down To This
11 J- Walk: Broken Beauty
10 Five Green Moons: Moon One
9 Sedibus: Seti
8 Underworld: Strawberry Hotel
7 Four Tet: 3
6 Jamie Xx: In Waves
5 The Cure: Songs Of A Lost World
I had no idea, along with thousands of other people I imagine, that what I really needed in late 2024 was a new album from The Cure. The opener, Alone, released as a single in the autumn, was an exercise in majestic beauty and beautiful gloom, a three minute instrumental intro and then Robert Smith singing as well as he ever has, about life, love, loss, mortality, and 'the end of every song we sing'. Stunning. The album continued in that vein for the next seven songs, meditations on aging and loss, ending inevitably with Endsong.
4 GLOK/ Timothy Clerkin: Alliance
Electronics and guitars, swirling, woozy modern psychedelia recorded remotely after the pair met at Andrew Weatherall's funeral. A collision of early 90s sounds and 2024 trippiness. For some time it was all I played, a totally addictive seven track album.
3 Bill Ryder- Jones: Iechyd Da
This could easily be album of the year, a January release that I keep returning to. Beautiful songs with acoustic guitars, pianos and grand, sweeping strings, a children's choir from a Birkenhead primary school, Mick Head reading Ulysses, a Gal Costa sample, and amazing stirring production- and then Bill's battered and beaten voice, sounding like a man who's reached the end of the road, has nowhere left to go, broken. The pain he sings about is from experience, the death of his brother as a child (Daniel fell off a cliff while they pair where on holiday, his family forever scarred) and mental health issues ever since.
In the end though he gets there and we do with him- 'I'm still lost/ But I know love/ I know loss/ But I chose love'.
2 Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds: Wild God
Wild God was a step into the light, a conscious decision by Nick Cave to choose joy over sorrow- a line that appears in the song Joy where Nick is visited late at night by a ghost, a boy with giant sneakers and laughing stars around his head, who tells him, 'we've all had too much sorrow/ now is the time for joy'. It shakes me when I hear it.
By this song, the fourth on the album, its clear we've stepped into a new Cave world. The first song, Song Of The Lake, explodes orchestrally Nick muttering 'never mind, never mind...'. It's follow by Wild God, with its heart stopping cry of 'bring your spirit down'. That is followed by Frogs, easily one of the best songs of this year and one of Cave's best, a song where Nick walks home on a Sunday in the rain, amazed at the wonders of the world around him- frogs in the gutter, the rain, Kris Kristofferson. The band sound reborn too. The previous albums were so grief stricken and spectral it was difficult for them to find a way in, Warren Ellis's synths were the core of the sound. Final Rescue Attempt tells of Nick being saved by a woman, and how after that, 'nothing really hurt again/ nothing ever really hurt/ not even real pain'. It's extraordinary stuff, magical, life affirming songs. By the end of side two, when former partner Anita Lane's voice appears (from Nick's answer phone. She died in 2021), we've gone through the wringer and come out the other side, the sheer joie de vivre evident throughout, no more so than in the fade out to Conversion where Nick and the choir sing/ shout, 'Stop! You're beautiful!', at each other.
Both Frogs and Wild God could have been near the top end of the singles list- I've not listened to any songs more than either of those two all year- but now they're fully part of the album as a whole, an album that when I put it on, I play all the way through and one I imagine I'll still be playing long into the future.
1 Various Artists: Sounds From The Flightpath Estate
What else could it be? I did wonder whether I could/ should put the album me, Martin, Dan, Mark and Baz pulled together into my list, if doing it was a bit much. But in the end, it has been the album of the year for me. This time last year we were receiving tracks from the artists we'd approached, music from Justin Robertson, David Holmes, Timothy J Fairplay, Richard Sen, Hardway Bros, Sons Of Slough, Rude Audio and 10:40. Andy Bell's cover of Smokebelch arriving at the last minute was the cherry on top. An unreleased Two Lone Swordsmen track too.
We knew we had something good, all the music was so strong, everyone had really responded so well to us (a bunch of unknowns let's be honest). But we did not expect what then happened. Selling out 500 vinyl copies in a day. Repressing 500 more and selling all of them too. Three of the tracks being played on Lauren Laverne's 6 Music show. Having the window display in Piccadilly Records.
Giving a copy to Paul Simonon at The Golden Lion was as memorable and surreal as anything else that happened in 2024. Appearing in two end of year lists (Piccadilly records and Uncut). All of it has been unreal and yet, there it is, it happened. It would have been nothing without the music though- from the chunky cosmic chug of Sons Of Slough (recorded live at The Golden Lion) to Tim Fairplay's centurion dub, Justin's weird folk/ dub collision and Richard Sen's massive sounding Tough On Chug, Tough On The Causes Of Chug, the dub techno of Rude Audio and 10:40's fairground swirl, Hardway Bros writing our own theme, Theme For Flightpath Estate, and Holmes' magnificent Human: Remains, to Andy's gorgeous cover of Smokebelch, it's a brilliant and beautiful thing and it's my album of the year. To everyone involved, all the artists, my Flightpath friends, Waka, Gig and Matt at the Golden Lion and GLS, Andrew Liles, Rusty for his incredible sleeve art, and the memory of Andrew Weatherall (for whom it is a tribute)- thank you.
Finally it is here- 30th November. It feels it's been hanging over me for ages. November is a double punch- 23rd November is Isaac's birthday and we wait for that to arrive with everything it brings and then there's a week where we wait again, for the anniversary of his death. He died on 30th November 2021, three years ago today. The two being tied together so closely is very difficult. We've all had a very tough week with some really difficult and gruelling days where our emotions have been very close to the surface and coping with every day things- work for instance- has been really hard. After today there will be some respite I think, some relief from it all, before we're flung into Christmas. It's incredible that it's now three whole years since he went. It feels like no time at all in some ways. Time really is relative.
Isaac died in a side room off a Covid ward in Wythenshawe Hospital, at about quarter to two in the afternoon. The three of us were with him. I can remember it all so vividly. The previous day we'd spoken to a consultant. It was a Covid ward. He'd seen, he told us, a lot of people die. I asked him how it would happen, what would physically happen to Isaac when the end came and it was pretty much exactly as he described it. Some time afterwards, a few weeks maybe, lying in bed and unable do much except drink tea and scroll aimlessly on my phone, I saw an article in one of the broadsheet newspapers with a headline that said scientists had discovered whether when we die our lives really do flash before our eyes. I didn't click through and read it but it made me think about what Isaac would have seen in those last moments. Good things I hope.
I've said before here that the time since his death has sometimes seen him swallowed up by it. By him I mean Isaac, who he was, the person he was and became, the things he and we did together. It is the grief, the loss, the full fucking horror of your son dying aged 23, gone in less than a week, suddenly, wrenched away from us. It is the massive ball of grief, the knot of anxiety I carry round inside me. It sits inside my chest and stomach, expanding and contracting, sometimes a thing that I've learned to live with and sometimes, like this week/ month, something that engulfs me. Trying to keep sight of him when you're overcome by it is not always easy. We talk about him and smile when we mention the things he did or said, laugh about the stuff we got up to. It hurts less some of the time. And sometimes it kicks me about, makes me cry in public places, makes me feel like I'm carrying a massive weight around with me. After today it will shrink a little for a while- I think it will anyway. Today is a milestone (or millstone) to get past, another date to see the back of, another end to a few weeks that just have to be endured. November is a fucker.
In the time since Isaac died there are songs which have changed their meaning for me. Some of them are songs that I knew really well before he died and then when listened to at some point in the days since early 2022 have shifted, the words taking on a new layer of meaning. One of those is this one by Nick Drake (who coincidentally died fifty years ago last week aged just 26, the age Isaac would have been last Saturday).
'Cello Song opens side two of Five Leaves Left, Nick Drake's debut album, released in 1969. Fast but melancholy folky, finger picked guitar, a cello and some hand drums, all recorded up close and with real immediacy by Joe Boyd. Nick songs in that whispery, very English voice. I don't know what the word are about, what Nick meant by them. They are very poetic, very literate, not really contemporary to 1969's lyrical concerns at all. There was a point when I heard the song and had been to see Isaac at the cemetery- I don't remember exactly when, summer 2022 maybe- when it became a completely new song for me, it had a new meaning for me. Halfway through the second verse Nick sings...
'But while the earth sinks to its grave/ You sail to the sky/ On the crest of a wave'
The third and final verse continues...
'So forget this cruel world/ Where I belong/ I'll just sit and wait and sing my song/ And if one day you should see me in a crowd/ Lend a hand and lift me/ To your place in the cloud'.
I don't need to unpick that do I.
At Isaac's funeral, at the graveside, we chose this poem to be read by the celebrant- The Dead by Billy Collins...
'The dead are always looking down on us, they say, while we are putting on our shoes or making a sandwich, they are looking down through the glass-bottom boats of heaven as they row themselves slowly through eternity.
They watch the tops of our heads moving below on earth, and when we lie down in a field or on a couch, drugged perhaps by the hum of a warm afternoon, they think we are looking back at them,
which makes them lift their oars and fall silent and wait, like parents, for us to close our eyes'
I think something in 'Cello Song reminded me of The Dead. Both bring me some comfort.
I've been going through Nick Cave's back catalogue too. There's lots to find in there. Playing CDs in the car while driving to and from work recently this song really struck me anew...
Written way back in 1990, when I was only 20 with no idea of what was to come, this song was on The Good Son and was perhaps the first mature Nick Cave song. Piano and organ, with Nick at the fore and the three Bad Seeds (Mick Harvey, Blixa Bargeld and Barry Adamson) providing angelic backing vocals, The Ship Song is full of metaphor and is clearly a song about romantic love, doomed love maybe, love as struggle; but, as it has swelled and filled the space inside my battered Peugeot car this week in the cold dark mornings and evenings of fucking November it has given me something, I don't know what, something to hold on to.
'Come sail your ships around me/ And burn your bridges down/ You are a little mystery to me/ Every time you come around'.
Thanks for sticking with me if you've got this far and thanks to everyone who does respond to my grief and Isaac posts. I know they're a bit heavy sometimes- I wouldn't blame anyone for not wanting to read this first thing on a Saturday morning. The comments and best wishes from the people who are part of this online community really do mean a lot.
Onwards and upwards eh? Always onwards. Aiming upwards.
It seemed too obvious for a while but then a few things came together and a Sunday mix of Sunday songs was staring me in the face. I managed to give it a kind of narrative too with a beginning and an end. Not to mention plenty of good music in the middle- Sunday likes its ambient and its electronics.
Sabres Of Paradise: Blackfriars Sunday (Peel Session)
10:40: Sunday's Cool
Beyond The Wizard's Sleeve: Sunday Morning Sun- g
Sonic Youth: Sunday
Perry Granville: Cleveland Sunday
Justin Cudmore: Sunday Lemonade
Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds: Frogs
Kris Kristofferson is the starting point for this mix. He died in September at the age of 88. Sunday Mornin' Comin' Down was written in 1969 and was been recorded and released by Johnny Cash and Ray Stevens. Kris' version is the best though. He wrote it and he lived it and felt it. 'Well I woke up Sunday mornin' with no way to hold my head that didn't hurt/ And the beer I had for breakfast wasn't bad, so I had one more for dessert'. Then he finds his cleanest dirty shirt and heads out. There are cigarettes, cans being kicked, frying chicken and 'the disappearing dreams of yesterday'.
Kevin McCormick is from Manchester and in the early 80s made some wonderful but very lost and overlooked ambient guitar music. Thankfully, Kevin's albums have been rediscovered, dusted down and re- released recently and they are very much worth diving into. Sunday Farmway it from Sticklebacks and you can get it here. I reviewed the latest one, Passing Clouds, at Ban Ban Ton Ton last month- you can read that here.
In March 1995 Sabres Of Paradise recorded a Peel Session that has never been officially released, three tracks also never appearing anywhere else- Duke On Berwick, Stanshall's Lament and the one here, Blackfriars Sunday, the sound of the Sabres Sunday service. Next year the reformed Sabres Of Paradise live band will perform at Primavera and then hopefully in the UK and elsewhere.
Sunday's Cool was on of the tracks on 10:40's Transition Theory, one of my favourite albums of 2023. The album was intended as a whole piece, each track segueing into the next and containing the seeds of the next one. Removing Sunday's Cool from its moorings didn't feel completely right but it fits nicely into its new surroundings here too.
Beyond The Wizard's Sleeve marry 60s psychedelia with acid house, Richard Norris and Erol Alkan experts at both. Sunday Morning Sun- g is from a fairly rare 12" from 2007.
'Sunday comes alone again/ A perfect day for a quiet friend', sang Thurston Moore and Sonic Youth in 1998. Sunday was the only single from A Thousand Leaves. Full on Sunday guitar vibes.
Perry Granville's Cleveland Sunday is from a 2022 EP, a take- no- prisoners acid thumper. Get it and a pair of remixes here. Sundays spent dancing and warding off the horrors of Monday morning.
Justin Cudmore's Sunday Lemonade came out on New York label Throne Of Blood, as part of a series of releases in 2022 to celebrate their sixteenth birthday. Sunday Lemonade is all bleeps, filters and FX with a kick drum thundering away underneath. Messy Sunday mornings.
Frogs came out this year, the second song ahead of Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds' Wild God album. It has followed me round all year, soundtracking my daily life, one of this year's best songs and one of Nick's best too. In Frogs a couple (him and Susie I assume) are walking home in the Sunday rain, having heard the story of Cain and Abel. Nick becomes aware of the Sunday rain and the natural world around him, the sheer aliveness of everything, frogs in the gutter and Nick 'amazed of love and amazed of pain/ Amazed to be back in the water again'. Kris Kristofferson walks by kicking a can, in a shirt he hasn't washed for years, and there we are, back at the beginning. Happy Sunday.
I woke up yesterday morning with memories of Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds in concert from the night before flashing through my sleepy mind. Then, straight away, I remembered the American election and reached for my phone and tapped the screen. A quick search and I said out loud, 'oh fuck', into the darkness. Trump was closing in on the required number of electoral college votes and was already streets ahead in the popular vote. Oh fuck. It took the shine off my Nick Cave gig afterglow a little.
I've been waiting for this gig since buying the tickets what seems like a year ago. The album Wild God has been close to the top of my listening since its release and I've been diving in and revisiting parts of Nick's back catalogue over the last few months. The venue- the AO Arena in Manchester- is a big metal barn and we had seats not standing tickets. I'd vastly have preferred to be standing but missed out on those tickets and navigating three middle aged men down to the front, carrying (vastly overpriced) drinks and going over the barrier seemed like a task too far. So seated we were. Nick came at 8.30pm, a six piece Bad Seeds with a four piece gospel choir behind them and opened as he and they meant to go on- full throttle, high energy, fully committed. The first song, Frogs, is one of the highpoints of Wild God, a massive sounding meditation on walking home in the rain on a Sunday morning, Cain and Abel, the abundance of life in the natural world with a Kris Kristofferson cameo, set to uplifting, swelling, awe inspiring music. Live it sounds even bigger. They follow it with the album's title track, Wild God, which is similarly massive, faster live than on disc, the rhythm section (Colin Greenwood from Radiohead on bass, Jim Sclavunos on a huge array of percussion and Larry Mullins on drums) filling the sound out enormously. There's a moment in Wild God where everyone pauses, before Nick and the choir launch in with the line, 'Bring your sprit down'. The cavernous space above us, heating ducts, air con and metal roof supports, are suddenly filled with this gigantic sound, the Bad Seeds, the choir and Nick all bringing their spirit down and pushing it out and up again. Two songs in and I'm almost overwhelmed.
From there on there's nearly two and a half hours of music from the full spectrum of the Bad Seeds back catalogue. At most arena shows there's a chasm between band and audience, a pit with barriers to prevent anyone from getting too close. Nick doesn't do this- he welcomes the front rows of the standing section into the performance, prowling, dancing and running on a strip of stage bordering the barrier, leaning into the crowd, clasping people's hands, receiving notes from them, putting his microphone into someone's hand and then falling into a group of outstretched arms. On some songs he retreats to the piano but the front of the stage at the barrier is where he wants to be, taking part in what becomes part gig and part act of communion. It's a funny thing, this ex- punk rocker, ex- heroin addict, ex- nihilist, becoming such a people person, such beloved figure to so many- connections have been made that cross generations and he relishes it, the performance, the transference of energy, the to and fro. At one point he tells us/ one man in the front row, how the chorus of the next song goes and how to join in as if he's speaking to just one person. After the fervent applause dies down after some songs, there's absolute silence in the arena, a hush as everyone waits to see what happens next. 'I love you Nick', someone shouts out. 'I love you too', he replies. 'I love your husband as well'.
There are emotive songs, songs that leave some of us in tears. Early on they play O Children (from 2004's Abattoir Blues/ The Lyre Of Orpheus). Nick explains it's origins, a song written after taking his young twin sons to the playground and watching them play while despairing at the state of the world and that the song is about the primal desire to protect your children. 'The song then followed me about for years', he continues, and obviously took on a newer meaning following Arthur Cave's death in 2015. Later on they play I Need You, possibly the bleakest of the songs written following Arthur's death, one that sometimes I deliberately play to put myself back into that space we were in when Isaac died, to reawaken that all consuming, physical feeling of grief, just to remind myself what it was like, just tto feel it again. I Need You has Nick and Suzie in the most banal of places- the supermarket- feeling the very worst of emotions- the death of your child- and concluding 'I need you/ Cause nothing really matters/ When the one you love is gone'. The arena is silent, Nick at the piano, reliving his grief. I'm in bits.
But there are also life affirming songs of joy- Conversion and Joy (both from Wild God)- and there is tremendous, bone shaking rock 'n' roll, Cave jumping about like a man half his age, the man from The Birthday Party and the early Bad Seeds (who, let's be honest, wasn't expected to get this far or to venues this size). The 2024 Bad Seeds play From Her To Eternity like their lives depend on it, a song from forty years ago, amped up, 80s goth- punk energy, filthy swaggering junkyard blues.
They play Tupelo from 1985, Nick introducing it at length, an unholy combination of the birth of Elvis and a Biblical flood, 'Lookayonder/ Lookaynoder/ No birds do fly/ No fish do swim'. It's stunning, a swamp rock masterpiece.
I could go on, describe every song for you and its effect, the transmission of energy between band and crowd, Warren Ellis in flight, his long straggly hair and beard trailing around him, switching from guitar to synth to violin (an instrument he plays as if it is the lead guitar). The mighty Jubilee Street with its drawn out lyrics about a girl called Bee and the thrilling gear change that takes us into the 'I'm transforming/ I'm vibrating' section. The enormous emotional whoomph of Final Rescue Attempt. The aching desolation of Long Dark Night. By the time we're reaching the business end everyone's at their fullest, the choir coming down to the front, and giving us the Bad Seeds big hitters, Red Right Hand, The Mercy Seat (which buzzes and snarls with menace), the Black Lives Matter inspired White Elephant from Carnage. Nick dedicates it to America, and there's a pregnant pause that suggests America really does some help. There is an encore which ends with the Brechtian, Weimar/ Greek tragedy of The Weeping Song, it's call and response vocals, and Nick leading the audience in the quick fire clapping section. His voice, several weeks into a tour, is superb and his performance is incredible (and avoids ever tipping into showbiz territory).
As The Bad Seeds take their bow, the audience's love both visible and audible, Nick sits at the piano and with the band departing from the stage he sings Into My Arms, and hey, there we go again, more tears.
In the song Joy, from Wild God, Nick describes a nocturnal visitation from a ghost who makes him 'jump up like a rabbit/ And fall down to my knees'. The ghost, 'a boy with giant sneakers and stars around his head', tells him, 'we've all had too much sorrow/ Now is the time for joy'. If this tour and the gigs are about anything it, it is exactly that, a rejection of sorrow and an embracing of joy and of living, of being alive, and the communal and transformative power of music.
I've been spending quite a bit of time with albums from the 00s recently, partly in response to a series running over at No Badger Required where this week sees the culmination of a six week countdown to find the best albums of the 00s. My rediscovery of Mercury Rev's All Is Dream came from a different place but that album featured at the lower ends of the No Badger Required chart (a chart voted on by the luminaries of the Musical Jury) and I've been digging into different bits of Nick Cave's back catalogue ahead of the upcoming concert at Manchester Arena in early November.
Two weeks ago I posted Heathen Child, a Grinderman single from 2010, from the second Grinderman album, Grinderman 2. Heathen Child came with an Andrew Weatherall remix and also as Super Heathen Child, a different take with Robert Fripp playing guitar. I noticed that Nick and The Bad Seeds have been playing Palaces Of Montezuma as they've been touring Europe for the last month and pulled Grinderman 2 out from the CDs and played it in the car going to and from work for a week. Grinderman was a Bad Seeds offshoot, a place for Nick to escape the 'heaviness' of the Bad Seeds and play around. Three Bad Seeds joined him- Warren Ellis, Martyn Casey and Jim Sclavunos. Nick often played guitar in Grinderman which shifted things it seems, away from being the vocalist or the man at the piano and repositioning Grinderman as a guitar band. I didn't see them live but friends who did said that the gigs were as frenetic and lively as any they'd seen. Nick also saw Grinderman as a place to do something else lyrically. There's a lot of middle aged man sex in Grinderman, like the filter has been deliberately removed and what pours out of the id and onto the paper is what you're going to get. On the first Grinderman album there was No Pussy Blues. On the second, there was Worm Tamer, the Grinderman junkyard blues and nerve shredding rattle with Nick's lines about the Female who he describes as 'the snake charmer... the worm tamer... the serpent wrangler... the mambo rider', all tongue in cheek and overtly lascivious, a dead pan Carry On Nick Cave, concluding with 'My baby calls me the Loch Ness Monster/ Two great big humps and I'm gone'.
Much of Grinderman 2 comes from a similar place, noise and confusion, aging bones and feral desires. Apart from the penultimate song, the wonderful, achingly romantic, three chord swoon of Palaces Of Montezuma. On this song, as the A, E and B chords roll round and the three Bad Seed/ Grindermen provide backing ooh oohs, Nick lists a series of gifts he wants to present to his lover- Mata Hari, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, Miles Davis, the black unicorn, and memorably 'the custard coloured super- dream of Ali McGraw and Steve McQueen' and 'the spinal cord of JFK wrapped in Marilyn Monroe's negligee'. He wants nothing in return, just a breath, and everything hangs together in the chorus, 'Come on baby come in out of the cold/ Gimme gimme gimme your precious love/ For me to hold'.
It's a song that feels like it takes as long to listen to as it did to write, three chords, some backing vocals and a list, but its utterly wonderful, one of his best songs. It also feels like maybe it was the song that prompted Nick back to the Bad Seeds. Two years later came Push The Sky Away, a Bad Seeds album that felt like a corner turned, a different Bad Seeds, the album of Higgs Bosun Blues and Jubilee Street. Palaces Of Montezuma feels like the bridge between Grinderman and a route back to the Bad Seeds.
The Bad Seeds album that came between the Grinderman debut and Gridnerman 2 was Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!!, from 2008, an album that features inside the No Badger Required 00s countdown top ten. It's a classic Bad Seeds album, the last one to feature Mick Harvey and one that Nick said would be partly informed by the guitar sound of Grinderman. Blixa Bargeld had left previously and with Mick Harvey going the Bad Seeds were mutating into a different group. 'I didn't get into rock 'n' roll to play rock and roll', Blixa said when he left. Ouch.
Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! is full of guitar rock songs, a cast of characters in the songs and the spirit of New York, the rattle and thrum of the Velvets, the sidewalk and the Lower East Side, seem to be strewn throughout it along with a hundred biblical allusions. There are some top ten Bad Seeds songs on Lazarus- the supper club groove of More News From Nowhere, the scattergun frenzy of We Call Upon The Author, the title track and this one, the second song, which launches itself into Lou Reed with the refrain 'We're gonna have a real cool time tonight!', a song about Little Janie (Sweet Jane?), who has the jawbone of an ass down the waistband of her jeans and is in a tussle with Mr. Sandman. It's a song that sounds like it could have come from the Grindermen as much as The Bad Seeds.
In 2010 Nick Cave's Bad Seeds offshoot Grinderman released their second album, Grinderman 2. Grinderman was very much a chance to do something away from the sometimes heavy expectations and history of the Bad Seeds, to play and have a little fun, 'less narrative' and 'more impressionistic' according to Nick. The first single from the album was Heathen Child and the video was not a standard Nick Cave piece of filmmaking...
'Hey little Momo/ Light as a rainbow/ Heavy as an asteroid/ Sitting in the bath tub'. A girl in a very milky looking bathtub. A wolf. Nick, Warren, Jim and Martyn dressed as Greek warriors. Laser beams blasting from eyes. Asteroids. Dancing. Horror. Sci fi. A smoke monster. Machine guns. Dancing. The wolfman.
Musically the blasts of distorted electric guitar and primitive drums are a garage punk thrill, as are the explosive, noisy choruses. It sounds like everyone had a good time making it.
There was a limited edition 12" single with an alternate take of the song with Robert Fripp on additional guitar- slightly longer, a bit gnarlier and more heathen.
More? There was also an Andrew Weatherall remix, Andrew and Timothy J. Fairplay stripping Grinderman down to the basics and extending them out; some drums, isolated bits of Nick's vocal, percussion and laser beams and a large wobbly synth bassline.
Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds released Wild God at the end of August, the eighteenth Bad Seeds album with the main man four decades into a career as the Bad Seed singer. Over the years fifteen different men and women have been Bad Seeds. The original line up- Cave, Blixa Bargeld and Mick Harvey- in some ways bears little relation to the current incarnation, a band with Warren Ellis as Nick's creative foil and Thomas Wydler, Martyn Casey, Jim Sclavunos and George Vjestica (and sometimes Radiohead's Colin Greenwood on bass) doing the rest of the work. But in some ways, the Bad Seeds remain the same- Wild God sounds to me like a Bad Seeds record.
The previous three Nick Cave albums were all informed by the tragedy of the death of his son Arthur. Skeleton Tree was started before Arthur died but completed after. Ghosteen was written about Arthur (and as Nick says with Arthur alongside him). Carnage was a Cave- Ellis album and although not entirely informed by Arthur he's very much there in many of the songs, not least the stunning Lavender Fields. The sound of those three albums is less 90s Bad Seeds (and the predecessor, Push The Sky Away was moving in that direction) with Warren Ellis' synths and strings and choral backing vocals becoming the core sound, a shift that seemed to be a reaction to events the sombre, confessional, harrowing nature of some of the songs reflected in the spare, synth sound Warren Ellis conjured up. On Wild God there's a move to a different sonic field again- this isn't a return to the chaotic, guitar wrangling, pots and pans noise/ blues of the early Bad Seeds and it's not the full on Grinderman assault either. It's a new Bad Seeds- strings, piano, choirs, foreground basslines. The brittle, sparse Skeleton Tree and Ghosteen music has been replaced by or evolved into a warmer, full, cosmic, optimistic Bad Seeds. It's still a record that is 'about' Arthur - and about Nick's son Jethro who died last year aged 30 and also ex- band mate and former partner Anita Lane who died in 2021 and appears via a phone message in a song about her, O Wow O Wow (How Wonderful She Is). But it's an album about recovery, about choosing joy over sorrow and about living again.
The album bursts into life with the opening song, Song Of The Lake, a massive ascending orchestral sound and Nick speaking about an old man on the shore of the lake, looking at a moment worth saving. Nick starts various lines and then pulls away with the phrase, 'never mind, never mind', choosing, I don't know, the moment, life, love... The bassline thumps away and the drums rattle and then the choir swells in again.
It's followed by two singles- the title track and Frogs. I've posted about both before. Both have grown and grown since their release. I don't think Nick's written a better song than Frogs- it's a career high and the album's centre, a psychedelic Scott Walker pop song, with Cain and Abel, walking home in the rain on Sunday, the frogs jumping for joy from the gutter, and Kris Kristofferson 'Walking by kicking a can/ In a shirt he hasn't washed for years'. It's extraordinary. I can't fully explain it and don't really need to. It's how it makes me feel that's important.
Frogs is followed by Joy, a song that took my breath away the first time I heard it. In Joy as piano plays and an ambient noise floats around and a lone horn pipes up, Nick sings in a quavering voice, 'I woke up this morning with a blues all around my head/ It felt like someone in my family is dead', and then he picks up and moves on, describing a nighttime visitation by a teenage boy, 'a ghost in giant sneakers, laughing, stars around his head'. Nick doesn't name the ghost as Arthur- that's for us to do. Then 'the flaming boy' sits on Nick's bed, and says, 'We've all had too much sorrow/ Now is the time for joy'. The song flows on, horns and a swelling bed of music, Nick on top singing of people all over the world shouting angry words, and then of mercy, love and joy. Around him a choir ahh ahh ahhs.
Wild God doesn't let up, the ten songs an emotional hit one after the other, the music sounding wide screen and epic in parts, intimate in others and Nick making some kind of sense of the world as it is now for him- Final Rescue Attempt has someone (his wife Suzie presumably) coming for him. 'After that nothing really hurt again', he sings.
Side Two (and this feels like a two sides of vinyl, forty minutes and ten song long album of the kind from before CDs and streaming) launches with Conversion is dark, cinematic gospel. Cinnamon Horses is another standout, a string- laden meditation on love, Nick concluding, 'I told my friends that life was sweet/ That love would endure if it could'. He has spoken and written about about moving on with grief and consciously choosing to be happy. This is a recurring theme on Wild God- life is for living, we carry the dead with us but have to make the most of what's around us and that the real essentials, the things that keep us alive are love, family, friends, moments.
Long Dark Night is a Cave piano ballad that was the final pre- album single and works much better as a part of the album than it did on its own. O Wow O Wow is beautiful and bouyant, a tribute to Anita Lane that ends with her voice chattering away in a phone message, talking about when they lived in a place near Brixton prison, laughing and remembering about 'mucking around and making up songs'. The album ends with a short song, As The Waters Cover The Sea, a song which is over and done with in two minutes, a musical box melody and strings, soft and either about his wife Suzie or maybe his Christianity, and suddenly joined by the choir again- and as it finishes my main response is to flip the disc over and go back to the start, to go on Nick's journey out of pain and into a beatific state again.
It won't surprise you that much of this resonates with me strongly. Since Isaac's death in November 2021 Nick's songs, his words at The Red Hand Files and in his book Carnage, have been a help to me. The songs on Wild God are something else- they don't necessarily mirror me or where I am but they strike me, I recognise them, I feel them. In the end, with music, maybe that's the main thing- what it does to you, what makes you feel.
We had a couple of days in London last week. One of the things we did was visit Isaac's name at the National Covid Memorial Wall on the walkway besides the Thames, opposite the Houses of Parliament. It's 500 metres long, a public mural with over 200, 000 red hearts painted on the wall and thousands of them then personalised to remember a person who died with Covid as the direct cause of death on the death certificate. A friend wrote Isaac's name onto the wall in early December 2021, in the week after he died. We've visited it three or four times now. One of the things I wanted to do when we went last week was re- ink his name. A lot of them are fading now.
It's a strange thing and always very moving. When we go to his grave at the cemetery it feels like we are going to see him, that that is where he (or part of him) resides. Our weekly routine includes a trip to the cemetery. Going to the Covid wall feels different. It's in a part of central London that is always busy with tourists. As we walked away from the wall, a small group of people were talking, in a very matter of fact kind of way.
'What's this?'
'It's a memorial for all the British people who died from Covid'.
'Ok.'
That is what it is but so much more. It's a place which is deeply personal but also very public, opposite one of the most famous buildings in the world and while our grief has been very personal to us, at the Covid wall he's part of something else, part of a national, global, catastrophe. Each and every heart of the wall is a person and behind every heart, name and message is a larger group of people, friends and family, permanently affected by this. That he is a part of this always affects me in a way that is different from going to see him at the cemetery.
Covid seems so long ago now- the initial fear as scenes from Italian TV showed genuine horror in their hospitals, the lockdowns, the working from home, Zoom, an hour's exercise a day, how unlocking would work, tiers, the total mess created by Johnson's government, the winter lockdown of early 2021, masks, the vaccine, the oft mentioned 'new normal', and the highly optimistic feeling from some that we might construct a slightly different approach to doing things as a society afterwards.
I watched the Nick Cave film This Much I Know To Be True this week, a 2022 documentary directed by Andrew Dominik, capturing the working relationship between Nick and Warren Ellis in 2021 as they play various songs from Ghosteen and Carnage, a pair of albums directly informed by the death of Arthur Cave. There is a section where Nick talks through his ceramics (eighteen Staffordshire ceramic figures telling a story of the life of the devil), a part with Marianne Faithful, and Nick at his laptop talking about The Red Hand Files, the questions he receives from fans and how he responds to them. The live sections, Nick and Warren, a string section and three backing singers, are incredible, cathartic performances- filmed I realised as watching it, during Covid and the summer of 2021 when the world began to creep back to some kind of normality. In an interview section Nick talks about one of the emails sent to him at The Red Hand Files and how he sees himself. Nick says where once he would have described/ defined himself as a musician and writer, now after Arthur's death, he was trying to see himself not as those labels but as a husband, father, friend and citizen, who also sings and writes.
In this clip from the film Nick sings the song Ghosteen Speaks, a song which opens with the words, 'I am beside you/ Look for me', a lyric where Nick feels Arthur's presence.
'I think they've gathered here for me', Ghosteen/ Arthur says in the song, via Nick, 'I am beside you/ You are beside me/ I think they're singing to be free/ I think my friends have gathered here for me/ To be beside me/ Look for me...'
It's an extraordinarily powerful song for me, one that I hear and feel a bit differently now than I did two years ago. Time doesn't heal but you can get used to living with the permanent scar of grief.
Today I offer you three new songs from artists who all found fame/ infamy in the 80s and have kept ploughing their particular own furrows ever since- The The, Pet Shop Boys and Nick Cave. All three have devoted fanbases, all three are artists who have something to say, and all three are associated with a distinct sound and style. The need to keep writing and recording seems to be as strong as ever with them all and the idea propagated by Pete Townshend in The Who about dying before he gets old is long gone. In the 1980s there was a certain amount of derision for The Rolling Stones et al still playing rock 'n' roll in their forties. There is nothing ridiculous about this anymore- artists keep going and we are still interested in their music. None of the three here today are solely nostalgia acts either u their old songs will often get the biggest cheers when played live but the new songs are all trying to get something across- about themselves, about aging, about life and death and the state of the world.
First is Matt Johnson, back as The The, with a single called Cognitive Dissident and a video by Tim Pope. The song has a gnarly blues guitar riff from Little Barrie's Barry Cadogan, plenty of atmosphere and Matt's low register voice, the song swelling with backing vocals into the chorus, 'left is right/ black is white/ Inside out/ Hope is doubt'. Matt has always written the state of the world and the lyrics on Cognitive Dissident circle around our post truth world, emotion and democracy, alienation and AI. The song is the first from an upcoming album Ensoulment (the first for twenty five years) and some gigs. Cognitive Dissident sounds like The The- no surprise there maybe- but the 90s, Dusk era incarnation with Johnny Marr on board rather than the 80s one of Infected and Soul Mining. Matt says the album is hopeful, even though this single is laced with fear, gloom and bad things.
Pet Shop Boys have a new album, Nonetheless, and a single, A new bohemia, and a video starring Neil and Chris, Russell Tovey and Tracey Emin. The Pet Shop Boys are a long way from their Imperial Period of the late 80s to mid 90s, are currently playing an arena tour of greatest hits and on A new bohemia are in reflective, melancholic mood, men in the 60s looking back to their youths and noticing that the passing of time has seen them moved aside by the new generation. 'Like silent movie stars in 60s Hollywood/ No one knows who you are in a hipster neighbourhood', Neil sings noting the invisibility that comes with being old. Later on, as the strings swirl, he confronts mortality and death, 'Every day is a warning evening might forget/ Then the following morning has the sweet smell of regret'. If Matt Johnson has found something to be hopeful about, Neil Tennant does too by the end of the song. 'Where are they now? Where have they gone? Who dances now to their song?', he sings, surrounded in the video by young revellers, Neil and Chris static on the dancefloor. And there is regret too, 'I wish I lived my life free and easier', he says before concluding, 'I'm on my way to a new bohemia'. I don't know if Neil and Chris are raging at the dying of the light, as Dylan Thomas had it, but they're going with disco strings, a day at the beach and acceptance of the turning of the wheel, the struggle of the past forty years replaced by something else- contentment maybe, peace of mind. It's moving stuff.
Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds are back too with a second single from their upcoming album Wild Gods and an arena tour in the autumn. The online fanbase seem a bit split about the new songs- they're also split about Nick's music pre- and post the death of Arthur Cave in 2015. Some want Nick to return to the hammering, chaotic Old Testament and murder ballads songs of yore. There's a feeling that Warren Ellis and the move to a synth dominated sound over the last decade is weaker in comparison to the bone crunching sound of the Bad Seeds of the 90s. Maybe what the long standing fans are really missing is their own youth, their own past in the 90s where a certain amount of chaos and noise was part of life and they were young enough to deal with it. I get why some of the albums Nick's written since the death of Arthur can be uncomfortable to listen to, difficult to find a way into- I've written before about how much I personally get out of Skeleton Tree, Ghosteen and Carnage. Wild Gods so far feels like the first album where the songs aren't directly about grief and loss (although that will all be in there somewhere I expect), but this one is feeling like Nick's found a way to get in touch with something else. The song Wild Gods was sung from the point of view of a carouser now living in a retirement home- Nick and Neil Tennant at similar stages in life. The new single Frogs rolls in on rippling piano, cymbals and strings and a fantastic bassline, references Cain and Abel early on, and keeps coming back to walking in the Sunday rain, frogs jumping in gutters, the song building and building, endlessly rising towards something that is ever just out of reach. A choir of backing vocals appear, ahh ahhing away, and Nick sings of being 'back in the water again'. Kris Kristofferson walks past kicking a can. It's epic, emotive and uplifting and feels like Nick is choosing life and hope and joy.
A new Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds song was released last Wednesday. It took me a few listens to fully get it but now I can't stay away from it. Wild God starts out slowly with what sounds like the end of another song, then begins to gather pace and oomph, the musicians setting out slowly and quietly and swelling as the song moves onwards. Nick's words seem to tell of a man looking back from his life in a retirement home, a wild god, but there are plenty of obtuse and currently unexplained lines as well as a reference to Jubilee Street (from 2013's Push The Sky Away) and a girl who died in a bedsit in 1993. The explosion just after three minutes in as the choir kicks in and Nick sings, 'bring your spirit down', packs a powerful punch, lifting the song and the listener- well, this listener for one. The sound becomes big and orchestrated but it's clearly Bad Seeds too, with the drums shifting things away from the synth oriented music of his recent albums with Warren Ellis. Wild God's long ending is full of passion and joy, an ecstatic finale with Nick still singing, 'here we go', as it fades out, the song sounding like it could go on.
A while ago, being interviewed for a film, Nick said that after several years of grieving the loss of their son Arthur in 2015 and all the awful trauma that came with it, Nick and Suzie made a conscious decision to be happy.
'It's strange reading those scripts back, those lyrics from my son brought back. And, you know, they're ok, they're actually kind of beautiful, really. But at the time they never revealed themselves as such. I just thought that I was writing a lot of rubbish.
That was one of the things I lost. That was one of the things I lost hard, a sense of belief in myself, like I'd fucked up bad, that me and Susie had looked away for a terrible moment, and this reflected savagely on everything else. A belief in the good in things, in the world, in ourselves evaporated. But you know, after a while, after a time, Susie and I decided to be happy.
This happiness seemed to be an act of revenge, an act of defiance. To care about each other and everyone else and to be careful, to be careful with each other and the ones around us.'
That's what Wild God sounds like to me- a conscious decision to be happy, to record the joy and euphoria that can be found in music. I'm sure the album will tell more. At the Red Hand Files this week he said that Wild God (also the title of the album) is a 'series of complex and interlinking narratives' and that 'an acutely vulnerable and mysterious 'event' resides at the heart of the album's central song, Conversion'. Wild God is also a song that seems to reveal a little more each time I play it, something new seeping out with each play. The album isn't out until the end of August which seems a long way off from here.
Some
time ago C (of Sun Dried Sparrows blog) left a comment in response to one of my
posts about Isaac’s death saying that when she suffered a loss there were times
when the grief felt so personal and so awful, that it feels like this can only be
happening to you, that no one else can possibly be feeling this way.
She said she found comfort in the realisation that anyone you see in the
street could be going through exactly
the same thing, that grief and loss are
universal and not something that you are going through on you own. The horrors
of the death of a person close to you, especially one who dies young,
are so traumatic and so terrible that
it can feel like it has only happened to you
but the truth is that we are not alone, no matter how much it might feel like
that at times.
Since Isaac’s death some people close to us have gone through similar experiences, the loss of a young person. I subscribe to Nick Cave’s Red Hand Files. Nick has opened his email address up to anyone to ask him a question and he operates it unfiltered, there no assistant reading through the inbox first and selecting them for him. Nick reads all the questions and letters sent to him and decides which to respond to. I don’t know how many he receives a week or a month- thousands I’m guessing. It’s a big undertaking and he freely admits he’s got no especial skill or training in terms of offering advice to people, many of whom are going through the worst situations imaginable, other than his own experience and a seemingly unlimited capacity for compassion. Many of the replies he posts are on the subject of loss and grief. In recent weeks he’s posted two which have struck chords with me. One is from a man, Mark from Scotland, who has suffered the death of his young son in truly awful circumstances. It's here. Nick's reply to Mark's letter contains these lines...
Your letter will be difficult for anyone to read, but it will also take many of us back, with a shudder of recognition, to our own times of sadness and loss.
We grievers know, Mark. We recognise in your letter the bottomless sorrow, the outrage, the desperation, the helplessness, the feelings of cosmic betrayal. We understand the sense of having nowhere to rest our minds that is not full of the darkest treachery. We know what it’s like to be confronted with the impossibility of a future life and the feeling that things will never be bearable again. Many of us also know the ghastly mechanics of planning the funeral of a child midst the zombied chaos of new grief. We know, Mark, and we are so very sorry.
But I want to say something, and even though it will doubtless mean little to you at this moment, I hope in time you will look back and know I spoke a kind of truth. Some years have now passed since the loss of my own sons, and though gone from this world, I have come to understand that they still travel with me – they are with me now – but more than that, they have become the active participants in a slow but certain awakening of the spirit. It saddens me deeply that they never lived their own full lives, but though I would give anything to have them back, these departed souls ultimately served as a kind of saving force that revealed the world to Susie and me as a thing of outrageous beauty. I have found my relationship to the world enriched in a way that I never dreamed possible. I know this to be true, but I also know it is a truth beyond understanding in your time of fresh grief, and so I say these things with extreme caution and pray it doesn’t come across as a kind of glibness uttered into your despair.
These are the saddest and most hopeless days you will experience, but I want you and your family to know this – if you can just hold together, I believe that life will get better for you, in ways you cannot yet comprehend. One day you will find Murray travelling with you, not just as a grief or a memory, but as an animating and guiding principle, allowing you to experience joy in a way you have never experienced it before. Be kind and patient and gentle and merciful with one another. Stay close. Hold firm. Forgive. Grief prepares the way. Joy will in time find you. It is searching for you, in the impossible darkness, even now.
I don't have anything particular to add to this. I'm not at the point Nick describes, I haven't had the world revealed to me as a thing of outrageous beauty (although I can see glimpses of it at times) but I'm also no longer at the point Mark, the letter writer, is either, where only a few weeks in everything is raw and brutal. For weeks after Isaac died waking up each morning was a wrench, a punch to the gut, every morning he died again when the realisation that I was awake and he was still dead hit me.
Nick is open and direct in his writing. One of the issues surrounding death is the language that people employ (or don't). People regularly use words like traumatic, horrific and devastating to describe commonplace situations- their football team conceding and losing in the last minute or having to take a day off work because their kid's school was closed due to snow. As a result, those words sometimes seem inadequate when talking about death, they have lost their true meaning. Another issue is the use of euphemisms. I always try to avoid euphemisms for death. Isaac didn’t pass away or pass on- he died. I think sometimes people flinch a little when I use that language of death in conversation but I can't sugarcoat it or hide it (and have felt guilty on the occasions that I have done so). Nick doesn’t use euphemisms or dress death up into something palatable, he confronts it head on. He has traversed a way through the deaths of his sons (Arthur in 2015 and Jethro in 2022) and with his wife Suzie they have found a way to live with it. And this is the truth about it- you can and do find a way to live with the loss. It doesn't go away. It sits inside me in my chest like a ball of pain, sometimes big, present and engulfing and sometimes smaller and pushed down a little by life. It's always there and I know it always will be but you can get used to living with it. Nick responded to another Red Hand Files question since the one above, a letter writer asking how he deals with receiving these emails and whether it is a kind of catharsis. That letter and Nick's reply are here.
I have been listening to Nick Cave's music for many years, since the late 80s. In the 90s I dropped in and out, sometimes tuning in and sometimes missing albums. I really connected with his music with Abattoir Blues/ The Lyre Of Orpheus in 2004, then Dig Lazarus Dig!!! in 2007 (which has two of my favourite Cave songs, We Call Upon The Author and More News From Nowhere) and then the first Grinderman album (also 2007). Nick's run of albums since 2013- Push The Sky Away, Skeleton Tree and Ghosteen and then 2021's Carnage (with Warren Ellis)- have been big albums for me. Skeleton Tree and Ghosteen are both in different ways connected to the death of Nick's son Arthur, Skeleton Tree written before Arthur's death but recorded after, and Ghosteen written as a way to deal with and live with the grief and the loss. Nick has described how while writing and recording Ghosteen he could feel Arthur as part of the process. There are times when they are difficult listens and there are times when they are absolutely what I need to hear, a mirror to my own bereavement.
Today's mix is a Nick Cave mix drawn solely from albums since Push The Sky Away and with a definite emphasis on the songs that have Nick dealing with Arthur and his death. I know some people find these songs difficult, a tough listen in places- but it does find hope and uplift as well. I did try versions of this mix with some other songs in there too to lighten or change the mood but in the end it didn't work and I took them out.
Push The Sky Away is the title track and closing song from the Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds album of 2013. It is a minimal and stately, synths and rumbling percussion, a much subtler record than previous ones.
Lavender Fields starts out with the line, 'I'm travelling appallingly alone'. The song groans and sways, synths and organ swelling. Nick says the song is about change, moving from one state to another. A choir comes in singing, 'there is a kingdom in the sky', and the song becomes about rebirth or renewal (the pale bird represents that I think). The chords rise, the singing rises, everything moves upwards. Lavender Fields is from Carnage, the album he made with Warren Ellis in 2021, a record that deals with the chaos of the modern world as well as Nick's interior life. White Elephant is a change of mood, a riotous, ridiculous and profound song that takes in Black Lives Matter, protestors, statues, Botticelli's Venus and (again) the kingdom in the sky.
I Need You is heavy. Heavy as fuck. It is the bottom of the pit, absolute hopelessness, the horror of loss and a world that has become meaningless. The woman, presumably Susie, is in the supermarket with her red dress on, they're holding hands, and nothing really matters. It's from Skeleton Tree, from 2016, the electronics, loops, atmospherics and synths now central to the Bad Seeds sound. The songs don't conform, they exist. Nick sings from a place of numbness and of grief.
We Are Not Alone is from a soundtrack recorded by Nick and Warren Ellis. The film is a documentary about snow leopards, La Panthere Des Neiges, from 2021. It is ten minutes long, a slow moving and layered piece of music with synths, strings, a choir, acoustic guitar and Warren's violin and eventually Nick singing about being observed and unaware and how, ultimately, we are not along. It seems to me like a counterpoint to the song that precedes it here.
Into My Arms is one of Nick Cave's most loved songs, a love song and a ballad, from the 1997 album The Boatman's Call. Famously, Nick wrote the song at a battered old piano while in rehab. Nick performed it at the funeral of Michael Hutchence. The version here is from Idiot Prayer, a live recording from Alexander Palace on 23rd July 2020. Nick was the only person present at the concert, a solo concert, just Nick and a piano and a vast empty space, deep into the world of Covid and lockdown.
Leviathan is from Ghosteen, the 2019 double album that is some kind of Cave masterpiece. It's a song about love and loss, about Nick and Susie and about Nick and Arthur. The second verse hits me hard- 'We talked it round and round again/ Then we drove down to the sea/ We sat in the car park for an hour or two/ I love my baby and my baby loves me'- the visuals it conjures up, the prosaic nature of a couple talking and driving round. I think they're talking about the death of their son and what the fuck they're going to do, how on earth they're going to manage to move forward, to do anything. Meanwhile the piano and the atonal synth sounds lurch and swim around, choral harmonies taking over as the song crawls towards its conclusion, a slow motion sonic rendition of grief. It's utterly beautiful, an immense and emotive expression of the human condition. Ghosteen is bleak and beautiful and ultimately it's about survival.
