Fifty Minutes Of Soundtrack Saturday

2025's year long Saturday series Soundtrack Saturday has reached the final reel but before the credits roll it seemed that a Sunday mix of various songs and scores from the various film soundtracks I've written about would make a good Sunday mix. This is the result, seventeen tracks from sixteen films, sequenced with something approaching a narrative arc- it starts out in the desert with Harry Dean Stanton tramping round the dust, stays out west for while and then shifts to Tokyo, sleeplessness and jet lag. We jump around some other locations- Long Island, France, Memphis- and have visions of a post- apocalyptic USA before the climax, a death, some levity and then Rutger Hauer in the rain. 

The photo at the top is of Stretford Essoldo, a former cinema just up the road from me, a beautiful 1930s building that has been sadly empty and unused for decades. 

Fifty Minutes Of Soundtrack Saturday

• Ry Cooder: Cancion Mixteca
• Ennio Morricone: Watch Chimes
• Bob Dylan: Billy 7
• Joe Strummer: Tennessee Rain
• Tom Waits: Jockey Full Of Bourbon
• Kevin Shields: Intro- Tokyo
• Kevin Shields: City Girl
• Mick Jones: Long Island
• David Holmes: I Think You Flooded It
• John Lurie: Tuesday Night In Memphis
• Gabriel Yared: 37 Degrees 2 Le Matin
• Nick Cave and Warren Ellis: The Road
• John Barry: Theme From Midnight Cowboy
• Brian Eno: Deep Blue Day
• Son House: Death Letter Blues
• B.J. Thomas: Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head
• Vangelis: Tears In Rain

Cancion Mixteca is from Paris, Texas, Wim Wenders' 1984 film, a Ry Cooder soundtrack with some dialogue from the film that stands up as an album in its own right.  

Watch Chimes is from Sergio Leone's For A Few Dollars More, the second installment of the Dollars trilogy, released in 1967. 

Billy is from Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid, Sam Peckinpah's 1973 Western, Bob Dylan contributing the soundtrack and appearing in the film. 

Joe Strummer did the soundtrack for Walker, Alex Cox's 1987 Western- one of Joe's best 'wilderness years' songs. 

A Jockey Full Of Bourbon appears in Down By Law, Jim Jarmusch's 1986 film- Tom Waits is one of the three stars of the film as well as being a key part of the soundtrack. 

Intro- Tokyo and City Girl are from Lost In Translation, Sofia Coppola's 2003 film, Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson lost in Tokyo. 

Mick Jones provided three tracks for the 1993 film Amongst Friends- Long Island is the most complete, a Jones solo song. 

I Think You Flooded It is from Out Of Sight, the first of many David Holmes- Steven Soderbergh soundtrack collaborations, released in 1998. 

John Lurie's score for Mystery Train had to compete with some big hitters- Elvis' Mystery Train for one, Roy Orbison's Domino for another. A second Jim Jarmusch film in this mix- the use of music is central to Jarmusch's films. 

Gabriel Yared's guitar playing is from the soundtrack to Betty Blue, another late 80s film that made a deep impression on me- Beatrice Dalle made quite an impression too. 

Nick Cave and Warren Ellis' soundtrack work spans all sorts of movies and documentaries. They began with the soundtrack to 2009 film The Road, a harrowing version of Cormac McCarthy's equally harrowing novel. 

Theme From Midnight Cowboy is gorgeous, a John Barry highpoint from a composer who recorded dozens of soundtracks. That harmonica. Stunning. 

Brian Eno's soundtrack work is wide and varied and an Eno only soundtrack mix would definitely work- Deep Blue Day is from the 1996 film Trainspotting but originally on Another Green World, Eno's 1975 album. 

Son House's Death Letter Blues is from 1965, just Son and a metal bodied resonator guitar. It's a stunning song and performance, Son's lyrics and performance can chill to the bone. It appeared on the soundtrack to On The Road, the  2012 version of Jack Kerouac's novel. 

B.J. Thomas' Raindrops Keep falling On My Head was a worldwide smash following its appearance in the 1969 film Butch Cassady And The Sundance Kid. The song is probably what the film is best known for, along with the two stars- Robert Redford and Paul Newman- and the famous shoot out ending. 

At the end of Blade Runner, Ridley Scott's 1982 sci fi/ film noir version of Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, Rutger Hauer sits on top of a crumbling building in the rain, holding a dove and improvises a farewell speech as Harrison Ford slumps in front of him, his life saved. 'All these moments will be lost in time', Hauer says as Vangelis' synth score plays. But they're not are they- they replay endlessly, equally moving each time. 

Soundtrack Saturday

In late July I was sitting on the roof terrace of a hotel bar in Napoli overlooking the Bay of Naples with Mount Vesuvius behind me drinking this negroni (a cocktail I became quite partial to in the summer, equal parts gin, Campari and Vermouth Rosso, garnished with some orange peel, a bittersweet drink that went down very well on holiday in Italy). It seems so unlikely now with the British autumn in full effect- at the time of writing this it is dark early and pouring down. So it goes. 

Nick Cave and Warren Ellis' working relationship has gone well beyond the Bad Seeds (Warren joined in The Bad Seeds in 1994 and has become Nick's right hand man. He was instrumental in Grinderman too). Their soundtrack work is spread over a range of films and documentaries, starting in 2007 with The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford and The English Surgeon and then really gathering acclaim with the soundtrack to The Road two years later. There are many others, full length scores, most recently Back To Black (a biopic about Amy Winehouse which I had the misfortune to watch one evening last year. The soundtrack was rather good though). 

Cave has spoken about how their collaborations for film scores comprise a totally different approach than the writing for The Bad Seeds- Warren records music all the time, sometimes just loops, rhythms, a couple of minutes of synth or violin. He sends it to Nick who then works on it, quickly and usually without the pressure of having to present it to a band for working up into a song or having to provide lyrics for it. There's a compilation called White Lunar, two CDs, which rounds up the soundtracks for The Proposition, Jesse James, The Road, The English Surgeon and more with a handful of otherwise unreleased pieces that works really well as a full album, disc one especially. Instrumentals, some only a couple of minutes long, piano, some bass, some violin. Some of it is elegiac, mournful, melancholic. Some of it is tense and droney. Some bleak. Cave's voice appears occasionally, croaking or whispering. It works as a standalone album without the weight that The Bad Seeds songs sometimes bring with them. 

This is from The Road, the 2009 film of Cormac McCarthy's novel. The book and film tell the story of a man and his son trekking through a post- apocalyptic North American wilderness. It's never quite clear what the apocalypse consisted of but it's truly end times- harrowing and tense and unbearably moving in places. For some reason I read the novel while Isaac was in hospital with meningitis in 2008, a six week stay that involved emergency hospitalisation, a coma, brain surgery, a desperate close to death forty eight hours and months of recovery for Isaac. We had a lot of time sitting by his bed and I guess the book didn't seem as bleak in those circumstances as it might otherwise. This piece of music, mainly gentle piano is lovely.

The Road

Song For Bob is from The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford starred Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck, a 21st century Western that stands up (as does Unforgiven, a similarly toned modern Western). Cave appears in the film briefly as a balladeer in a saloon. Song For Bob is six minutes long, very different from The Road- slow paced and subtle, a lead violin backed by a string section, piano and some soft padding bass notes. 

Song For Bob

In 2021 Nick and Warren provided the score for a documentary about snow leopards called La Panthere Des Neiges. The long title track has drawn out synth chords and twinkling sounds, violin (again) providing some tension, piano notes rippling in, and a build up that breaks eventually with a ghostly choir and Cave singing, ending with the repeated line, 'We are not alone'. Nick didn't write the words- they were by the film's writer Sylvain Tesson- but they feel like they fit perfectly with Nick's post- Skeleton Tree, post- Ghosteen, Carnage world, a feeling of survival and of something bigger than yourself. 'I was observed/ We are not alone'. Rather beautiful all told. 

L'apparition: We Are Not Alone

Bring Your Spirit Down

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. 

From Her To Eternity

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). 

The Weeping Song

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. 

Joy

Stick that in your presidential election result. 

The Return Of The Free CD Box

Today's post is another raid on the box of free CDs that with magazines, a random selection of three tracks from two CDs, both coincidentally from December 2021. First is Will Sergeant, Bunnyman and solo artist. Themes For 'Grind' originally came out in 1982, Will going analogue synth and experimental ambient, an album of  eleven tracks. At first all were titled Untitled but since all have been named Scene followed by a Roman numeral, I through to XI. 

Scene V

Scene V was on Electronic Sounds Best Of 2021 CD, a double album with both new and re- issued music from that year starting with cover star LoneLady and finishing with Me Lost Me. Scene V is early 80s, Cold War/ Liverpool experimentalism, the sound of someone spending some time alone with a room full of synths. Theme For 'Grind' is available to buy in full at Sgt. Fuzz's Bandcamp page. 

Over at Mojo in December 2021 the cover stars were hoary old Led Zeppelin in all their 70s pomp. The free CD however was compiled by Idles, titled Acts Of Resistance, and pulled together a disparate fifteen artists and songs from that year's releases and re- issues, kicking off with Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds' The Mercy Seat and wending its way through Bush Tetras, Idles, Au Pairs, and James Holden among others, with these two finding themselves transferred from disc to my hard drive. 

Fisherman's Blues (Live In Toronto 1989)

In 1989 The Waterboys were riding the crest of a wave, the Big Music replaced by traditional Irish and Scottish music, a move partly due to fiddle player Steve Wickham joining the band as well as Mike Scott's move to Dublin in 1986. The album Fisherman's Blues was a huge success, crossing over and winning new fans. The title track is Dylan- esque, the band in full reel behind Mike and the lyrics all about escape- 'I wish I was a fisherman/ Tumblin' on the seas/ Far away from dry land/ And it's bitter memories... I wish I was a brakeman/ On a hurtlin' fevered train'- and conclude with 'Light in my head/ You in my arms'. The live recording was from Toronto's Masonic Hall, 11th October 1989, a long way from home but in sweeping form. It came as part of a seven CD boxed set of the group in 1989- 90, Fisherman's Blues and Right To Roam album, a huge number of live recordings, versions, remasters and outtakes. 

1000 Miles

1000 Miles is by Dirty Three and their 1996 album Horse Stories. Jim White, Mick Turner and Warren Ellis formed the band in 1992, instrumental music on guitar, drums and violin. 1000 Miles is cinematic, but one of those films that stays with you afterwards leaving you slightly disturbed. 

I Am Beside You

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. 

Ghosteen Speaks

Forty Minutes Of Nick Cave

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.

Forty Minutes Of Nick Cave

• Push The Sky Away
• Lavender Fields
• I Need You
• We Are Not Alone
• Into My Arms (Idiot Prayer Version)
• White Elephant
• Leviathan

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.

Two Years

Isaac died two years ago today. In normal terms two years would seem like a long time but under these circumstances it doesn't feel like very long at all. Part of me still thinks he might come in through the front door at some point, dropped off by his college bus after a week away. I can recall the last few days at home and then in Wythenshawe hospital so clearly and vividly that it could have happened yesterday and it doesn't take much for me to be back in the room in the hospital with him, those days and hours that led up to him leaving us, at 1.45pm on Tuesday 30th November 2023. Or standing in the car park on the phone to my parents. Or the walk I took behind the trolley with the two porters through the hospital corridors to leave him at the mortuary. Or arriving back at home in the dark without him, the three of us suddenly in a new world we didn't ask for. I don't think about these things that often but I have done this week in those moments where I haven't been distracted by something else, driving to and from work especially. I'll be glad when today is over I think, another anniversary navigated and survived. The anniversary of his death and his birthday exactly a week earlier are paired in away which is really difficult. Last week we took him some goodies for his birthday. Today we'll go to the cemetery and take him some flowers and try to remember him as he was. 

Nick Cave writes about grief a lot. At his Red Hand Files he encourages people to write in to him and he'll reply, unfiltered. A lot of people write to him about their own grief or his and he replies eloquently and with experience and wisdom. A lot of it rings true with me. On Carnage, the album he made with Warren Ellis in 2021, an album I bought while in a record shop in Manchester in the hazy, unimaginable weeks after Isaac died, there's a song called Lavender Fields. Carnage has many great, explosive, funny, horrific and image laden songs, songs about white elephants, Black Lives Matter, Botticelli Venuses with penises and the hand of God. Lavender Fields is none of these things.

Lavender Fields

On Lavender Fields Nick sings of being 'appallingly alone on a singular road', walking through the lavender fields and how the flowers stain his skin. He describes the world as furious and how he is over it (the world). The line, 'Sometimes I hear my name, oh where did you go?', I assume is about his son Arthur, who died in 2015 (and the whole song is I think, although Nick said at Red Hand Files that the song is about change, about 'moving from one state to another'). Warren Ellis' music is simple and stately, rising and falling organ/ synth/ strings, church music. It becomes elegiac and choral, the backing vocals swelling as the synths ascend and then fades out slowly. 

'Sometimes I see a pale bird wheeling/ In the sky/ But that is just a feeling/ A feeling when you die'. 

Nick then shifts up again, emotionally and spiritually, the song transporting him (and us- well me anyway)...

'We don't ask who/ And we don't ask why/ There is a kingdom in the sky'

At Red Hand Files recently he was asked about writing about grief through music. This is a part of his reply...

When I started to write Ghosteen, my intention wasn’t to write a record about the death of my son, but as I scribbled away, Arthur inserted himself into the process. He became the ruling force, perched there at the end of every song to exert his sovereignty. He showed me how to write the record and I simply had no choice in the matter.

Nowadays, when I sit down and begin to write, I feel the dead, all the dead, ferrying the words forward. They are not necessarily the subject of the songs, rather they are the spiritual energy that runs through them. The dead are always with us, holding us in their sway. We, the living, are the exuberant and temporary anima of their departure. As songwriters we scratch away, writing ourselves into existence in order to enliven the spirits of those who have passed on.

I can't articulate or explain exactly what Nick means here but I get it. It reminds me of the poem we had read at the graveside, 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'

A few weeks ago I met Mat Ducasse aka Matty Skylab. Mat makes music, once as part of Skylab and more recently under his own name. I've posted some of his music here before- Love Theme and Bunny's Lullaby are both impossibly beautiful, cosmic ambient pieces, profound and emotive. In September he put out a two track release called Juniper Songs and I'm not going to attempt to describe the two songs on it, I'm just going to point you towards them. You can find them here. We had a chat for a few minutes and we asked each other how we were. 'We abide, we endure', Mat said to me, and those words are as true as anything anyone has said to me recently. Thank you Mat. 

It's Vast And Wild And As Deep As The Sea

This is the second post written this week in response to something coming through the ether/ internet that connects me to Isaac's death. This has led to a couple of more straightforward, lighter hearted music posts being shunted back into next week. The first connection was Fontaines DC and their cover of Nick Drake's 'Cello Song that I wrote about two days ago here. The same evening I sat writing that post I got my regular email update from Nick Cave's Red Hand Files. 

Nick started The Red Hand Files a few years ago as a means of direct communication with fans, an interaction with no moderation involved, no one screening the emails or reading them for him. He gets hundreds, maybe thousands of emails a week (and says there are some people who email him weekly too). From these emails, all of which he says he reads, he replies to one, publicly, sending it out to subscribers by email and uploading it to The Red Hand Files website. You may well subscribe and read them already. 

The topics range widely, taking in all kinds of art, life, culture and personal enquiries. Recently he's replied to questions about Johnny Cash, the banning of the song Delilah, the cougar in the Hollywood hills, AI produced art, religion and spirituality, tattoos, his lyrics, learning to play the guitar aged sixty, Love Island, tinnitus, the meaning of life, and inevitably the death of his son Arthur. Nick's replies are considered and thoughtful, sensitive, insightful, funny, warm and moving. Sometimes he reaches a conclusion you didn't expect. Sometimes he admits he doesn't know. Sometimes he imparts something profound. He has experiences to share. And, the man can write. The one that popped into my inbox on Tuesday was from Dave in El Paso, USA, who wrote...

My son died almost a decade and a half ago. I don't have nearly as many dreams about him now but when I do, as when I had many, many dreams of him...he never speaks. I can be virtually right next to him in a known location. He never talks. Is there an underlying meaning to this?

This caught my attention as you can imagine. I took a breath and read on. Nick replied...

Dear Dave,

I read this question to Susie, as Arthur appears regularly in her dreams. She says she experiences him in the same way that you describe – Arthur is there beside her but never speaks. She tells me he feels hyper-present, and that he stands very close to her, and sometimes he hugs her, but that nothing else happens in the dream, there is no one else there and there is no real narrative. She says that the locations in the dream are familiar, but she has the sense of being a visitor to a different realm, and that within that realm there is an intense feeling of ‘unbounded love’. She says that upon waking she feels a residual presence of Arthur that takes some minutes to subside. I asked Susie why she thought Arthur didn’t speak to her and she said, 'because it’s a place where we don’t communicate with ordinary language.’

Dave, I asked Susie your question because she has a rich and vibrant dream life. Unfortunately, I do not. The rare dreams I do remember are extraordinarily banal and neither of my late sons appear in them. But I know Susie finds much needed respite from her loss through the softness of dreams. They are beautiful, comforting, even saving things. We can find great solace in these ‘encounters’ with loved ones who have passed on, meeting them in our memories, recollections or conversations, through signs, whispered intimations or imaginings. I am very happy your son continues to visit your dreams and Susie and I send you our very best.

Love, Nick

I've dreamt about Isaac in the year and three months since he died. To the best of my memory, it happens once every couple of weeks. Dreaming about him always wakes me up with a jolt. I am suddenly and violently awake, both eyes wide open in the dark. It always disturbs me, leaves me thrown and startled. In my dream he's so real and he's alive. Then there's a moment and it sinks in again sharply and suddenly that it was a dream and that he's gone. Each time it happens, there's a mini- loss all over again. I seem to be getting used to that more now. 

In some of my dreams he talks to me. I never remember what he was saying or what we were talking about but am aware we were talking. Like Dave and Nick's wife Susie, sometimes he's there but silent (which seems unlikely if you knew Isaac, who was rarely silent for long). Sometimes he seems to be just being there, alongside whatever other weirdness is going on. I have been having very vivid and odd dreams for the last few months- even the ones without Isaac in them can wake me up feeling a bit perturbed and unsure what is going on. I'm not sure how I feel about the Isaac that exists in my dreams. I don't think it's actually him, it's my subconscious dredging things up while I sleep. Nick Cave says above that Susie finds respite and comfort from dreaming about Arthur. I'm not sure I find that yet about Isaac- I hope one day I will. Nick and Susie and the letter writer Dave are a long way ahead of us in their grief in terms of time. I like Nick's phrasing and idea that the dream versions of our lost sons are 'encounters'. That's a way I'd like to get to feel about them I think. 

Lou dreams about Isaac sometimes and she always has the same dream- in her dream he's crossing the road outside our house, his back to her, going towards a car to be taken somewhere. She's holding a sandwich wrapped in tin foil for him but he doesn't hear her. On the occasions when she's told me about it or when I've been present when she describes it to other people, it crushes me. It has just now, typing it. 

I got Nick's book Faith Hope And Carnage for Christmas and have been reading it recently, a chapter every now and then, trying not to race through it. It is set out as a conversation between Nick and writer Sean O'Hagen, taken from a series of long conversations they had starting around March 2020. Much of Carnage is about Arthur, and about Nick and Susie's grief. It is also about Nick's faith, his songwriting and music, the transformative power of live performance of songs and how sometimes they only reveal their meaning when played live, the albums Skeleton Tree, Carnage and Ghosteen (especially Ghosteen), his childhood, the relationships with musicians he's worked with (especially Blixa Bargeld, Mick Harvey and Warren Ellis) and his creative projects away from music- The Red Hand Files among them. I might come back to writing about the book and what I've taken from it another day. I need to write about Ghosteen too at some point. There's one bit from the book that stood out for me even before I'd started reading it properly. On the back cover the pull out quote reads...

Sean O'Hagen: 'But surely your outlook is entirely different now?'

Nick Cave: 'Well, the young Nick Cave could afford to hold the world in some kind of disdain because he had no idea of what was coming down the line. I can see now that this disdain or contempt for the world was a kind of luxury or indulgence, even a vanity. He had no idea of the preciousness of life- the fragility... like I say, he had no idea what was coming down the road'.

This struck a massive chord with me. When I think about us, me and Lou, as younger people I feel exactly what Nick Cave describes- we had no idea what was ahead of us, that this was coming and how this would feel, how it would turn us inside out, how painful it would be, how (as I said on Tuesday) we might never be the same people again. In some ways it shocks me. We had no idea what was coming down the road. 

There's another part of the book where Nick says, 'Arthur is a regular reminder I don't really have to conform to the rules the world has laid down for me, because the world feels chaotic and random and indifferent to any rules. When I call Arthur to me and I feel him around me, as an optimistic force... I don't have to be afraid. I am aware of how that sounds to many people but this is, at the very least, a survival strategy- and grievers know. Generally, they know.'

Being a griever isn't a club any of us would choose to join, certainly not one in the circumstances of the death of your child, but it is some kind of comfort to see some of your own extreme and awful experience reflected by someone else, to know that others have gone through this too and can survive it. In some way, it helps. Trying to make sense of grief may well prove to be impossible- there is no sense to be found, it just happens, part of the chaotic and random world Nick describes above. Maybe all we can do is talk about it, describe it, write about it. Maybe the act of saying it out loud is as close to making sense of it as we're going to get. 

This song is from Ghosteen. I've got nothing to add at the moment, no description its power or explanation of it, other than to say it chills me to my absolute core and in some way brings a kind of comfort.

Leviathan