ORIGINAL
SIGNED PUNK ROCK POSTER 1984 #2
~"NICK CAVE AND THE BAD
SEEDS"~
62 x 40 Inch Poster. 1984
Flourescent Hot Pink Surface with Fold Marks. Signed by
ALL the band
members on top in black ink Nick
Cave.
The dramatic procession of Nick Cave and The
Bad Seeds enters a new phase in 2003. The supremely
crafted albums which came out towards the close of the
century, "Murder Ballads" and "The
Boatman's Call", affirmed what many have known since
the band formed out of the ashes of Australian legends
The Birthday Party in 1983: as an expressive force The
Bad Seeds are entirely in a class of their own, and Cave
is one of the few truly great, genuinely maverick
songwriters and performers of the present day. As the
millennium creaked round, there was a brief creative
pause. The softly enunciated, devotional love songs of
1997's "The Boatman's Call" had been widely
recognized as a consummate achievement for Cave. 2001's
"No More Shall We Part" found Cave's piano
compositions placed within highly arranged settings, his
songs of spiritual and emotional survival beautifully
embellished with string sections guided by long term
collaborator Mick Harvey and Warren Ellis. Within
"No More Shall We Part" there were, however,
tell tale signs that the
prowling, cathartic, extrovert side to The Bad Seeds,
which had run through albums since their violent 1983
debut "From Her To Eternity" had not been laid
to rest. In 'Fifteen Feet of Pure White Snow' and 'Oh My
Lord' the band was beginning to groove. Any notion that
it was no longer of interest to exploit the combustible
potential of musicians as vehement and skilful as Harvey,
Blixa Bargeld, Thomas Wydler, Martyn Casey, Conway
Savage, Jim Sclavunos and Warren Ellis is due to be
knocked aside by the next stage in the group's long
march. The twelfth Bad Seeds album "Nocturama"
displays a renewed strength of purpose within the band,
and is marked by an immediacy of recording technique and
thematic diversity. The sessions took place in early 2002
when the band decided to use free time on an Australian
tour to try out new compositions. They ended up learning
and recording the album in a week. "The idea was to
take some of the preciousness about the making of the
record away, and possibly create records more like they
did in the old days which was a faster turn around,"
says Cave. "The way I wrote this record was to get
the musical idea down, and a set of lyrics, and then put
it to one side and start a new one. I didn't reflect on
the songs again, or play them again. Once they were
written, that was it. Whereas with the record before -
"No More Shall We Part" - I'd arranged the
whole thing before I went in, which perhaps inhibits the
band a little. If something's already complete and all
they have to do is play the parts, it doesn't give them
much breathing space, and with this record they had a lot
more room to play".An objective point of view was
brought to bear on proceedings in the form of Nick
Launay. The LA-based British producer had worked with
Cave many years before when he produced The Birthday
Party's 1981 single 'Release The Bats', and at the behest
of Mick Harvey Launay agreed to record the sessions. The
band's sheer pleasure in playing together built on the
intention to loosen up the process saw
"Nocturama" emerge with a rawness in both the
driven and the gentle songs. As ever with Cave there are
too many tributaries flowing into his work from the
history of song to allow for easy analysis. While
admitting to the influence of a handful of poets - Auden,
Thomas Hardy amongst them - and song writers - Dylan and
Van Morrison - Cave is still clearly inventing his own
traditions on "Nocturama". The mood swings are
impressive, spanning emotional surrender to venomous
black humor. He engages with a wide range of themes.
There is a tender sunset song of hope; an elegant piano
song of longing; a yawing, dark violin waltz; a
swaggering pledge of love; a raucous abominable tale; a
sorrowful evocation of loss; a nostalgic meditation; a
fragrant love epiphany; and one final, lustful demonic
epic. "Nocturama" might well be the complete
Cave and The Bad Seeds panorama. "By writing I try
to understand myself in some way," says Cave.
"It's the only way that I have really of
understanding what I feel about things and what I think
about things" Wishing to maintain the ambiguity and
mystery in the songs Cave is reluctant to extemporize on
their content. At any rate some of the loveliest, most
compelling songs are the gentle ones like the opening
'Wonderful Life', or the simple rendering of nostalgia
'There Is A Town', which require no footnotes. 'Bring it
On' sees the band hitting a bold, superfly noir groove.
The song benefits from an outstanding duetted vocal from
Chris Bailey, singer with Brisbane's glorious pre-punk
nihilists The Saints. "He was in Melbourne at the
time and I called him up and he came and sang on 'Bring
it On' - and he sang it beautifully. He lifted that
song," says Cave. "He's a wonderful
singer". "The Saints were Godlike to me and my
colleagues. It was extraordinary to go and see a band
that were so anarchic and violent, with a singer that
could actually sing" 'Dead Man in My Bed' follows
immediately from 'Bring it On' and further raises noise
levels as Cave takes the perspective of a woman afflicted
with a uselesspartner. "It's a song about
marriage," says Cave. "But it's a comic song,
funny and dark". The album's most spectacular song
is saved until the end when The Bad Seeds unleash the
flaming jam 'Babe, I'm On Fire' demonstrating their
mastery of demonic relentlessness. At fifteen minutes
it's an epic with 43 verses (or more, as many didn't make
the recorded version) in which a bizarre cast of high and
low characters testify to the burning lust of the singer.
The song was played just once prior to recording.
"It was just an idea that steamrolled," says
Cave. "It's the kind of song you write when you're
not writing a song".Film director John Hillcoat, who
worked with Cave on the prison movie 'Ghosts of the Civil
Dead', came in to make videos for two songs from the
album. The single 'Bring it On' is accompanied by a
performance video from the band, assisted by semi-clad
extras, shaking anatomy at the camera in homage to
American pop videos. "Johnny Hillcoat asked me what
I wanted to make a video about" says Cave; "I
asked him 'What do videos look like on MTV these days?'
and he said 'basically there's a lot of black girls
wiggling their asses at the camera'. So, I said yeah,
well alright let's do that then".Miscegenated
emotions have been a part of the Cave cannon from the
beginning. The son of an English teacher and a librarian,
he brought a rare intelligence to the post-punk scene of
the early '80s. Formed in Australia but relocated to
England, his pre-Bad Seeds band The Birthday Party were
an apocalyptic expressionist challenge to the senses.
When they split up in '83 Cave re-grouped with a set of
fierce musicians willing and able to join him in the
perversion and celebration of blues, folk and popular
forms. The first line up of The Bad Seeds included two
members still in the band - Blixa Bargeld from
Einstürzende Neubauten and ex-Birthday Party guitarist
Mick Harvey. Over the next two decades the band of
gentlemen gangstas would go through many line-ups, with
personnel living in diverse corners of the world, but the
standard of excellence would never dip. "From Her To
Eternity", their introductory album of menacing
swamp songs, was released in 1984. Shortly afterwards
Cave moved to Berlin and began writing a first novel. In
1985 the release of "The First Born Is Dead"
saw Cave's then literary concerns - the Old Testament,
Elvis, Delta blues - leaking into the album's themes.
"Your Funeral My Trial" kept up momentum,
surfacing in 1986 and giving voice to some of the haunted
outsiders in Cave's head. Having met Wim Wenders in
Berlin, Cave and the band appeared in the director's
'Wings Of Desire' and the 1987 prison movie 'Ghosts Of
The Civil Dead' featured an acting performance by Cave
and a score by Cave, Bargeld and Harvey. With the
publication of his first book, the lyrics compendium King
Ink, and the 1988 release of the yearning tour de force
Seeds album "Tender Prey", Cave's Berlin
sojourn came to an end. In 1989 he moved to Sao Paulo in
Brazil where the album "The Good Son" was
recorded in 1990. Cave's novel 'And the Ass Saw the
Angel' was finally published in the same year to critical
acclaim,including selection as Time Out Book of the Year.
It has been translated to fourteen languages. The new
decade saw The Bad Seeds augment their line up, bringing
in bassist Martyn Casey and keyboardist Conway Savage.
1992's vaulting "Henry's Dream" benefited from
the additions, and the '93 live album "Live
Seeds" captured the band as they mutated into one of
the most powerful and authentic live ensembles of all
time. Visceral renderings of dark passions continued with
the lauded "Let Love In" in 1994. Ironically,
the band's most commercially successful album of the
'90s, "Murder Ballads", began life as a means
of accommodating songs that were "too long and too
strange to put on a legitimate record'. An exercise in
mingling the comic and the horrific, the album's bloody
narratives included a graphic rendition of the blues
standard 'Stagger Lee' and a number of collaborations.
Australian chanteuse Kylie Minogue joined Cave on 'Where
The Wild Roses Grow' and PJ Harvey sung with him on
'Henry Lee'. The spirited end piece version of Dylan's
'Death Is Not The End' features verses by Anita Lane and
The Pogues' Shane McGowan. As the '90s drew to a close,
the line up of the band had swollen to include New York
percussion player Jim Sclavunos and Dirty Three violinist
Warren Ellis. The live incarnation of The Bad Seeds had
reached frightening levels of intensity. With the
stripped down, personal songs of "The Boatman's
Call" in '97, they proved themselves adept at the
most relenting instrumentation, as well as the most
relentless. As "Nocturama" is released Cave is
already half way though writing the next album. The
process of writing is continual for him, partly, he
admits, to avoid the frightening prospect of having to
begin again after a pause. He works to a regime, visiting
an office and burdening his baby Steinway grand with full
ashtrays, as he draws down ideas and tussles with his
muse. Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds plan to speed up the
pace at which they issue albums. Remarkably for a band
who have set such high standards, the best may be yet to
come. - Anti Records
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