http://www.heraldscotland.com/arts-ents/music-features/nick-cave-gets-a-touch
-of-evil-from-his-grinderman-sessions-1.1054776
Nick Cave gets a touch of evil from his Grinderman sessions
Edd McCracken
13 Sep 2010
Cut off from the outside world in their studio, the Bad Seeds offshoot create
an unholy racket.
In the 15th century, King James IV of Scotland wanted to know what the voice
of angels sounded like. So he took a newborn child and placed it on Inchkeith
island in the Firth of Forth with only a deaf-mute nursemaid to look after it.
If the child grew up isolated from hearing common speech, the King believed,
once it reached maturity it would speak only the uncorrupted language of
heaven.
History is littered with similar apocryphal tales of sensory deprivation.
Grinderman - the alter-ego of Nick Cave, Jim Sclavunos, Warren Ellis and
Martyn Casey - are merely the latest to follow in the footsteps of Scottish
kings, Indian princes and German scientists.
Last year, they retreated into a studio for five days. They cut off all
contact with the outside world: no lyrics, sheet music or notes were brought
in. No preconceived ideas were allowed. Nothing recorded was listened to. Cave
and his band members wanted to see what music welled up in them when they were
cut adrift.
What they discovered was not the voice of angels. "It's f***in' evil," says
Cave, rolling that final, potent word. With his raven-black hair slicked back
and a purple shirt, unbuttoned to his navel, hanging on his tall, lithe frame,
this revelation sounds like less of a surprising discovery than a decree by
some crown prince of darkness. It was always going to be evil.
The rough beast slouching towards release is the album Grinderman 2. Cave and
drummer Sclavunos are holding court in an ante-room in the Electric Cinema on
London's Portobello Road, explaining the recording's unholy birth. The street
outside throbs in the heat. Inside, stained coffee cups are piled high on a
wide, jet-black table. An air-con unit hums.
For a project based upon improvisation, risk and primal energy, there is a
strangely business-like aura to the scene. Cave is on his laptop and making
dinner plans on his phone. Sclavunos, a man-mountain with square shoulders
and, at this point, a thick, unkempt beard, speaks in hushed American tones
about how the legendary Australian singer is his "boss".
Later in the interview, Cave compares the process of writing songs in his
Grinderman incarnation with writing for his other band, the Bad Seeds. With
the latter, he says, he sits in his office in Brighton working on material.
This also jars, as if something as beautiful as Breathless or Into My Arms
could have been composed in the shadow of filing cabinets and Post-it notes.
But, with Cave, confusion appears to be natural. This new Grinderman album has
flummoxed even himself, not to mention the rest of the Bad Seeds (with whom
the three other members of Grinderman also play).
"It's certainly more confusing now than ever," he says. "I knew during the
first [album] what Grinderman is; and I don't really know for the second one.
"I was more worried about doing it this time. First time it had this runaway
energy that was immediately apparent. Second time we did it, I went away
wondering what we had. It was only when I was listening back to some bits on
CD weeks later, when I was in Australia, that I realised it was really good.
It's really close to the music we all enjoy playing.
"Often when things are real comfortable, you tend to like it. You like it
because you've heard it before. And we haven't done anything like this kind of
music before. The record today seems like a very different record to what
we've done before."
After the first Grinderman album in 2007, the full Bad Seeds band reassembled
and recorded Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!, one of the freshest and most energetic
albums of their 27-year career. Cave puts that down to the cleansing exercise
of Grinderman. "It had a great impact on us," he says. "It caused a lot of
confusion, chaos and uncertainty."
"Which sounds negative, but was great for us," adds Sclavunos.
Musically, at times Grinderman 2 sounds exactly as you'd expect a record made
by four middle-aged male artists trapped in the same room for five days to
sound: musky, shamanistic, lewd and bristling with grubby heat. Songs such as
Evil sound like an expensive, middle-aged primal-scream-therapy session. At
other times, however, there are moments of sublime, shimmering beauty, as on
Palaces Of Montezuma. Either way, it offers no easy musical answers.
The lyrics, like the music, were improvised: again a departure for Cave, a man
who admits he can agonise for weeks over one line of a song. "When you're ad
libbing, you don't have anything stopping you," he says. "It takes you places
maybe you shouldn't go to, that it isn't wise to go to. The imagery becomes
more primal. It just comes from a more subconscious place. Listening back,
hearing these snippets, I'm like, 'F***, what is going on here?' It sounds
pretentious, but it does comes from a more primal place."
So Grinderman 2 is littered with references to chimeras such as the wolfman
and the abominable snowman. Cave sings with an animalistic growl. Heathen
Child, the lead single, carries suggestive lyrics about "sucking thumbs". Cave
and Sclavunos seem to delight in how uncomfortable it makes them feel, like a
child learning to swear for the first time.
"Heathen Child is not crude, but it is worrying," says Sclavunos. "It teeters
on objectionable."
"It's catchy," says Cave. "But my kids sing it around the house. I'm like,
'Would you please stop singing that song.'"
Cave recently published his second novel, The Death Of Bunny Munro, the tale
of an oversexed, ageing travelling salesman with distinctly feral instincts.
Combined with the new Grinderman album's fascination for wolfmen, does this
make Cave the arch-chronicler of middle-aged male depravity?
"There is a lot of that, yes," he admits. "But the album is not like a musical
equivalent to Bunny Munro. Bunny Munro is pretty dark. This is much more of a
freeform, subconscious, Freudian thing going on, I think.
"With the wolfman, I wanted to recreate this archetype. Give it some renewed
threat. But if this album was the soundtrack to a book, it would be more akin
to a malign fairy tale. Darker than the darkest of Grimms' fairy tales."
"There is a lot of blatant evil across this," says Sclavunos, affecting the
tone of a soothsayer from a bad amateur dramatic production. "And these
monstrous incarnations are just one manifestation of that evil."
There's that word again: evil. The pair wield it lightly, though. One minute
they are talking about the very nature of the inferno, the next they are
joking about the level of percussion on the new record. Cave digs at his
drummer over his love of maracas. "Sometimes I'm on stage and just want to
turn around and say, 'Everyone, stop shaking the f***ing maracas,' he says.
"Maybe you should take the lead and stop playing that tambourine that you
brandish all the time," Sclavunos retorts.
"At least a tambourine is cooler than a maraca."
And so on.
In the end, King James IV never did hear the language of heaven. When he
returned to Inchkeith after a decade, the marooned child could produce only
primal, incomprehensible sounds. "Not even a word of Hebrew," the king
reportedly lamented.
But, as Cave's Grinderman project may have proved via the most unscientific of
means, he should not have been surprised. Man left alone for long enough will
create a din to shake the walls of Hades. And will use maracas if necessary.
Grinderman 2 is released tomorrow. The band play the Barrowland, Glasgow, on
September 28.
http://www.heraldscotland.com/arts-ents/music-features/nick-cave-gets-a-touch
-of-evil-from-his-grinderman-sessions-1.1054776
Nick Cave gets a touch of evil from his Grinderman sessions
Edd McCracken
13 Sep 2010
Cut off from the outside world in their studio, the Bad Seeds offshoot create
an unholy racket.
In the 15th century, King James IV of Scotland wanted to know what the voice
of angels sounded like. So he took a newborn child and placed it on Inchkeith
island in the Firth of Forth with only a deaf-mute nursemaid to look after it.
If the child grew up isolated from hearing common speech, the King believed,
once it reached maturity it would speak only the uncorrupted language of
heaven.
History is littered with similar apocryphal tales of sensory deprivation.
Grinderman - the alter-ego of Nick Cave, Jim Sclavunos, Warren Ellis and
Martyn Casey - are merely the latest to follow in the footsteps of Scottish
kings, Indian princes and German scientists.
Last year, they retreated into a studio for five days. They cut off all
contact with the outside world: no lyrics, sheet music or notes were brought
in. No preconceived ideas were allowed. Nothing recorded was listened to. Cave
and his band members wanted to see what music welled up in them when they were
cut adrift.
What they discovered was not the voice of angels. "It's f***in' evil," says
Cave, rolling that final, potent word. With his raven-black hair slicked back
and a purple shirt, unbuttoned to his navel, hanging on his tall, lithe frame,
this revelation sounds like less of a surprising discovery than a decree by
some crown prince of darkness. It was always going to be evil.
The rough beast slouching towards release is the album Grinderman 2. Cave and
drummer Sclavunos are holding court in an ante-room in the Electric Cinema on
London's Portobello Road, explaining the recording's unholy birth. The street
outside throbs in the heat. Inside, stained coffee cups are piled high on a
wide, jet-black table. An air-con unit hums.
For a project based upon improvisation, risk and primal energy, there is a
strangely business-like aura to the scene. Cave is on his laptop and making
dinner plans on his phone. Sclavunos, a man-mountain with square shoulders
and, at this point, a thick, unkempt beard, speaks in hushed American tones
about how the legendary Australian singer is his "boss".
Later in the interview, Cave compares the process of writing songs in his
Grinderman incarnation with writing for his other band, the Bad Seeds. With
the latter, he says, he sits in his office in Brighton working on material.
This also jars, as if something as beautiful as Breathless or Into My Arms
could have been composed in the shadow of filing cabinets and Post-it notes.
But, with Cave, confusion appears to be natural. This new Grinderman album has
flummoxed even himself, not to mention the rest of the Bad Seeds (with whom
the three other members of Grinderman also play).
"It's certainly more confusing now than ever," he says. "I knew during the
first [album] what Grinderman is; and I don't really know for the second one.
"I was more worried about doing it this time. First time it had this runaway
energy that was immediately apparent. Second time we did it, I went away
wondering what we had. It was only when I was listening back to some bits on
CD weeks later, when I was in Australia, that I realised it was really good.
It's really close to the music we all enjoy playing.
"Often when things are real comfortable, you tend to like it. You like it
because you've heard it before. And we haven't done anything like this kind of
music before. The record today seems like a very different record to what
we've done before."
After the first Grinderman album in 2007, the full Bad Seeds band reassembled
and recorded Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!, one of the freshest and most energetic
albums of their 27-year career. Cave puts that down to the cleansing exercise
of Grinderman. "It had a great impact on us," he says. "It caused a lot of
confusion, chaos and uncertainty."
"Which sounds negative, but was great for us," adds Sclavunos.
Musically, at times Grinderman 2 sounds exactly as you'd expect a record made
by four middle-aged male artists trapped in the same room for five days to
sound: musky, shamanistic, lewd and bristling with grubby heat. Songs such as
Evil sound like an expensive, middle-aged primal-scream-therapy session. At
other times, however, there are moments of sublime, shimmering beauty, as on
Palaces Of Montezuma. Either way, it offers no easy musical answers.
The lyrics, like the music, were improvised: again a departure for Cave, a man
who admits he can agonise for weeks over one line of a song. "When you're ad
libbing, you don't have anything stopping you," he says. "It takes you places
maybe you shouldn't go to, that it isn't wise to go to. The imagery becomes
more primal. It just comes from a more subconscious place. Listening back,
hearing these snippets, I'm like, 'F***, what is going on here?' It sounds
pretentious, but it does comes from a more primal place."
So Grinderman 2 is littered with references to chimeras such as the wolfman
and the abominable snowman. Cave sings with an animalistic growl. Heathen
Child, the lead single, carries suggestive lyrics about "sucking thumbs". Cave
and Sclavunos seem to delight in how uncomfortable it makes them feel, like a
child learning to swear for the first time.
"Heathen Child is not crude, but it is worrying," says Sclavunos. "It teeters
on objectionable."
"It's catchy," says Cave. "But my kids sing it around the house. I'm like,
'Would you please stop singing that song.'"
Cave recently published his second novel, The Death Of Bunny Munro, the tale
of an oversexed, ageing travelling salesman with distinctly feral instincts.
Combined with the new Grinderman album's fascination for wolfmen, does this
make Cave the arch-chronicler of middle-aged male depravity?
"There is a lot of that, yes," he admits. "But the album is not like a musical
equivalent to Bunny Munro. Bunny Munro is pretty dark. This is much more of a
freeform, subconscious, Freudian thing going on, I think.
"With the wolfman, I wanted to recreate this archetype. Give it some renewed
threat. But if this album was the soundtrack to a book, it would be more akin
to a malign fairy tale. Darker than the darkest of Grimms' fairy tales."
"There is a lot of blatant evil across this," says Sclavunos, affecting the
tone of a soothsayer from a bad amateur dramatic production. "And these
monstrous incarnations are just one manifestation of that evil."
There's that word again: evil. The pair wield it lightly, though. One minute
they are talking about the very nature of the inferno, the next they are
joking about the level of percussion on the new record. Cave digs at his
drummer over his love of maracas. "Sometimes I'm on stage and just want to
turn around and say, 'Everyone, stop shaking the f***ing maracas,' he says.
"Maybe you should take the lead and stop playing that tambourine that you
brandish all the time," Sclavunos retorts.
"At least a tambourine is cooler than a maraca."
And so on.
In the end, King James IV never did hear the language of heaven. When he
returned to Inchkeith after a decade, the marooned child could produce only
primal, incomprehensible sounds. "Not even a word of Hebrew," the king
reportedly lamented.
But, as Cave's Grinderman project may have proved via the most unscientific of
means, he should not have been surprised. Man left alone for long enough will
create a din to shake the walls of Hades. And will use maracas if necessary.
Grinderman 2 is released tomorrow. The band play the Barrowland, Glasgow, on
September 28.