When Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds finally played the Ritz in New York City during their Your Funeral… My Trial tour, it was a makeup date, rescheduled for a Sunday in February, after an earlier, sold out Friday show the previous October had been cancelled at the very last minute. On that night, when I got to the venue, there was a large crowd of people dressed in black standing in the street outside. Mick Harvey sat atop a huge cube of equipment covered by a tarp. I asked him “What happened?” and he shrugged and threw his hands up. “We don’t know where Nick is.” (The answer, it was later revealed by the Village Voice, was that Cave had been busted copping dope in Harlem and was then sitting in jail. This was in the days before cell phones, and I am reasonably sure that Mick was fearing something far worse might have happened.)

The rescheduled date came some weeks after the end of the tour and the Sunday show was poorly attended, so it was easy to get near the stage. I stood directly in front of Cave’s mic stand. Now, I don’t want to imply that Nick Cave has mellowed out over the years—because he really hasn’t—but my favorite era of Cave’s work is from Mutiny! through Kicking Against The Pricks. “Junkie Nick Cave,” in other words. It was thrilling, almost scary, being so close to someone so seemingly unhinged and angry. Some of it didn’t necessarily seem like an act. His stage presence was fearsome and impressive, in a Keith Richards “elegantly wasted” meets Antonin Artaud sort of way. Larger than life. Cave wore a blue velvet tuxedo with a ruffle collar shirt and cuffs and he looked dead cool. His performance was so energetic and so physical that it appeared to me that heroin must have exactly the opposite effect on him that it has on most people. Or maybe he had just taken a different sort of vitamin? I don’t know, but I will say this, when the band walked offstage, the house lights stayed off, awaiting their reappearance for an encore. They stayed off for nearly ten minutes and when Cave finally staggered back onstage, his eyes were absolutely bloodshot red and he looked and acted very, very high. It seemed obvious what had caused the delay.

If I haven’t gotten the point across that this was one of the very best concerts that I’ve ever seen, it absolutely was. Cave was then, and still is, the best frontman of our time—and this was an incarnation of the Bad Seeds that included both Blixa Bargeld and Kid Congo Powers—but in the first decade of his career, he was more intense, more dangerous, more… fucking evil, basically. Today’s Nick Cave is more akin to a rambunctious revival preacher, but back then he just seemed homicidal. But, you know, in a good way.
 

 
On the way out I purchased the tour program, a black and white glossy fold-out poster with a green flexi disc attached to the front. The song, titled “Scum,” was an incredibly vitriolic and outrageously spiteful diatribe that was clearly directed towards one person, that person being an NME writer who Cave had briefly been flatmates with named Matt Snow. 

A sample lyric:

He was a miserable shitwringing turd
Like he reminded me of some evil gnome
Shaking hands was like shaking a hot, fat, oily bone.

Here’s another:

His and herpes bath towel type
If you know what I mean
I could not look at him, worm

OUCH!

Here’s how it ends:

I think you fucking traitor, chronic masturbator,
Shitlicker, user, self-abuser, jigger jigger!
What rock did you crawl from?
Which, did you come?
You Judas, Brutus, Vitus, Scum!
Hey four-eyes, come
That’s right, it’s a gun
Face is bubble, blood, and, street
Snowman with six holes clean into his fat fuckin guts

Psychotic drama mounts
Guts well deep then a spring is fount
I unload into his eyes
Blood springs
Dead snow
Blue skies

One needn’t wonder how Nick felt about his former flatmate, does one? Apparently what had ticked him off was a lukewarm review.

Imagine what it must feel like to hear yourself immortalized in song? But THAT song? Oh dear…

Well, apparently Matt Snow took it all in stride, and even thought if was funny, At least this is what he told the Guardian in 2008:

In 1980 my old school buddy Barney Hoskyns was writing for NME and wanted someone to go to gigs with. I became his plus one. The Birthday Party (an early band of Cave’s) were just fantastic, incredibly exciting, wild and feral, and we became part of their scene, which consisted of hanging out, playing records, doing drugs and drinking. I had a straight job and by night morphed into a nocturnal creature. It was an exciting scene to feel vicariously part of. It felt like you were living through a Velvet Underground song. I remember Nick [Cave] setting his hair on fire with a candle: everything was part-Baudelaire, part-Keith Richards. But by 1983 the Birthday Party had broken up and Nick was forming the Bad Seeds. He and his girlfriend Anita were asking for somewhere to crash for a while, and the pair moved in with me. He was still doing heroin but he was discreet. He was a good housemate. It was funny because he was always nagging Anita about her diet, yet he was shooting up! They moved down the road and we lost touch.

I raved about his From Her To Eternity album in NME but then, in a singles review, happened to drop in that the forthcoming - second - Nick Cave album “lacked the same dramatic tension”. A year or so later I found myself interviewing Nick formally for the first time. He kept me and the photographer waiting for hours. The PR was very jumpy. I got a very unusual interview. I asked him what the problem was and he said, “I think you’re an arsehole” and mentioned that he’d written a song developing this theme. Weeks later, I bought for £1 a green seven-inch flexidisc called “Scum.” I think it’s one of his best songs, and very funny. Like Dylan’s Mr Jones, I’d rather be memorialised as the spotlit object of a genius’s scorn than a dusty discographical footnote. My wife to be was a big Nick Cave fan—“Scum” is “our song.”

And there you have it. 
 

 
“Scum” is included on the first volume of B-Sides & Rarities, a 3-CD set of Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds’ er… b-sides and rarities, which has now been joined by a sequel, B-Sides & Rarities Part II, a 2-CD compilation that features previously uncollected tracks from the years 2006-2019. Both sets together comprise a special limited edition seven record vinyl box set, which you can enter below to win.

Listen to “Vortex,” a previously unreleased song featured on Vol II.
 

 
Nick Cave lost his innocence watching Johnny Cash sing. He was about nine or ten years of age, living with his librarian mother and teacher father in rural Wangaratta, in Victoria, Australia. Cave didn’t know much about rock ‘n’ roll, but watching Johnny Cash sing on TV, he suddenly realized:
 

...that music could be an evil thing, a beautiful, evil thing.

For me it was very much the way he began the show. He’d have his back to you in silhouette, dressed all in black, and he’d swing around and say “Hi, I’m Johnny Cash”. There was something that struck me about him, and about the way my parents shifted around uncomfortably.

 
After joining the school choir, Cave harbored his own ambitions for a career in music. His first major success came with The Birthday Party, five chaotic individuals in search of a tune, where Cave unleashed his own “evil thing,” a vision of hell, fueled by drink, drugs, and his constant reading of the Hell-fire and damnation of the Old Testament.
 

The brutality of the Old Testament inspired me, the stories and grand gestures. I wrote that stuff up and it influenced the way I saw the world. What I’m trying to say is I didn’t walk around in a rage thinking God is a hateful god. I was influenced by looking at the Bible, and it suited me in my life vision at the time to see things in that way. .... After a while I started to feel a little kinder and warmer to the world, and at the same time started to read the New Testament.

 
Cave was smart enough to know this “solipsism of youth” couldn’t last, and after the band split he returned to home. After a few months, fellow Birthday Party musician, Mick Harvey, suggested they form a band, and so was born Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds.

While we wait for the full release of the biographical drama-documentary on Nick Cave, 20,000 Days on Earth, this edition of Melvyn Bragg’s The South Bank from 2003, presents a revealing portrait of the singer, poet, author, actor, and screenwriter. Cave discusses his influences (from Cash and John Lee Hooker to Nina Simone), inspirations for songs, the key moments in his life, and the importance of being a writer.

The Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds tour of the US and Canada starts this month, details here.
 

 
Happy New Year, this is a post from the Dangerous Minds archives, originally published in 2009.

Whenever the discussion of a “favorite” movie comes up, my eyes glaze over. I’ve seen so many films that when pressed, exactly none of them stand out as a particular favorite. Not one. But when the favorite album question gets asked, Nick Cave’s first post-Birthday Party outing, From Her to Eternity comes immediately to mind.

To say that this album was a significant soundtrack to my ill-spent youth is a bit of an understatement. I listened to this record obsessively. I was a huge Birthday Party fan, but From Her to Eternity absolutely captivated my imagination. It was the most intelligent, most literate, most criminally insane rock music I’d ever heard, a quantum leap past everything else that was happening at the time. At the tail end of the post punk era, when once great bands—like the Psychedelic Furs, PiL and Ultravox to name but three—had lost their mojos in disheartening ways, Nick Cave became the standard bearer of intellectual cool in my late teen years. Talk about a dangerous mind, I thought Nick Cave was the baddest motherfucker alive.

True story: For the better part of 1983 and 1984, I lived in the south London neighborhood of Brixton. Today it’s a trendy area, but then it was anything but gentrified, its residents consisting of mostly poor West Indian immigrants, dreadlocked rastas and a small subset of squatters and junkies from all across the globe. I loved it there. One night I was exiting the Brixton tube station with my friend Sam when we were accosted by none other than Nick Cave, looking very much worse for wear, who politely asked us if we could direct him to where he could find some smack, please. (In truth, Cave didn’t ask “us,” he asked Sam, who looked all gothy and weird while I looked like what I was, a preppy, 18-year old American kid. He wasn’t addressing me at all, I was just standing there.)

Sam kindly pretended not to know who Cave was—oh he knew—just shook his head no and kept going. When we walked up the stairs and out of the station, he turned to me and said “That’s the second time he’s asked me that!”

I have always prided myself on my ability to be at the right place at the right time…

Cut to 1986. CDs had been on the market for a couple of years, but at that time it was still all stuff like Billy Joel, Tina Turner and Phil Collins that got released on the format. I was stomping around New York City with a Sony Walkman clamped to my ears and I was slowly beginning to understand the concept of hi-fidelity audio. I was curious about CDs, but there wasn’t that much there to lure me in just yet. Finally things I cared about started slowly trickling in, but it wasn’t until Kicking Against the Pricks, Nick Cave and the Bad Seed’s third outing, an all covers collection, came out, that I decided to bite the bullet and buy a CD player (which used to cost $500!). If Kicking Against the Pricks on CD could sound even better than it did on the cassette version I’d been listening to, then sign me up.

The first 3 CDs I bought were Kicking Against the Pricks, Nancy Sinatra’s The Hit Years comp and the first Psychedelic Furs album. Later that day, eager to hear more of this newfangled digital audio, I bought Marc Almond’s Mother Fist and Her Five Daughters, Julian Cope’s World Shut Your Mouth and John Zorn’s Morricone tribute, The Big Gundown.

Cut to December 2009. Since about 2002 I had been buying multi-channel SACD and DVD-A audio discs, but since I had only a stereo system, I was just able to listen to the two channel versions of some of my favorite classic albums, but never the 5:1 mixes. Once again it was hearing that the Nick Cave catalog was coming out, remastered and in 5:1 that caused me to get antsy about upgrading the audio gear to a surround system. I’d managed to keep a lid on my once unparalleled ability to buy massive amounts of CDs for a good 3-4 years now and my lovely, but financially cautious wife, agreed to loosen the purse-strings for a major refurbishment of the home entertainment electronics.

Since it would be ridiculous for me to “review” an album I’ve already told you at the outset is probably my top, top favorite record, I’ll spare you the middle-aged fanboy rhapsodizing and instead concentrate (mostly) on the matter of the “Okay, I already own this CD, do I need to buy it again?” equation. In my case, in the past, I have purchased the album, the audio cassette and the CD of From Her to Eternity. The CD has always sounded amazing, how much better could it get?

Mute Records has been redoing certain major artists’ back catalogs (Depeche Mode, Can, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds) with significant sonic upgrades in recent years. They do a consistently great job and these audiophile editions are quite good value for the consumer, especially ones with the high end audio systems to fully appreciate what’s on offer. It’s these consumers who are, let’s face it, just about the only dependable audience left anymore for the purchase of actual discs and it’s good business for Mute to cater to them. Aside from the new King Crimson releases (which sound amazing), Mute’s refurbishment of the Nick Cave catalog is one of the few major efforts in the audiophile arena, at least for pop music, this year or last. Jazz and classical see quite a few SACD, DTS and DVD-A releases each year, but the rock and pop category fewer and fewer. The pop marketplace seems largely to have abandoned the space. Even the Stones and Dylan SACDs have been replaced now with standard “red book” CDs. Considering that the Stones SACDs can rarely be found for less than $80 these days, used, it shows, once again, how short-sighted most of the record industry is. Then again it is the record industry, isn’t it? Visionary business practices are hardly what we’ve come to expect.

Which is what makes the Mute Nick Cave reissues all the more worth savoring. To answer the question posed above, are they worth buying even if you already own them on CD, the answer is a strong yes. They did a fine, fine job on these reissues, each one a 2 disc set, consisting of the album on a regular CD to play in the car or rip to iTunes, and a DVD with fantastic multi-channel versions of the album, in both Dolby 5:1 and DTS. As objects, they’re quite sweet to unwrap. Each of the albums comes in an ultra glossy gatefold sleeve with intelligent liner notes by Amy Hanson and graphics faithful to the original releases, but better. There is a multi-part documentary spread out over the span of the catalog called “Do You Love Me Like” I Love You directed by Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard. Key members of Cave’s orbit, well-known fans and writers—everyone but Cave himself (and Anita Lane)—are interrogated under harsh lighting not unlike a forensics video. Watching this film before listening to the music really whet my appetite to hear it afresh.

For an album that had always sounded so amazing, no matter what format, the improvement in sound quality would have to go some way, by my own personal subjective standards, to move the needle much on my jaded audiophile reviewer’s scale. When I got to the choice of which surround mode to listen in, I chose the Dolby 5:1 because it generally sounds better to me than DTS.

Simply put, the immersive aural experience of the multi-channel version of From Her to Eternity—supervised by Mick Harvey from the original recordings by Flood—blew my doors off. To stand inside the violent maelstrom of sound that is the Bad Seeds, with Blixa Bargeld’s anarchic slide guitar in that speaker, the skull-cracking thwap of the drums coming from behind, the rumble of Barry Adamson’s bass in the subwoofer, and hear it like you were in the studio with them, is something awesome and fearful to behold. The album is heavily percussive—whether the drums, piano, vibes or the guitars—there is a lot of banging on this record. If anyone knows how to record percussion, it’s Flood (who subsequently worked with U2 and Depeche Mode). The extra channels of audio give even more room ambiance and “air” around the various instruments. Far greater nuance is achieved here than would be possible in a stereo mix. The album is rife with moments where a sonic crack appears in the proceedings, and something crawls into your ear for a split second before scurrying off into the floorboards. Listening to From Her to Eternity in multi-channel caused me to think of the way Stockhausen often used a moment of dissonance to capture listener’s attention, although I doubt he was an influence here.

The real test came for me with the final song, “A Box for Black Paul.” An enigmatic narrative about the final resting place for a Baudelaire-esque character, when someone asks ‘what’s your favorite song?’ this one, like the album it’s from, comes in at my #1 spot. It’s the final tour de force on an album consisting of one wildly uncompromising tour de force after another. I stood in the middle of the room, in the multi-channel “sweet spot,” as it were, and listened. “A Box for Black Paul” is not a piece of music that anyone could listen to casually. It was stunning, exquisite. The sustain on Cave’s piano and the close-mike recording of his vocals truly sounded like you were in the room with him during the performance. By the time its nearly ten minute long running time had elapsed, I was limp, exhausted and exhilarated.

And that brings me to my final point about the new version of From Her to Eternity and why it is worth acquiring this edition even if you already own the admittedly already great sounding earlier CD. Although I stated at the outset of this essay that it was the first thing that came to mind when someone asked me what my favorite album was, it’s still not really something that, after 26 years, I pull out and listen to all that much. By offering the consumer such a rich package, the documentary, the extra tracks, the substantial liner notes, it achieves what releases of this sort should achieve, and that is to say, it allows the deep fan the chance to really immerse themselves in the music again and to hear it with fresh ears, like the first time they heard it. I must have played this album 30 times all the way through since I got it and when you can hear new things in music that is meaningful to you personally, this is a fun, great thing and actually worth supporting with your hard earned dough. I find it pretty difficult to get a hard-on for buying a regular CD anymore but I do find myself actually returning to the record stores and Amazon these days to look for multi-channel releases. If the record industry gets smart and starts to look at Mute’s quality repackaging of its major artists back catalogs as a model to emulate, maybe just maybe, they’ll coax more middle-aged rock snobs like myself back into the record stores. I wouldn’t bet on that happening or anything (!) but Mute should be singled out and commended for actually giving music fans a real value for their money.

Below, Nick Cave—and not the Bad Seeds exactly, but the Cavemen, as they were then called—live at The Electric Ballroom in London, November 1984.
 

 
A gathering by accident, design and hair-spray: The Immaculate Consumptive was an all too brief collaboration (3 days, 3 gigs) between Lydia Lunch (gtr. voc.), Nick Cave (pn. voc.), J. G. Thirlwell (aka Clint Ruin, Foetus) (drm., sax., voc.) and Marc Almond (voc.)

The 4 musicians met in London—Lunch had been filming Like Dawn To Dust, with Vivienne Dick; while Cave had been collaborating with Thirlwell (on the track “Wings Off Flies” for the debut Bad Seeds album From Her To Eternity), and both had worked with Almond, who was resting from Soft Cell, and working on Marc and The Mambas.

The party traveled to New York, where they were followed and interviewed by the N.M.E. Lunch had a Halloween event organized for October 30th and 31st—though The Immaculate Consumptive’s first gig was actually in Washington, on October 27th, where Thirlwell broke the piano, and ended with 2 nights later with Cave seemingly bored by the chaos of proceedings.

This is some of the archival material of those 3 gloriously chaotic days together. The cable access interviewer is Merle Ginsberg, known to many of you from her role as a judge on RuPaul’s Drag Race.
 

The Immaculate Consumptive - “Love Amongst The Ruined”
 

The Immaculate Consumptive - “Misery Loves Company”
 

 
There are several excellent full length concerts by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds on YouTube. This strong 1998 set, recorded in Moscow for Russian TV, is one of the very best of them.

Numbers that The Bad Seeds normally do at the end of shows or as encores are front-loaded here, so by the the middle of this it gets pretty incendiary, with the Russian audience going (appropriately) nuts. Then the maelstrom subsides for some prettier moments, including a moving “Into My Arms” (surely every bit as great a love song as George Harrison’s “Something,” ain’t it?)

“Do You Love Me?”
“Right Red Hand”
“From Her to Eternity”
“Henry Lee”
“The Mercy Seat”
“The Weeping Song” (duet with Blixa Bargeld)
“Lime Tree Arbour”
“Deanna”
“The Ship Song”
“Into My Arms”