The Nick Cave Top 75 Countdown (#35-31) & This Week's Statistics

Hello, my friends, old and new! Even though it's Easter Sunday where I live, this is no reason not to have our regular story.

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. In 2012, Lawless represented another collaboration between Nick Cave, his writing partner Warren Ellis, and director John Hillcoat. The film had an all-star cast, which included Shia LaBeouf, Tom Hardy, Jason Clarke, Guy Pearce, Jessica Chastain, Mia Wasikowska, Dane DeHaan, and Gary Oldman. Here's part of the soundtrack:

At #35 we find a song called City of Refuge, from Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' great album, Tender Prey (1988). The song was inspired by a Blind Willie Johnson song I'm Gonna Run to the City of Refuge. A lone harmonica introduces one of the Bad Seeds’ most ominous songs (no easy feat), full of pounding drums and jagged guitar riffs, with Cave turning the Old Testament cities of refuge into a ferocious tribute to his then home, Berlin. The echoing, gentle-yet-rough sonics do well in keeping the energy level up.

Mark Arm of Mudhoney is a big fan of the song. Here is what he has to say about it:

"Nick has a unique vision. It's dark and funny and they're two of my favorite things. I remember hearing that song Deep In The Woods, which wouldn't strike most people as necessarily funny, but my friends and I were rolling around laughing. That line 'tonight we sleep in separate ditches' was just brilliant. There's always been a lot of dark humor threading through his work. I love City Of Refuge. It's got that steamroller drumbeat that Thomas Wydler lays down so well."

"Nick was still steeped in a lot of the blues at that point [1988], so that song was a homage to [Blind] Willie Johnson's I'm Gonna Run To The City Of Refuge. The only thing that's similar though is the chorus; the verses and the music are totally different. He was making something new without seeming like a rip-off, which was also something from the folk or blues tradition. I think that, for a while, Nick was very obsessed with the notion of the American South, even though he hadn't been there. He was doing romanticized versions of what is the horrible reality of it. There's a strong literary influence but then he totally rocks. And that doesn't happen very often. It's unpretentious, with a lot of truth to it. It's not like the f*cking Decemberists."

"Mudhoney did the Big Day Out tour of Australia in '93, along with the Bad Seeds, Iggy Pop, Sonic Youth and The Beasts Of Bourbon. At the last show, we ended up doing a giant version of Little Doll with Iggy's band and the Bad Seeds and Sonic Youth. The singers were Iggy, Nick and myself. I have to say it was pretty f*cking amazing."

This is the song's inspiration, by Blind Willie Johnson:

This is Nick Cave with the Bad Seeds and the song in question:

This is a live version at the Roskilde Festival, in 1990:

At #34 is a song from Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' 2013 album, Push the Sky Away. It's in two parts: The album's most elaborate track, Jubilee Street, is answered by Finishing Jubilee Street, a spartan, spoken-word account of a dream Cave had just after he completed work on the former. The aforementioned Jubilee Street is built upon a repeated Hey Joe-like chord progression that, thanks to Ellis' mesmerizing violin lines, grows more grandiose with each passing cycle, reaching such dizzying heights that you almost forget you're listening to a song about a murdered prostitute.

It's a special type of band who can make one of their strongest albums after nigh-on 30 years and 14 previous records, but the Bad Seeds have always been several pages ahead of their contemporaries, leaving others to copy their dog-eared old chapters while they focus on freshening things up. Push the Sky Away isn't goth-rock schlock or wounded balladeering: it's a lush, layered and textured album that's deeper and more mysterious than any of their previous works, pushing into the hidden nooks and crannies of Cave's mind for subtler but no-less-dark subject matter. The centerpiece, Jubilee Street, shows a band who are more comfortable with their craft than ever before, despite the exit of founder member Mick Harvey. It glowers and glimmers, with Warren Ellis' otherworldly violin line soaring and screeching like a funeral march. Cave’s never had much compassion for the rotten scoundrels who slime over his songs, but there’s a newfound empathy in his voice for the down-on-her-luck prostitute who's been terrorized by gangsters and drugs: it quivers as he hopes for rebirth and sings: "I am beyond recriminations... I'm transforming, I'm vibrating," as the score shudders towards some higher plane of being.

This is Jubilee Street:

This is Jubilee Street, live in Hollywood at the Fonda Theatre, on February 21st, 2013:

This is Finishing Jubilee Street:

This is Finishing Jubilee Street, live in Hollywood at the Fonda Theatre, on February 21st, 2013:

We now come to the song at #33, which is the title track to Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! (2008). The Bad Seeds get the funk! A darkly comic travelogue, where 'Larry' - who "never asked to be raised up from the tomb" - cannons around New York and Los Angeles.

Released just a year after Grinderman's 2007 self-titled debut, there's a swagger to the album Dig, Lazarus Dig!!! that Cave and his Bad Seeds hadn't plundered for yonks: a brashness and bawdiness missing from their downbeat mid-00s period. And so while We Call Upon the Author - an interrogation of a god who can't be arsed to busy himself with the world's problems - is arguably more impressive, there's something so shriekingly camp about the title track that it feels like the most important, a shot of daft, witty testosterone that perked up a band in danger of becoming too dour. It's fast-and-loose garage rock, one chugging riff on a sweaty loop, with madcap noises and horns exploding in the background, as Cave reimagines the biblical mainstay Lazarus as the helpless fool, Larry, pissed off that he's been brought back to life in the gaudy 21st century as he stumbles from sex to drugs to prison to death. Poor Larry.

Here is Cave himself, explaining the source of his inspiration:

"Ever since I can remember hearing the Lazarus story, when I was a kid, you know, back in church, I was disturbed and worried by it. Traumatized, actually. We are all, of course, in awe of the greatest of Christ's miracles - raising a man from the dead - but I couldn't help but wonder how Lazarus felt about it. As a child it gave me the creeps, to be honest. I've taken Lazarus and stuck him in New York City, in order to give the song, a hip, contemporary feel. I was also thinking about Harry Houdini who spent a lot of his life trying to debunk the spiritualists who were cashing in on the bereaved. He believed there was nothing going on beyond the grave. He was the second greatest escapologist, Harry was, Lazarus, of course, being the greatest. I wanted to create a kind of vehicle, a medium, for Houdini to speak to us if he so desires, you know, from beyond the grave."

Here is ex-Bad Seed Kid Kongo Powers' opinion:

"Nick is special to me for his dedication to his own vision with no apologies or retractions. His love of artists, be it Burt Bacharach, Tammy Wynette, John Lee Hooker, or The Stooges, are on equal pedestals of reverence without irony. I first heard Nick Cave on The Birthday Party album Prayers On Fire. Lydia Lunch ordered me: 'Listen to this band! They have this song called Nick The Stripper…' She growled then cackled. How could I resist? The inverted rhythm, stinging guitars and Nick's lyrics immediately seduced me."

"I met Nick post-Birthday Party in LA. He was hanging out a bit with [The Gun Club's] Jeffrey Lee Pierce. I just remember a lot of wild hair on him, and on me, and the book, Under The Volcano, by Malcolm Lowry. It wasn't until a few years later in London that Mick Harvey and Nick asked me to fill in on the Your Funeral… My Trial tour that I got to know Nick better, as I moved to Berlin and spent the next three years as a Bad Seed. Dig, Lazarus Dig!!! is my favorite track. That song made me fall in love with Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds all over again. Plus it has a good beat and I like to dance to it. I believe Nick has gotten stronger with time. For me he's added another element to his recipe, too – he's become uplifting."

This is the song's studio version:

This is live at the Jools Holland TV show in the UK:

I've just mentioned We Call Upon the Author, a standout track - the second best (in my opinion) on Dig, Lazarus Dig!!! Here it is, at #32. It's the song in which Cave takes The Almighty himself to task on a couple of salient points…

In We Call Upon the Author, Cave has become a cross between the great 20th century poets of history and the outer edges of mental myths like Charles Olson and John Berryman who happen to play rock & roll. The latter of these writers is celebrated in the same tune for writing like "wet papier mache/and going out the "Heming-way." This occurs a mere line after he castigates the late Charles Bukowski for being a jerk.

Nick's partner-in-crime in most of the Bad Seeds' albums, Mick Harvey, has this to say:

"Much of Nick's work has probed at the big questions. Whether searching for the essence of our emotional foundations in his love songs or throwing up moral conundrums in a murder ballad - through a wealth of subject matter in between - it's the deeper, inner human workings that Nick repeatedly probes. They can be gut-wrenchingly confronting, heartbreakingly delicate, disturbingly violent, or just plain funny, and sometimes all of these at once. But they are always pushing at the boundaries of the listener's own emotional and moral positioning."

"Occasionally the music is more of a vehicle (though usually a pretty cool one) to transport the lyrical content. And so it is with We Call Upon The Author, a song which literally purports to be asking The Big Question, or at least confronting the Great Architect head on. A heady rush of rough verbiage, self-effacing observations and raw humor, it's typical of a kind of wild-word-roller-coaster which Nick has used throughout the years. As one of the songs on my last album with The Bad Seeds which helped me continue that love affair, it has a special place."

"It's hard for me to pick out just one song and write about it after so many years and songs that I love; the songs which were the reason I was around from first to last. In the end, after 30 years, I was still deeply affected, impressed and inspired by what Nick was writing. Long may that continue."

This is the studio version of We Call Upon The Author:

This is live at St Luke's, London:

Finally for today, at #31, is a song from another one of Nick Cave with the Bad Seeds' best albums, The Boatman's Call (1997). The song is called Where Do We Go Now But Nowhere? The preceding song on the album, (Are You The One) I've Been Waiting For is one of the best songs of pure shivering devotion ever written. After a song as good as that you'd think that nothing would come close, but Where Do We Go Now But Nowhere? is equally good, with some fantastic violin from Warren Ellis while Nick croons hopelessness and despair. This seems to be about Cave's crumbling marriage, expressing regret and guilt while still throwing blame at his ex-wife. Here are the two final verses of the song's bittersweet lyrics:

From the balcony we watched the carnival band
The crack of the drum a little child did scare
I can still feel his tiny fingers pressed in my hand
O where do we go now but nowhere?

If I could relive one day of my life
If I could relive just a single one
You on the balcony, my future wife
O who could have known, but no one?

And this is the song itself:

Now, let's continue with last week's statistics; we have had a steep drop for the second week in a row (31%): in fact, this was the second worst week of 2018, so far. As far as the stories were concerned, last week's Nick Cave did OK, while the story of Maria Callas is still performing very well, as well as all-time favorites, George Maharis and Freddie Jackson. There was also renewed interest in the Larry Parnes story.

May I remind you, if you like good Soul music, visit our last story, which has the details on how to vote for our upcoming Motown Countdown. I will be expecting many of you to vote. You can catch the story here: Motown Countdown

As far as countries are concerned, most of our major players kept their percentages more or less the same. Italy has experienced a minor increase, the United States, and Japan even bigger ones. With France being the only major player to actually have its overall percentage fall, this means that the United States returns to the top of the all-time chart, a position that it has held for all but two weeks.

Here are this week's Top 10 countries:

1. the United States

2. the United Kingdom

3. Greece

4. France

5. Canada

6. Japan

7. Italy

8. South Africa

9. Spain

10. Australia

Here are the other countries that graced us with their presence since our last statistics (alphabetically): Albania, Algeria, Argentina, Armenia, Austria, the Bahamas, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, China, Croatia, Curaçao, Cyprus, Czechia, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, El Salvador, Estonia, Finland, FYR Of Macedonia, Georgia, Germany, Ghana, Guadeloupe, Guernsey, Hong Kong, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Jamaica, Kenya, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lebanon, Lithuania, Madagascar, Malaysia, Malta, Mexico, Morocco, Mozambique, Nepal, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Norway, Pakistan, Peru, the Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Serbia, Singapore, Slovakia, South Korea, Suriname, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, Trinidad & Tobago, Turkey, Ukraine, the United Arab Emirates, Uruguay, Venezuela, Vietnam, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. Happy to have you all!

And here's the all-time Top 10:

1. the United States = 25.8%

2. France = 25.6%

3. the United Kingdom = 13.6%

4. Greece = 6.4%

5. Russia = 2.6%

6. Germany = 1.7%

7. Canada = 1.42%

8. Italy = 1.24%

9. Turkey = 1.08%

10. Cyprus = 0.95%

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