I've been spending quite a bit of time with albums from the 00s recently, partly in response to a series running over at No Badger Required where this week sees the culmination of a six week countdown to find the best albums of the 00s. My rediscovery of Mercury Rev's All Is Dream came from a different place but that album featured at the lower ends of the No Badger Required chart (a chart voted on by the luminaries of the Musical Jury) and I've been digging into different bits of Nick Cave's back catalogue ahead of the upcoming concert at Manchester Arena in early November.
Two weeks ago I posted Heathen Child, a Grinderman single from 2010, from the second Grinderman album, Grinderman 2. Heathen Child came with an Andrew Weatherall remix and also as Super Heathen Child, a different take with Robert Fripp playing guitar. I noticed that Nick and The Bad Seeds have been playing Palaces Of Montezuma as they've been touring Europe for the last month and pulled Grinderman 2 out from the CDs and played it in the car going to and from work for a week. Grinderman was a Bad Seeds offshoot, a place for Nick to escape the 'heaviness' of the Bad Seeds and play around. Three Bad Seeds joined him- Warren Ellis, Martyn Casey and Jim Sclavunos. Nick often played guitar in Grinderman which shifted things it seems, away from being the vocalist or the man at the piano and repositioning Grinderman as a guitar band. I didn't see them live but friends who did said that the gigs were as frenetic and lively as any they'd seen. Nick also saw Grinderman as a place to do something else lyrically. There's a lot of middle aged man sex in Grinderman, like the filter has been deliberately removed and what pours out of the id and onto the paper is what you're going to get. On the first Grinderman album there was No Pussy Blues. On the second, there was Worm Tamer, the Grinderman junkyard blues and nerve shredding rattle with Nick's lines about the Female who he describes as 'the snake charmer... the worm tamer... the serpent wrangler... the mambo rider', all tongue in cheek and overtly lascivious, a dead pan Carry On Nick Cave, concluding with 'My baby calls me the Loch Ness Monster/ Two great big humps and I'm gone'.
Much of Grinderman 2 comes from a similar place, noise and confusion, aging bones and feral desires. Apart from the penultimate song, the wonderful, achingly romantic, three chord swoon of Palaces Of Montezuma. On this song, as the A, E and B chords roll round and the three Bad Seed/ Grindermen provide backing ooh oohs, Nick lists a series of gifts he wants to present to his lover- Mata Hari, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, Miles Davis, the black unicorn, and memorably 'the custard coloured super- dream of Ali McGraw and Steve McQueen' and 'the spinal cord of JFK wrapped in Marilyn Monroe's negligee'. He wants nothing in return, just a breath, and everything hangs together in the chorus, 'Come on baby come in out of the cold/ Gimme gimme gimme your precious love/ For me to hold'.
It's a song that feels like it takes as long to listen to as it did to write, three chords, some backing vocals and a list, but its utterly wonderful, one of his best songs. It also feels like maybe it was the song that prompted Nick back to the Bad Seeds. Two years later came Push The Sky Away, a Bad Seeds album that felt like a corner turned, a different Bad Seeds, the album of Higgs Bosun Blues and Jubilee Street. Palaces Of Montezuma feels like the bridge between Grinderman and a route back to the Bad Seeds.
The Bad Seeds album that came between the Grinderman debut and Gridnerman 2 was Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!!, from 2008, an album that features inside the No Badger Required 00s countdown top ten. It's a classic Bad Seeds album, the last one to feature Mick Harvey and one that Nick said would be partly informed by the guitar sound of Grinderman. Blixa Bargeld had left previously and with Mick Harvey going the Bad Seeds were mutating into a different group. 'I didn't get into rock 'n' roll to play rock and roll', Blixa said when he left. Ouch.
Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! is full of guitar rock songs, a cast of characters in the songs and the spirit of New York, the rattle and thrum of the Velvets, the sidewalk and the Lower East Side, seem to be strewn throughout it along with a hundred biblical allusions. There are some top ten Bad Seeds songs on Lazarus- the supper club groove of More News From Nowhere, the scattergun frenzy of We Call Upon The Author, the title track and this one, the second song, which launches itself into Lou Reed with the refrain 'We're gonna have a real cool time tonight!', a song about Little Janie (Sweet Jane?), who has the jawbone of an ass down the waistband of her jeans and is in a tussle with Mr. Sandman. It's a song that sounds like it could have come from the Grindermen as much as The Bad Seeds.