BMG When Nick Cave experienced the tragedy above all tragedies as a parent in 2015, it would be no surprise that all artistic output would be set on hold. This compilation was in the process of being finished, but was yielded maybe because the need of finishing Skeleton Tree that came out last year.
Nick Cave
10 posts
Bad Seed One More Time With Feeling was designed to ideally be watched before Skeleton Tree was released; so to watch it for the first time now, after living with that raw, naked and shivering mass of beauty and heartbreak is, clearly, a very different experience than that originally intended. But I don’t think that makes it any less powerful a film in its own right.
Bad Seed It will cause no great controversy if I say that Nick Cave has been writing about love and death for most of his career. If The Birthday Party were the gleeful rictus grin of the Grim Reaper, then later work with the Bad Seeds saw him embrace grief as a response, rather than savage laughter.
Film 4 His wife mostly hides. I think she knows what he’s going to say, or rather what he’s not going to say. She’s central and peripheral in this tale and that seems about right since so is Nick. He’s in every scene and every scene is about him (or, more properly, for him) but we don’t get anything as ‘startlingly frank’ as you’d imagine. He’s there but […]
Bad Seed Ltd Last summer whilst I was living it up in my small way in the south of France, celebrating true heat and the glories of car-crash-like French music spectacles which dominate the season of the votive festivals, I was utterly unaware of the fact that just half an hour away, down a treacherous twisty road lined with diseased plane trees, some of my most revered musical […]
Label: Mute Format: CD OK, confession time- I have yet to get around to seeing the film to which this is the soundtrack, though I have been assured by people who have and whose opinions I respect that it’s awesome. Though that’s not really the point – the point is that I’m only able to judge this album on how well its stands up on its own. Don’t […]
Label: Mute Format: 2CD No question has ever divided the civilised world more than this one: “What did you think of Nocturama?” For every devotee willing to bask in the righteous glory that was “Bring It On”, there’s a hater who’s all too keen to remind you of the less-than-spectacular “Rock Of Gibraltar”. Me? Well, I liked it. Except for “Rock of Gibraltar”, obviously. That was shit. That […]
Label: Mute Format: CD, limited 2CD It occurs to me as I listen to this new effort by Nick Cave that I might like to have never heard of him. In fact I add up the years and it has been at least nineteen since I first did so. I think I have loved him ever since. No one is able to express such ugliness and cynicism in […]
Irregular #5 The South Bank Centre, London 8th-10th April 1999 The last five to ten years have seen an exponential rise in the number of intriguing events at London’s premier Arts Council-funded cultural centre on the South Bank of the River Thames, thanks to an innovative booking policy and the success of the events themselves, expanding the venue beyond its associations with Radio 3 “serious” music concerts and […]
Label: Mute Format: CD, 2CD There’s a problem I always have with “Best Of” albums. To me, at least, they always bring to mind images of motorway service stations, racks filled to overflowing with Greatest Hits, The Very Best Of, or, worse, The Best (insert allegedly zeitgeist-defining noun here) Album in the World, Ever!. They suggest something a little too posthumous, a little too much like an obituary- […]