Hal Willner’s “Forest of No Return: Music from Vintage Disney Films” was performed live at London’s Royal Festival Hall in 2007. An impressive line-up of musicians, including Jarvis Cocker (who hosted the event), Shane MacGowan, Grace Jones, David Thomas and Beth Orton, covered tunes from the Disney songbook.
In the clip below, Nick Cave sounds like a drunken sailor on ¨Hi Diddle Dee Dee¨ from Pincocchio . Good fun.
In related news, a new filmed version of Pinocchio is being produced by Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth, Hellboy) and Nick Cave has been brought on board to compose an original score for the movie. This I gotta see.
Cave meets Disney:
Nick does KC and The Sunshine Band after the jump…
Farris Badwan is lead singer of the British psyche-garage troupe The Horrors, and Cat’s Eyes is his new project, co-founded with the London-based Canadian opera soprano Rachel Zeffira. The pair’s debut album, cunningly titled Cat’s Eyes, has just been released on Polydor, following up their debut Broken Glass EP which came out in January, and it’s really rather good.
What the duo are doing is nothing we haven’t seen before, but they do it very well. Take the dark romanticism of male/female duos like Nancy & Lee, Isobel & Mark, even Kylie & Nick, filter it through the girl-group and 60s pop lens of Phil Spector and inject it with occasional jolts of psyche-rock and you pretty much get the picture. What a lovely picture that is too, a balance of light and shade, of anger and tenderness blended to perfection by veteran producer Steve Osbourne.
Cat’s Eyes is not the first Horror’s off-shoot band. That honor would go to Spider And The Flies, which is Rhys and Tom experimenting with analog synths and Joe Meek-esque production techniques. That too is really good, and floats my particular boat very much. I have to admit I was really wary of the Horrors when the emerged about 5 years ago - I took one look at their haircuts and goth-dandy stylings and dismissed them straight away as another “fashion” act. Their music blew me away though, keeping alive the heavy sleaze-garage vibes of one of my favorite bands from the 90s, Gallon Drunk. Their Primary Colours album from 2009 (produced by Portishead’s Geoff Barrow) took their sound in a more psychedelic/shoegaze direction and straight to the top of the NME’s best albums of the year poll. Now The Horrors have just announced a short string of UK dates for this summer, and their official website says they are currently in the studio.
I eagerly await what they do next, but in the meantime am more than happy to make do with Cat’s Eyes, who have more info (and some free MP3s) at the Cat’s Eyes website. The album Cat’s Eyes is available to buy on Amazon now, here’s a taste of what’s on offer:
Cat’s Eyes - “Face In The Crowd”
Cat’s Eyes - “The Best Person I Know”
Cat’s Eyes - “Cat’s Eyes”
Cat’s Eyes - “When My Baby Comes” (Grinderman cover)
You can picture the scene, lunch somewhere, another glass, and then the producer says. “I know this band, they’re hot, they’re what the kids want, let’s get them in the movie.”
It’s a win-win situation. Surely? The band starts their film career and receive major media exposure; while the movie has cachet from the group’s fans. This, of course, all depends on the quality of the film and the songs.
Does anyone remember what The Yardbirds were playing in Blow-Up? All I recall is Jeff Beck going Pete Townshend on his guitar, while a white trousersered David Hemmings intently joined a rather bored-looking audience.
Amen Corner had topped the UK pop charts with “If Paradise is half as Nice” and must have seemed a perfect call for the Vincent Price, Christopher Lee schlock fest, Scream and Scream Again. Singer Andy Fairweather-Low is beautifully filmed in the background as loopy Michael Gothard prowls a nighclub in search of fresh blood. The trouble is the song’s a stinker.
Sparks were allegedly second choice to Kiss for the George Segal, Timothy Bottoms, Richard Widmark dull-a-thon, Rollercoaster. The brothers Mael had moved back to the US after four successful years in the UK, and had just released their album Big Beat, from which they played “Fill Her Up” and “Big Boy” to a wildly over-enthusiastic crowd. The audience obviously hadn’t read the script, as the film is turgid, and the band’s cameo is its only highlight. When asked about the biggest regret in their career, Sparks said appearing in Rollercoaster. Understandable.
Brian De Palma stopped copying Hitchcock form a few minutes in Body Double to make a pop promo for Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s “Relax”, right in the middle of the movie. Surprisingly, it works. But perhaps the best, almost seamless merging of pop singer / artiste in a film is Nick Cave in Wim Wenders in Wings of Desire. Cave is perfect, as is the film, and he was a resident in West Berlin at the time, writing his first novel And the ass saw the Angel.
Of course, there are plenty of others, (Twisted Sister in Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, The Tubes in Xanadu, anyone?), but oddest may be Cliff Richard and The Shadows in Gerry Anderson’s puppet movie Thunderbird Are Go. Difficult to tell the difference between puppet and the real thing.
Michelangelo Antonioni originally wanted The Velvet Underground for ‘Blow-Up’ (1966), but a problem over work permits led to The Yardbirds, with Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck playing “Stroll On” in the cameo.
Here’s a look at a homemade Nick Cave doll by Flickr users Rick & Mindy. And what would a Nick Cave doll post be without Bongwater’s “Nick Cave Dolls”?
“Wow! They have Nick Cave Dolls now… I waaaant ooone!”
After a hard night of playing music, attending after show parties, and working on a script, Nick Cave, renaissance man, sat down with Australia’s Triple J radio to discuss his art, his nipples and performing with Grinderman at the Big Day Out festival.
Nick Cave, the Jimmy Swaggart of punk, leaps into the pit as Grinderman sets the night sky on fire over Sydney. This raw and electrifying fan video was shot last Wednesday at the Big Day Out festival in Australia.
An inspired bit of photoshopping by the folks at Cherrybombed. The picture was used in tandem with an article about The Stooges and Grinderman sharing the bill at Australia’s massivie music fest Big Day Out.
Nick Cave smashes into a speed camera with his Jaguar and walks away.
The grinderman’s latest hit.
British paper The Telegraph reports:
Cave, 53, was travelling along Hove seafront in Sussex with his two boys, Arthur and Earl,10, when he crashed through a metal barrier and collided with the camera. Nobody was injured in the accident, which happened on Tuesday evening.
Police were called to the crash, which left the camera bent at a 45 degree angle, but Cave was not arrested.
Nick Cave, in his now four-decade career, has turned out some astonishing, but often seldom-heard, versions of songs made famous by others, often in the process, making the songs his own. Cave’s 1986 album, Kicking Against the Pricks, was an all covers affair, following in the footsteps of David Bowie’s Pin-Ups and Bryan Ferry’s These Foolish Things, but with more perverse song selections than either. It’s the first album where Cave sang “pretty” songs and from start to finish, it’s a tour de force. Certainly the work on that record showed the way forward creatively for Cave, who is probably the greatest writer/singer of classic love songs in the world today.
An intrepid soul at the TwentyFourBit blog has assembled for your listening pleasure, a massive collection of 28 lovely Nick Cave-crooned cover versions, rounded-up from the wilds of YouTube. Personal favorites include Cave’s sorrowful version of Neil Young’s “Helpless,” ferocious Birthday Party-era takes on Gene Vincent’s “Cat Man” and “Loose” by The Stooges,and don’t miss the emotional duet with Johnny Cash, on Hank Williams’ “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.”
Barry Adamson is one very hep cat who has been a significant player in two pivotal bands of the 80s, Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds and Magazine, and, as a solo artist, he’s produced an impressive body of work. Over the course of nine albums, Adamson has created jazzy, edgy, erotic mood pieces that are evocative of the shadow world of film noir. It’s no wonder that David Lynch hired him to do soundtrack work on Lost Highway. Adamson’s dark grooves are the things that fever dreams are made of. His music and visual sense are switchblade sharp and sexy as hell.
In these clips, two of which, The Man With The Golden Arm and Moss Side Story, are quite rare, we are invited into the seductive web of the Jazz Devil, a place where a kiss can be deadly and love is just another word for ‘fuck you.’
As the Jazz Devil
Full and greedy
I’m the Jazz Devil
Libido needy
I’m the Jazz Devil
Flymeat in the mix
Where you can call me Agent Double O 666
The next three installments (Tender Prey, The Good Son, Henry’s Dream) in Mute’s superbly remastered Nick Cave series came out yesterday and I’m pleased to report that they’re done to the extremely high standards established by the first batch. Each 2-disc set comes with a remastered stereo CD and a DVD-A with a choice of DTS or Dobly 5:1 surround mixes, as well as a PCM stereo version. There are ample B-sides, music videos and each set features the continuing, multi-part documentary by Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard called Do You Love Me (Like I Love You) chronicling the recording of each album.
They sound fucking amazing. Tender Prey sounds especially good, with the surround versions offering total immersion in the Bad Seeds awe-inspiring swagger. Every Nick Cave album is an audiophile’s dream, but the Bad Seeds become a locomotive force of nature when experienced in these new surround versions. They sound so good, so like you’re right there in the studio with them, that it’s nothing short of exhilarating to listen to these albums at a high volume. When City of Refuge kicks in, it’s like being hit by an enraged Mack truck. My neighbors probably hate me.
The Good Son, one of my personal favorites, also unfolds remarkably in the airier surround mix. You can really hear how delicately the piano keys are being struck in The Ship Song and how hard the the xylophone is being pounded in The Weeping Song. The strings sound great and the drums really snap. It’s a great musical experience, nothing more, nothing less. These are albums that were meant to be listened to as complete song cycles and that’s how I consumed them. I highly recommend watching the docs before sinking into the album. Taken this way, it really builds anticipation for the music. The music does not disappoint.
In conclusion, now that there are seven of these sets, I’ve been listening to a lot of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds lately. I’ve owned these albums for years, I bought them when they originally came out, but as is typical, I’d listen to each for a while, then put it away, a year later the next one comes out, I’d listen to that one for a while, then I’d shelve it, etc, etc. With a solo career going back 26 years at this point, to hear all of them again, so masterfully refurbished, and so fresh sounding, I’m struck by the fact that only Nick Cave, of all of the major artists to emerge during the 1980s, has the back catalog to really deserve this kind of respect and archival treatment. Truly, Cave should be seen as one of the all time great artists of the rock era and these sets make a convincing case for that, indeed.
I’ll say it one more time: Mute really do the finest reissues of any label I can think of. You’d have to go to the recent Neil Young Archives Vol. 1 (reviewed by me here) to find an equivalent to what they’re doing here (Depeche Mode got the same treatment a few years back). Each set is a fantastic consumer value. As the compact disc format dies, Mute are still giving punters an actual reason to return to the record store. Good for their business and good for the fans, too.
