And as The Ship Song shows, softer doesn’t necessarily mean slushier: it’s almost too intense, a stark, swelling piano ballad that walks a tightrope between lump-in-the-throat romanticism and unsustainable devotion, and Cave sings every word as if he’s been compelled by some higher force to use his last breath to explain how besotted he is.
How could the snarling, sneering preacher of despair and dismay turn soft and sentimental? Why would he turn his back on blood-and-guts wails of noise for tender ballads and dark-hearted pop? In hindsight, though, it’s a school of thought purely for the dimwits unable to realise there’s a delicate beauty to the Bad Seeds that is just as powerful as the hellfire-and-brimstone melodrama. It’s a tricky blighter, the Bad Seeds’ 1990 album The Good Son, and it kicked up a fair old stink among Cave followers upon its release. Cave is arguably the finest narrative songwriter of his generation, but the power of The Mercy Seat is in how fragmented it is: it’s less a story than an avant-garde poem, a jumble of thoughts spilling out of some poor sod’s head, and here he’s less singer than he is a method actor chewing over a meaty soliloquy at the grimmest curtain call of all. Cave takes on the role of a killer condemned to death row, droning like a demented narcissist as he flits from crazed delusion (“The face of Jesus in my soup") to feverish Old Testament gibbering (“An eye for an eye / A tooth for a tooth”) until the gruesome end (“And the mercy seat is glowing / And I think my head is smoking”). The Mercy Seat sounds genuinely sick: diseased and malformed, with shivering strings and a stark, serpent-like piano line from Mick Harvey that tries to wind and slither out of the noise-rush. For their fifth album, Tender Prey, they brought in Kid Congo Powers (formerly of the Cramps and the Gun Club) and multi-instrumentalist Roland Wolf to help push the Bad Seeds’ sound into bolder territory. Some 15 musicians have, at some point, formed part of the ever-changing lineup, to freshen up their sound with anew ideas, fresh tics and weirder kicks. One of the secrets of the Bad Seeds’ success is how fluid their membership is.
“Well Saturday gives what Sunday steals / And a child is born on his brothers heels / Come Sunday morn the first-born dead.” The King is born, and nothing will be the same again. “Why the hen won’t lay no egg / Can’t get that cock to crow / The nag is spooked and crazy,” sings Cave over a vamping, biblical din, before hinting at a darker terror: the fate of Jesse Garon, the baby who never was and an unwilling sacrifice because nothing could survive the arrival of Elvis. Just like WB Yeats’s The Second Coming imagined the birth of a vengeful beast that would bring anarchy to the world, so baby Elvis becomes a terrible force making its presence known. It’s the idea that something monstrous is stirring that someone – or something – is about to be born that’s so terrible it’s causing nature to protest and the elements to revolt. “A big black cloud come,” snarls Cave as thunder crashes, lightning flashes and rain falls, but it’s the otherworldly dread that makes Tupelo into something far more menacing than inclement weather. Tupelo, then, takes the tale of Elvis Presley’s birth – a strange night in which Mississippi was hit by a torrid flood and his older twin brother, Jesse Garon, was delivered stillborn 35 minutes before – and reimagines it as an apocalyptic warning. Mark Twain’s much-loved Huckleberry Finn is transformed from innocent do-gooder into devilish ne’er-do-well, a lost soul who abandons the path of righteousness and finds himself wading through the stinking, sinful swamp of the “dirty ol’ man latrine” instead, until a bullet is lodged in his brain.Ĭave has never been content with mere suffering or misery: he’s a songwriter who wants to turn tragedy into something ghastlier and grander, a detective forever on the hunt for clues and signs that the end is nigh and Doomsday is upon us.
It’s his shrieking, discordant clang that underpins Saint Huck, the first song the Bad Seeds recorded together, as Cave hams it up like a crazed preacher in the throes of zealous rapture. It was Bargeld who held the key to Cave’s liberation: a divine saviour disguised as a haughty oddball with a fondness for making music with ear-splitting electronic drills, and responsible for a bleaker sound than the Birthday Party’s abrasive racket. Exhausted from the drug-related bickering and strangled by his relationship with guitarist Rowland S Howard, he and drummer Mick Harvey fled to start anew and formed the Bad Seeds’ first fixed lineup with ex-Magazine bassist Barry Adamson, guitarist Hugo Race and Einstürzende Neubauten’s Blixa Bargeld. The Birthday Party were an unholy force of evil noise, but by 1983 Nick Cave had grown tired of their mess and muck.
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