The Nick Cave Top 75 Countdown (#60-56) & This Week's Statistics

Hello, my friends, old and new! As we're moving up the ladder of Nick Cave's countdown, we'll encounter more songs by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, the artist's longest and most fruitful vehicle.

Before the countdown continues, however, let's begin with our bonus track, from one of the soundtracks that Nick Cave wrote in his long and illustrious career. To Have & To Hold (1996) was the second collaboration of several between Cave and Australian film director John Hillcoat. It was a mystery thriller and it starred Tchéky Karyo and Rachel Griffiths:

At #60 is a song by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds: The Witness Song is a track on The Good Son (1990). It is loosely based on the traditional American gospel song Who Will Be A Witness?. This is Cave at his leering, vengeful best, a gospel knees-up where false hope is scornfully decried from a Hammond-stacked pulpit as the Bad Seeds gleefully lay waste to all around them.

This is a live version at the Pinkpop Festival, 04.06.1990:

This is Who Will Be A Witness? performed by the Courville Concert Choir:

At #59 is a song from Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds' follow-up to The Good Son, Henry's Dream (1992), called John Finn's Wife (she of the "tattooed breasts and raven hair… legs like scissors and carving knives"). And then, oooh mercy, that coda. For me, at least, that perfect line - "John Finns' wife took all the flowers down from her hair/ And threw them on the ground" - has always allowed just enough ambiguity to make it unclear whether she throws them to the ground in mourning of her dead husband, or as a way to indicate that she had only used the unnamed narrator to provoke and murder her "mad" husband.

Regardless, the song is a beautiful encapsulation of Cave’s songwriting abilities, and of the versatility and sensitivity of the Bad Seeds as a working band. That the song manages to look ahead to Murder Ballads at the same time as it looks back to the blues and frontier preoccupations of earlier Bad Seeds albums is just an additional facet to its many fine qualities.

Listen to the band holding back - and their knowledge of exactly how much they should hold back when they have to, and listen to them unload everything when the time for that comes. You'll see what I mean:

This is a great version that appeared on their follow-up album, Live Seeds (1993):

At #58 is yet another song by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Nobody's Baby Now, a work of wry, understated elegance with a particularly lovely guitar/piano line. It is found on one of the band's best album's ever, Let Love In (1994). Few singers have made the transition from bawling swamp punk devil to devastating piano torch singer, but Cave made it look so easy. Written for Johnny Cash but kept for the Bad Seeds, Nobody’s Baby Now captured the lingering, forlorn memories of a romance that proved too slippery.

This is a great live version:

Besides being noteworthy as an astonishingly good all-covers album, Kicking Against the Pricks (1986) is notable for the arrival of a new key member for the Bad Seeds, drummer Thomas Wydler. Besides being a fine percussionist, able to perform at both the explosive and restrained levels Cave requires, Wydler also allowed Harvey to concentrate on adding guitar and keyboards live as well as in the studio, a notable bonus. Race reappears briefly to add some guitar while former Birthday Party cohorts Rowland Howard and Tracy Pew guest as well, the latter on some of his last tracks before his untimely death.

The song at #57 is from this album: It was a no-brainer that Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds should cover a song from the seminal rock album, Andy Warhol presents the Velvet Underground & Nico. It was a perfect fit. The song they chose is All Tomorrow's Parties - and their version is as manic as required, with an undercurrent of ambiguous glee:

Here they are, live in Ljubljana, Kodeljevo, 1988:

Finally for today, at #56, is the song Sad Waters from the album that came right after Kicking Against the Pricks, called Your Funeral... My Trial. Cave later said, "That particular record, which is my favorite of the records we've done, is very special to me and a lot of amazing things happened, musically, in the studio.

The gentle, but still melancholy moods of Sad Waters, detailing a riverside scene between a couple, are simply grand. It's one of his beautiful dream-like love songs. A harmonica plays over the bridge.

Recorded when Cave was nearing the peak of his heroin addiction, Sad Waters takes the form of an almost-duet where he sings both identical parts. This has the strange effect of the song being very easy to interpret in different ways depending on your mood, although the romantic current comes through most strongly in the acoustic version housed on the recorded version of The Secret Life of the Love Song. In the 1986 original, the lovely rising basslines and breezy organ sound are matched by the lyrics, some of Cave's most flowery and ornate. He casts himself as a prisoner of love, and this is not altogether bad or good - if sadness can never be banished entirely it must be embraced as part of living, and all of life’s moments and details savored.

This is the original studio version:

This is the rare acoustic version:

Now, let's continue with last week's statistics; there was a 10% increase in the number of weekly visits, even though there were fewer new stories. I guess that our new readers found the time to look through the older stories. The stories that benefited the most were relatively recent - all but one came out in 2018. Of the new stories, the Oscar Predictions did slightly better than the previous Nick Cave Song Countdown.

As far as countries are concerned, this was the United Kingdom's week; it easily sits at the top of the weekly chart. Turkey is still going strong - and so is Canada, which managed to overtake underperforming Cyprus on the all-time list. Spain and Australia each had a good week after a few weaker ones, while the Netherlands' good weekend showing helped propel it on the weekly top 10. Germany is nice'n'steady - while joining Cyprus on the underperformers' club are France, Greece, Russia, and Italy. The main underperformer continues to be the United States...

Here are this week's Top 10 countries.

1. the United Kingdom

2. France

3. the United States

4. Turkey

5. Canada

6. Greece

7. Spain

8. Australia

9. the Netherlands

10. Germany

Here are the other countries that graced us with their presence since our last statistics (alphabetically): Albania, Angola, Argentina, Armenia, Austria, the Bahamas, Bahrain, Belgium, Bermuda, Brazil, Bulgaria, Chile, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Croatia, Cyprus, Czechia, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, Finland, Ghana, Gibraltar, Grenada, Guatemala, Haiti, Hungary, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Kenya, Latvia, Lebanon, Lithuania, Malaysia, Mauritius, Mexico, Mozambique, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, Pakistan, Paraguay, Peru, the Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Romania, Russia, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, Trinidad & Tobago, Uganda, Ukraine, the United Arab Emirates, Uruguay, Venezuela, Vietnam, and Zimbabwe. Happy to have you all!

And here's the all-time Top 10:

1. the United States = 28.1%

2. France = 27.2%

3. the United Kingdom = 9.5%

4. Greece = 7.1%

5. Russia = 3.0%

6. Germany = 2.0%

7. Italy = 1.44%

8. Canada = 1.18%

9. Cyprus = 1.08%

10. Turkey = 0.68%

That's all for today, folks. Till the next one!