Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds

This may have been the tour when I saw Nick & Co., although of course not this actual show. Little did I know it would be the last time I'd have the chance to see Nick, Blixa Bargeld, and Mick Harvey together, after what? More than twenty years as the core of the band? Also present were one of the best lineups in years: Thomas Wydler, Martin P. Casey, Conway Savage, Jim Sclavunos, and Warren Ellis (also of the Aussie band The Dirty Three). Ellis, the most junior member of the band, has "only" been playing with them on a permanent basis since 1997, though he worked as a "guest" member on various tracks going back to 1994. So that means everyone on stage had been working together a minimum of 7 years. Now, with the same lineup but minus Blixa (sob), that togetherness has been pushed to 15 years, enough for any band to really tighen up and become seamless. Nevermind Cave and Harvey have been playing together since high school, well over 30 years. Mick Harvey is the bloke with the red guitar in this video.

Now, I'm not a huge U2 fan; I enjoy one or two tracks per album (sometimes more) but the actual singles they release, and which become their anthems, say nothing to me peronally - it's always an obscure track like "Love is Blindness" or "A Man and a Woman" which I find very interesting. But whatever you think of U2, the fact that those four musicians have been together, with NO additions and NO defections, for more than 30 years is incredible and is what makes them the most popular band in the world. They are as tight in the studio and on stage as the Beatles or Stones or any band has ever been. They can probably literally read each others' minds by now. I'm not saying their songs are as good as those bands' (or even close to Radiohead's for that matter, which in my opinion has been consistently the BEST if not the biggest band of the 1990s and 2000s without a doubt and who will go down with the Beatles, Floyd, U2, Stones, Zeppelin, Smiths, Eagles, and so on as amongst the elite rock bands ever). But U2 have their moments, like on "With Or Without You," "One," "Original of the Species," and so on. Still, the musicianship is what makes them, year after year, decade after decade, the biggest act in the world and makes their sound, if somewhat boring, at least comfortable and recognizable as soon as you hear a note from The Edge or a word from Bono, or that rock solid rhythm section of Adam and Larry - you know you're in the hands of real professionals (even more so with Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois producing; they would make even a bad band sound mediocre).

So with Nick Cave and his Seeds it's not all about Nick. I mean, in one sense, OF COURSE it's all about Nick. He's the Thomas the Tank Engine that makes the locomotive run. He's the poet with the cigarette in his suit and telling all the vivid stories from the other side, the side we don't always want to follow him too but feel somehow compelled. He's the bard, the magicician. But all the cars that follow his Engine have vital contributions to make - the one that carries the coal from the colliaries, the one that hauls vats of marmite, the one that carries passengers, the one which caries plutonium to its secret dumping ground, the one which holds the money that needs to be robbed, and the one containing alien bodies which officially isn't attached to the train at all. Without all these cars, the train would still chug like hell, but it wouldn't be nearly as interesting or deliver a payload so richly varied. And you've all seen those trains with a couple of extra engines attached for extra large loads, right? Well, the Bad Seeds being such the big and widely talented group they are - most of them multi-intrumentalists or extreme specialists in instruments one would not expect to find in a 'rock' band (à la Dead Can Dance) - you can consider Mick Harvey and formerley Blixa Bargeld as two more engines, pushing Cave up that hill during his darkest times and helping him get this ragtag train to the station on time.

I miss Blixa, he was always my favorite band member apart from Nick himself, though he continues to be active in his own longtime band Einstürzende Neubauten, if you're a person brave enough for such things and perhaps speak a little German. It's Blixa in this video who sings first and who is the vocal counterpart to Nick Cave, in case you don't know the band too well, and he was also their lead guitarist and, again with Mick, one of the two chief backup singers (and often shriekers) in the group. He's got the grey/green guitar. This isn't the best quality video, it's too dark (lighting-wise), but it's ok, and it's the best I could scare up with YouTube cracking down on everything worth watching, seemingly now the lapdog of the corporate media moguls instead of the free, almost anarchic enterprise they once were. Well, more about that in an upcoming post.

Enjoy "The Weeping Song"!