The Nick Cave Top 75 Countdown (#30-26) & This Week's Statistics

Hello, my friends, old and new! Here's another installment of our regular weekend story.

Before the Nick Cave countdown continues, however, let's begin with our bonus track, from one of the soundtracks that Cave wrote in his long and illustrious career. In 2012, Quelques Heures De Printemps (A Few Hours of Spring) was the first film-score that Nick Cave and his writing partner Warren Ellis composed for a French film. The film did not have a happy subject; it concerned the problems of old age and the thorny subject of assisted suicide. It starred Vincent Lindon, Hélène Vincent, and Emmanuelle Seigner. Here's part of the soundtrack:

At #30 on our countdown we find a song that we have already mentioned last week, called (Are You The One) I've Been Waiting For. It is found on one of Nick Cave & Bad Seeds' greatest albums, The Boatman's Call (1997). As I've already mentioned, (Are You The One) I've Been Waiting For is one of the best songs of pure shivering devotion ever written. I love the sense of anticipation that runs throughout the song, I love the bridge, but nothing can come close to the way he delivers the song's exquisite lyrics. It's a performance worthy of Scott Walker. Here are some of the lyrics:

"Out of sorrow entire worlds have been built
Out of longing great wonders have been willed
They're only little tears, darling, let them spill
And lay your head upon my shoulder
Outside my window the world has gone to war
Are you the one that I've been waiting for?

O we will know, won't we?
The stars will explode in the sky
O but they don't, do they?
Stars have their moment and then they die"

This is the song:

This is live in Milano, Italy, 2009:

At #29 is a song from Grinderman's first, self-titled album, released in 2007. Grinderman was a majestic beast with a short lifespan, helmed by Cave and his iconic offsider, Warren Ellis. The song is called No Pussy Blues. It begins with the sounds of a typewriter plunking only to be joined by a Sclavunos' hi-hat before Cave prattles in spoken word with real menace: "My face is finished, my body's gone, and I can't help thinking but think standing up here with all this applause and gazing down at all the young and beautiful with looking up with their questioning eyes/That I must above all things love myself..." Joined by a snarling bass, he goes on to try to woo some young woman in the crowd with all his tricks, from sucking in his gut and getting all togged up to quoting her Yeats to doing her dishes and sending her doves, but he is rejected. The wail of age is fraught with both danger and delight as he continues his desperate and unsuccessful attempt at seduction, but all he ends up with is the "no pussy blues." It adds up to two things: black humor and a love for the kind of rock & roll younger musicians have to plot, plan, pose and dig deep into their record collections to try and emulate. When the band jumps in with all the racket unleashed, the track is as tragically funny as it is unhinged. The singer's frustration is understood and empathized with to the point of sheer vitriol. And it's a careening jolt of rock & roll that would send his listeners to the volume control for more.

This is what Nick Cave himself had to say on the subject:

"When I go into the studio with Grinderman, it's a kind of talent I have to be able to think on my feet lyrically and be able to ad lib and rhyme at the same time. I get into these long narrative stories. They go in directions that somehow bypass those things that get in the way of writing a song - like good taste. Like whether it's a good idea to be singing about this thing or not. It takes you to different places than when you're sitting in an office. Something like No Pussy Blues, for example: that was a title that I'd written in my notebook, and my notebook is anything goes. But once I sit down, I think 'Nahh…', because you can't help but consider the ramifications of a particular lyric, or you can't help see the lyric through other people's eyes. But when you're ad-libbing you don't have that self-editing process. Then you see it in a format where it works, and think, 'Fuck, it's cool.'

"At some point in my career, I've managed to flip this little switch in my head which says 'It doesn't fucking matter' and go in with a certain sense of humor about it all - do what you can do, and it doesn't really matter. And I think for my lyric writing that became hugely beneficial, and induced a kind of levity to the stuff I was writing, and lyrically it wasn't all quite so weighed down."

Here it is:

This is a great live version:

At #28 is another song from The Boatman's Call (1997), called Green Eyes. In an interview, Cave stated that the opening stanza was about Tori Amos; he later recanted, stating that when an interview bored him, he made stuff up. It was actually inspired by singer PJ Harvey, with whom Nick had a brief relationship around that time. The song includes a line from Sonnet 18, by Louise Labé ("Kiss me, rekiss me, & kiss me again"). In this song Cave duets with himself, singing the song and reciting the lyrics all at once - it's very effective, creating a cinematic atmosphere that's would easily belong to a David Lynch movie. Here it is:

This is the object of his affection, PJ Harvey, who responded a year later with a Pascal Comelade's song of the same title:

At #27 we find Babe, I'm on Fire, the pièce de résistance on Nocturama (2003), the last Bad Seeds album to feature founding member Blixa Bargeld, which also reunited Nick Cave with Nick Launay, who had produced Junkyard by The Birthday Party 21 years earlier.

Babe, I'm on Fire is a welcome blast of energy, the longest song on the album by far. A frantic list song in the vein of Dylan's Subterranean Homesick Blues, it lasts for 15 minutes and 40 verses and touches on AIDS, terrorism and Australia's treatment of asylum seekers. It rhymes "Guernica" with "hernia" and features a lyrical cast including Bill Gates, George Bush, Sonny Liston, "the sweet little goth with her ears made of cloth" and "the poor Pakistani with his lamb biryani". And on top of Cave's startling lyric - which shifts from playful doggerel to poignant observation, often within the space of a line - the Bad Seeds play ferociously, underpinning the verses with scalding, distorted organ and relentlessly pounding drums.

The song offers a tantalizing glimpse of what Cave and his band can do when they are operating at full throttle, being enough to disabuse anyone of the notion that Nick Cave's middle-aged contentment has precipitated a slide into complacency. This is what a real fusion of the old firebrand and the mature musician should sound like; the passion and aggression of Deanna, or Janglin' Jack, minus the raunch, with superior arrangements and musicianship. Babe, I'm on Fire closes the album with fifteen minutes of flawless, incendiary madness; The Bad Seeds produce a Latin-and-blues-tinged collage of shredded organ and guitar strings, dub bass, and Cave at his howling, vitriolic best. It fits squarely in his personal hall of fame, and in particular, makes a moldy joke of the remainder of Nocturama. Here it is:

Finally for today, at #26, is More News from Nowhere, a song from Nick Cave & Bad Seeds' Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! (2008), the last album to feature founding member Mick Harvey, who left the Bad Seeds in 2009. At this point, it had been almost thirty years since Nick Cave hit the music scene as a member of the Boys Next Door. And, after all that time, he still hadn't shown every side of himself. More News from Nowhere shows Cave as a friendly, personable guy who makes fun music, cleverly retelling the Odyssey in the modern day and doing so with a really catchy guitar riff backing him up.

The song draws its title from News from Nowhere, an 1890 utopian socialist novel by William Morris. It was the album's second single and its haunting and unsettling closer. Musically and lyrically it walks the line between Bob Dylan's wry, bluesy, sprawling observations on 21st-century life and the light, sarcastic celebration of decadence in Lou Reed's Walk on the Wild Side.

More News from Nowhere is tempting to read as autobiography, as the catalog of women's names includes a "Miss Polly" (Cave's former lover PJ Harvey?), an Alina (Cave's former lover Anita Lane?), and a Deanna (whoever the song Deanna was based on?). It's also the one moment on the record where this impenetrably cool customer lets his guard down, wondering: "Don't it make you feel so sad, don't the blood rush to your feet/To think that everything you do today, tomorrow is obsolete?"

Here it is:

This is from a performance at "Friday Night with Jonathan Ross" in 2008:

Now, let's continue with last week's statistics; this week's visits were more or less the same as last week's. As far as the stories were concerned, last week's Nick Cave and Marilyn Monroe did well, as well as all-time favorites, George Maharis and Freddie Jackson.

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

As far as countries are concerned, most of our major players kept their percentages more or less the same. Only France has experienced a drop, while the United States, Greece, Canada, South Africa, the Netherlands, and the United Arab Emirates saw their all-time percentage rise.

Here are this week's Top 10 countries:

1. the United States

2. Greece

3. the United Kingdom

4. Canada

5. South Africa

6. France

7. the Netherlands

8. Germany

9. Italy

10. the United Arab Emirates

Here are the other countries that graced us with their presence since our last statistics (alphabetically): Albania, Argentina, Australia, Austria, Barbados, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Bulgaria, Chile, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cyprus, Czechia, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Egypt, Finland, FYR Of Macedonia, Guadeloupe, Haiti, Hong Kong, Hungary, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Ireland, Jamaica, Japan, Jordan, Kenya, Kuwait, Lithuania, Malaysia, Malta, Mauritius, Mexico, Morocco, Nepal, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Niger, Nigeria, Norway, Pakistan, Peru, the Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Romania, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Suriname, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Tanzania, Thailand, Trinidad & Tobago, Turkey, Ukraine, Uruguay, Venezuela, Vietnam, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. Happy to have you all!

And here's the all-time Top 10:

1. the United States = 25.9%

2. France = 25.4%

3. the United Kingdom = 13.6%

4. Greece = 6.5%

5. Russia = 2.6%

6. Germany = 1.7%

7. Canada = 1.43%

8. Italy = 1.24%

9. Turkey = 1.08%

10. Cyprus = 0.95%

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