REISSUES

Thirty years of the Bad Seeds, boxed and bound: a treasure trove for the curious, an artefact for the devoted. By Victoria Segal.

Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds; Thelonious Monk, George Jones and more.

Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds Lovely Creatures: The Best Of… (1984-2014) MUTE/BMG. CD/LP

In the imposing hardback book with this super deluxe edition, the essays by writers, artists and academics about Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds come with intriguing photos: Cave and Polly Harvey, laughing on a sofa; hooded Bob Dylan patting the singer’s shoulder at Glastonbury 1998; Cave and former guitar foil Blixa Bargeld clad as disreputable priests for The Weeping Song video. Live shots capture the band in all their layingon-of-hands intensity, multifaceted violinist Warren Ellis in blurry motion, and – if it needs underlining after hearing the music – images that catch the bond between Cave and his Bad Seeds, a conspiratorial glint in the eye, an arm around the shoulders. One picture demands particular scrutiny. Taken by the band’s photographer ally Bleddyn Butcher in Cave’s Berlin home in 1985, it shows the singer in his spikiest plumage, pen in mouth, sprawled in a bedroom that looks like an insect’s nest. Through the debris a German classics book, Lexikon Der Antike, a Brigitte Bardot record, a copy of arts review The New Criterion all visible. On a shelf is a bottle of vodka and from a pipe above Cave’s head, like grisly murder trophies, hang coils of long black hair (bought at a market, according to Butcher). All around are his notebooks, his famous hoard of ideas, words and pictures. The image looks like chaos – probably was chaos – but it shows that even in his unhinged pomp, Cave was not just on a Deanna-style spree-killer songwriting rampage: he was researching, storing, shoring up material to help him interrogate the world. Nearly 30 years and 14 Seeds later, the band recorded Push The Sky Away, influenced by Wikipedia rabbitholes and whimsical Googling. Sweeping from murder ballad to love song, antic violence to philosophical caper, Lovely Creatures feels similarly encyclopaedic, a collection of songs pushing for answers, pushing to make sense of it all, pushing to make it more beautiful – or much uglier – than anyone could dream. Compiled by Cave, founding member Mick Harvey, who left the band in 2008, and the current Bad Seeds, Lovely Creatures consists of 45 chronologically arranged tracks and a DVD of rare live footage and interview clips. Understandably, it stops before last year’s grief-blasted and, as Cave calls it in the poignant afterword, “wholly necessary” Skeleton Tree, yet that leaves a grand

"THE MERCY SEAT COMES AS CLOSE AS ANY SONG TO CAPTURING EVIL WITH ITS MALIGN BUZZING AND SWARMING WORDS."

sweep of material that shows their evolutionary flights and remarkable consistency. There should be a sense of rupture between filthy murder ballad Stagger Lee and holy love song Into My Arms, or the songs Cave wrote while living in Brazil in the early ’90s and those he wrote in Brighton this century. Instead, there’s a shared craft, a communal passion for human experience no matter how wild or intimate, these songs resonate rather than cancel each other out. Deanna from 1988’s Tender Prey, might feel deranged compared with the learned oil-lamp studies of 1997’s The Boatman’s Call – the moment Cave assumed the mantle of proper lecture-giving gravitas – but the surgical horror of its lyrics is every bit as precise: “The winding cloth holds many moths/Around your Ku Klux furniture/I cum a death’s-head in your frock/We discuss the murder pact.” Long-standing followers might find the tracklisting straightforward, but it makes a wonderful primer for the curious bystander, and for the fan updates 1998’s compact best-of. The book and DVD are a lure for the latter, too, the reproduction memorabilia that flutters from the pages – a small white envelope of negatives, a sketch for a single cover, a photo labelled “Deanna” – giving a scrapbook-like quality. But there’s nothing scrappy here. It feels monumental, nearly every song testament to the Bad Seeds’ cardinal strengths: fluid, intuitive playing, judicious experimentation, and an intense need to respond to the world in all its horror as well as its beauty. At one end of their spectrum is 1988’s The Mercy Seat, the last-minute testament of a man being executed by electric chair, a song that comes as close as any to capturing a tangible evil with its malign buzzing and swarming words. At the other is Into My Arms, from 1997’s The Boatman’s Call, a stately piano hymn, a song so convinced of love’s power that the singer considers his embrace a state of grace. Yet in between, Lovely Creatures contains multitudes. There are the nightmares: Tupelo (the only single off 1985’s The Firstborn Is Dead) is a twisted Elvis nativity distilling Cave’s Southern gothic; More News From Nowhere from 2008’s table-rapping Dig Lazarus Dig!!! sees Cave at a party with all his ex-partners, a distorted, never-ending Odyssey. Meanwhile, 2013’s Higgs Boson Blues, a woozy narrative, suggests the narrator is in search of the “god particle”, the glue holding the planet together, but finds only visions of Miley Cyrus. Then there are the love songs. Cave’s fascination with the form is well-documented, and his best are here: the Greek-mythic power of The Ship Song, a transitional moment in his slow move from heroinfuelled hellraiser to professorial elder; Straight To You’s apocalyptic last dance; and (Are You) The One That I’ve Been Waiting For?, as cherished as much for its glorious rhyme scheme as its hopeless – or hopeful – romanticism. There’s more that doesn’t fit so cleanly, of course: the shiny ’90s goth grand guignol of Do You Love Me? and Red Right Hand, or the philosophical and linguistic pile up of We Call Upon The Author To Explain, one of their finest later songs. The DVD features a smudge of interview where Cave is asked what he thinks he will be doing when he’s 56. “I would hope I wasn’t involved in music by then,” he says tersely. “I already feel a bit guilty as it is, being involved at 28.” Hearteningly, Cave calls Lovely Creatures “the best of the first 30 years”. Of anyone else, it would be insane to say the best may yet be to come. Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds? You wouldn’t put it past them.