Happy Birthday Lydia Lunch!

Raising a glass to Lydia Lunch with a performance with Nick Cave, Die Haut and friends at the Tempodrome in Berlin from 1992.

Remembering Marianne Faithfull on her birthday

Raising a glass to the amazing Marianne Faithfull on her birthday with a few talk show interviews and one with Nick Cave.  

Happy Birthday Nick Cave!

Raising a glass to Nick Cave with his performance with The Bad Seeds at the Accor Arena in Paris last November.  

LINKS 

Arte Concert Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds at Accor Arena 17/11/2024

R.I.P. Marianne Faithfull, 1946-2025

Sadly, singer/songwriter and actor Marianne Faithfull has passed away at the age of 78. She'll be greatly missed.

Nick Cave sees the folly in "disgraceful self-indulgence"

Watch Nick Cave's revealing 30-minute chat on the Australian Story followed by his entire discussion with Stephen Colbert. 

Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds preview Wild God album with "Frogs"

Check out "Frogs" and "Wild God" off Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' forthcoming Wild God album following the preview clip.

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds share "Wild God" off their forthcoming album

Check out "Wild God" by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds followed by Nick's recent chat with Sean O'Hagan. 

Shane MacGowan remembered by Nick Cave

Nick Cave recently wrote about Shane MacGowan on The Red Hand Files site and spoke about him with Sean O'Hagan. 

Remembering Rowland S. Howard with "Shivers"

Remembering Rowland S. Howard on his birthday with his version of "Shivers" and one by his Boys Next Door mate Nick Cave.

New Birthday Party documentary Mutiny In Heaven on the way

Mutiny In Heaven is slated for a Toronto screening at the Paradise Cinema on October 5th. Check the preview clip below. 

Here's the scoop... 

Hailed as "a one band war" and "the most violent band in the world," The Birthday Party with Nick Cave was one of the definitive post-punk groups and goth rock pioneers, creative and destructive in equal measure. Their incendiary live performances were the stuff of violent, anarchic legend. Featuring a wealth of rare and unseen archives, original artwork, unreleased tracks, studio footage, animation, and told exclusively by the group's members, Ian White's new film MUTINY IN HEAVEN is the story of epic struggle, artistic genius and total chaos, bringing the band’s own account to the screen for the first time. Featuring Nick Cave, Rowland S. Howard, Mick Harvey, Phill Calvert, and Tracy Pew. For more info and upcoming screening dates check the site right here. Watch the preview clip below. 

Nick Cave & Debbie Harry share duet from Jeffrey Lee Pierce tribute project

"On The Other Side" by Nick Cave & Debbie Harry is off the new Jeffrey Lee Pierce salute "The Task Has Overwhelmed Us"

Here's the scoop from Glitterhouse Records...

Nearly ten years in the making, The Task Has Overwhelmed Us is the long-awaited fourth volume in The Jeffrey Lee Pierce Sessions Project series slated for release on September 29th via Glitterhouse Records. 

Conceived in 2006 by the late Gun Club titan’s guitarist Cypress Grove, the Project has always aimed to highlight Pierce as one of America’s most fascinatingly influential singer-songwriters of the last century while propelling his outpourings into modern times by placing it in the hands of former collaborators, friends and fans. 

Following 2009’s We Are Only Riders, 2012’s The Journey Is Long and 2014’s Axels and Sockets, The Task Has Overwhelmed Us presents stellar interpretations of tracks from Pierce’s Gun Club and solo canons along with fresh works constructed from rehearsal skeletons, previously unheard lyrics, songs only performed live. Taking song ideas without lyrics and words looking for musical settings gave rise to what Cypress Grove calls “Frankenstein songs”. 

The stellar roll-call of contributors features the Project’s original recurring core including Nick Cave, Debbie Harry, Mark Lanegan, Lydia Lunch, Youth, Jim Jones, Warren Ellis, Mark Stewart, Hugo Race, Cypress himself plus Mick Harvey and J.P. Shilo as The Amber Lights, even Jeffrey himself from original tapes. These are joined by new bloods including Dave Gahan, Suzie Stapleton, Duke Garwood, Pam Hogg, The Coathangers, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club’s Peter Hayes and Leah Shapiro, Humanist, The Walkabouts’ Chris Eckman, Jozef van Wissem, Jim Jarmusch, Chantal Acda and Welsh space-rockers Sendelica with US vocalists Wonder and Dynamax Roberts. Like Pierce’s beloved jazz, the cast often spill into each other’s tracks.

The mood throughout the eighteen tracks is of rare gems crafted with love, respect and the energy of committed fans, even obsessives channeling whatever facet or fragment of Pierce’s unruly muse fires their creative juices. It’s pretty much carved in legend how Jeffrey Lee Pierce roared out of post-punk LA brandishing an incendiary genius that flamed in the spotlight for just fifteen years before his untimely death in 1996. Despite the impact of the Gun Club and resonance of Pierce’s back catalogue, his legacy seemed in danger of shrinking to eternal cult status earlier this century, fading against modern blandness yet ever-radiating for a gaggle of core diehards he’d touched with his supernatural muse (quite possibly in a blizzard of chaos). 

Then along came London-based guitarist Cypress Grove, who’d played with Jeffrey in his final years gigging and on 1992’s Ramblin' Jeffrey Lee & Cypress Grove With Willie Love. Sorting out his loft one day in 2006, Cypress found an anonymous cassette containing bedroom rehearsals for Ramblin’… - “very vague but good enough to work from,” he says. “So I had the idea of asking people who worked with Jeffrey, were friends with him or who simply admired his work to help me complete the songs.” 

“The Cypress Tape” would soon be joined by other unrealized song sources from diverse tapes supplied by key characters in Jeffrey’s life coming on board, including Gene Temesy, who started the Gun Club fan club in 1984 and brought home Pierce’s ‘98 autobiography Go Tell The Mountain, writer-DJ-musician Phast Phreddie Patterson and Jeffrey’s sister Jacqui, who supplied unfinished songs and previously unseen writings she’d discovered after her brother’s death. “The source material for some of the songs was so vague that it could be interpreted in many ways,” says Cypress. “There was no definitive or ‘original’ version. It was like trying to restore a painting where much of the material was missing.” (Lunch’s turning some lyrics from Phreddie’s collection into the scabrous nightmare roll of ‘Time Drains Away’, bolstered by Jarmusch on guitar and van Wissem’s medieval lute). 

From Gahan’s opening haunted piano ballad take on ‘Mother of Earth’ through, for example, Lanegan singing ‘Go Tell The Mountain’ backed by Ellis and Cave (who back Jeffrey himself on ‘Yellow Eyes’), Cave duetting beautifully with Debbie Harry again on ‘On the Other Side’ to Sendelica and Secret Knowledge’s Wonder hotwiring ‘Bad America’ into caterwauling mayhem mixed by veteran electro-Def Jam producer Jay Burnett, NY rapper Dynamax acknowledging Jeffrey’s hiphop obsession over the juddering beats. 

Pre-order a copy right here. Check the tracklisting followed by "On The Other SIde" below. 

Jeffrey Lee Pierce Sessions Project – The Task Has Overwhelmed Us

1. Mother Of Earth - Dave Gahan

2. La La Los Angeles - The Coathangers

3. Yellow Eyes - Jeffrey Lee Pierce (feat. Nick Cave & Warren Ellis)

4. Debbie By The Christmas Tree - The Amber Lights

5. Go Tell The Mountain - Mark Lanegan (feat. Nick Cave & Warren Ellis)

6. Going Down The Red River - Jim Jones and the Righteous Mind

7. The Stranger In Our Town - Peter Hayes, Leah Shapiro, & Humanist

8. Secret Fires - Suzie Stapleton (feat. Duke Garwood)

9. Tiger Girl - Hugo Race

10. On The Other Side - Nick Cave & Debbie Harry

11. Idiot Waltz - Cypress Grove

12. Tiger Girl - The Amber Lights

13. From Death To Texas - Alejandro Escovedo

14. Vodou - Mark Stewart<

15. Time Drains Away - Lydia Lunch, Jozef van Wissem, Jim Jarmusch

16. Lucky Jim - Chris Eckman & Chantal Acda

17. I Was Ashamed - Pam Hogg (feat. Warren Ellis & Youth)

18. Bad America - Sendelica (feat. Wonder & Dynamax Roberts)

 

Anna Calvi shares "Ain't No Grave" from Peaky Blinders-inspired Tommy EP

Anna Calvi collaborated with on the score for Peaky Blinders' final season with director Anthony Byrne. Listen to "Ain't No Grave"

Here's the scoop from Peaky Blinders...

Anna Calvi, the artist and composer behind the music of series five and six of Peaky Blinders, has shared her new single ‘Ain’t No Grave’ today. It’s been featured in the show since series 5, so you will know it already. Her new EP entitled Tommy, with four songs inspired by the series, is out next month on May 6th, and includes a cover of Red Right Hand, the iconic Peaky Blinders anthem.

A message from Anna:

"Peaky Blinders is really all about the psychology of Tommy Shelby. As such I always felt he should have an original song that sums him up - he’s the ultimate anti-hero - murderous, cold, terrifying, and yet has a deep love for his family and a naive childlike hope that he will one day rise above it all and be happy. I wanted to portray how he believes he is infallible to the point of godliness, and the lyrics “there ain’t no grave, can hold my body down” fit him perfectly. The song is all about destiny - it rolls forward and even Tommy doesn’t have the power to stop it. All the songs on this EP are trying to encapsulate the contradictions of this fascinating and enigmatic character. I’ve been in the mind of Tommy Shelby for years now, and this EP is a love letter to him, and my way to say goodbye to this iconic show." 

– Anna 🖤

 

That time The Birthday Party played a Peel Session in 1981

Nick Cave and crew topped their raucous version of "Release The Bats" with a parting rip through The Stooges' "Loose."

Happy Birthday Marianne Faithfull

Celebrating Marianne Faithfull's 75th birthday with a couple of interviews surrounding her latest album She Walks In Beauty.

She Walks In Beauty

With She Walks in Beauty Marianne Faithfull, with composer and multi-instrumentalist Warren Ellis, releases one of the most distinctive and singular albums of her long, extraordinary life and career. It was recorded just before and during the first Covid-19 lockdown – during which the singer herself became infected and almost died of the disease – with musical friends and family including not only composer Warren Ellis but Nick Cave, Brian Eno, cellist Vincent Ségal and producer-engineer Head. She Walks in Beauty fulfils Faithfull’s long-held ambition to record an album of poetry with music.

Delving deep into her past, it’s a record that draws on her passion for the English Romantic poets, a passion she fostered in her A Level studies with one Mrs Simpson at St Joseph’s Convent School in Reading, before leaving for London at the age of 16. From there she entered the world of ‘As Tears Go By’, of Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones, Top of the Pops and the left-hand path of pop and stage stardom. Sixties iconography and outrage followed, as did her subsequent battles with addiction before her 1979 return to powerful female and artistic autonomy with Broken English, an album which featured her setting to music Heathcote Williams’ poem of eviscerating rage, ‘Why D’Ya Do It?’

On subsequent albums, such as 1995’s A Secret Life, she set the poems of her friend Frank McGuinness to music, while 1998’s Seven Deadly Sins drew on Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht. She toured a show of Shakespeare’s sonnets with cellist Vincent Ségal in 2008-2009, and earlier in 2020 took part in a relay reading of Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. But it is only now that a project she had nursed through the decades has come to fruition.

Instrumental in making She Walks in Beauty a reality is her longtime friend and manager Francois Ravard. “It was Francois who put it together and made it happen,” she says. “And it was him who persuaded Warren to commit, which was really difficult because Warren’s doing so many things.”

“Marianne had a wonderful idea for this poetry record, and she wanted to do it straight away,” recalls Ravard. “I loved the idea immediately, and I called Head and asked him to go to Marianne to record her readings.” Then he approached Warren to see if he could score them in the same way he scores his films. “It took time for him to realise what he could do, but afterwards he said that he’d had one of the best times in his life working on it.”

Warren Ellis with Marianne Faithfull

It was recorded in part at her London home just before and after lockdown, with PJ Harvey’s producer Head, who then sent the voice recordings to Ellis, who set about composing the music in his Paris studio. “I didn’t think of them as songs,” he says. “I wasn’t locked into melodies or chords. I could take incredible liberties. It wasn’t about creating something that had to follow the text or outline it – it was free in that respect. The important thing was that it didn’t get in the way.”

He describes the music of She Walks in Beauty as a kind of musique concrete, incorporating street sounds with a range of acoustic and electronic instrumentation and manipulation. “My preferred way of making music is to leave a lot of it to chance, to let accidents happen,” he says. “I’ve been moving away from structures in things. This music is me attempting to push forward. I think it’s as good as anything I’ve ever done,” he adds, “in terms of the spirit of it and the process I went through to make it.”

Working in isolation through lockdown in his Paris studio, Ellis’s immersion in the readings took over his life for a while. “It’s really meditative to hear this stuff over and over,” he says. “For a couple of months it was all I listened to.” Eventually he shared the music he had composed to counterpoint the poems with an enthusiastic Nick Cave, who went on to play piano on many of the tracks (“He downloaded it as he listened to it while talking to me on the phone and he was like, ‘wow, this is incredible, this is amazing!’”). Brian Eno created compelling sound textures on the likes of ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ and ‘The Bridge of Sighs’, while Vincent Ségal added cello parts to Shelley’s liminal, otherworldly ‘To The Moon’, and Byron’s late night lament ‘So We’ll Go No More A-Roving’, among others.

Drawing deep on the poetry of Shelley, Keats, Byron, Wordsworth, Tennyson and Thomas Hood, Faithfull’s vocal performances set to Ellis’s subtle collages of sound draw out the heart, the quick, the vibrant living matter in all these great poems, making them fresh, renewing them with the complex, lived-in timbres of her voice, and set to a subtle palette of ambient musical settings. It’s both a radical departure and a return to her original inspirations as an artist and performer.

The greatest poetry is best heard, and Faithfull’s accounts of some of the greatest lyric poetry in our language – Keats’ ‘Ode To A Nightingale’ and ‘To Autumn’ – are spine-tingling in their deep understanding of the poetry’s powerful currents of meaning and identification. On ‘Nightingale’, her voice opens up like an epic landscape, while in Shelley’s miniature masterpiece, ‘To The Moon’, she sounds otherworldly, as if calling down from another medium, and the atonal, otherworldly sound textures provided by Eno on ‘Bridge of Sighs’ and ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ become a compelling foil for Faithfull’s haunting interpretations of these rich, dark poems.

“They’ve been with Marianne her whole life,” says Ellis. “She believes in these texts. That world, she inhabits it, embodies it, and that really comes through. She really means it. It’s no blind reading. And what’s great about hearing them is that she totally takes you with her. It’s inclusive. She’s inviting you into this world with her. She does that with a song too. I’ve seen her do things in the studio, deliver a vocal where there’s not one dry eye in the room. And then she’d go, ‘Was that alright?’. She’s got one of those voices. There’s just something about the way she can deliver that is incredibly affecting.”

“Eventually I always end up where I was meant to be,” says Faithfull. “I’ve noticed that. It may take a long time, but I get there. I never forget these things. After all these years, I’ve drawn the strands back and they still mean something and they resonate more, actually, because I now have life experience. Life and near-death experience. Many times! Not just once.”

It’s perhaps no coincidence that her previous album, 2018’s highly acclaimed Negative Capability, took its title from a central tenet of Keats’ poetics. “And what that is, is to live in doubt, to not be absolutely sure of yourself. But this time,” she adds, “I wasn’t in doubt – I’ve been thinking about it for so long, this album, it’s been in my head for so long, I think I really knew exactly what I wanted. I just picked the poems I really loved, and I can’t help but say I think I was very lucky. We got it.”

She Walks in Beauty is scheduled for release on April 30th 2021, with artwork created for the album by British artist and lifelong friend, Colin Self, and with the full texts of the poems, and commentary, included in the liner notes. While Faithfull continues to recover from the after-effects of Covid-19, and the world around us continues to struggle with the impact of the worldwide pandemic, these are poems and performances to steady and lift the spirit.

Get a copy of Marianne Faithfull's new album She Walks In Beauty right here. Check the interview clips and BBC documentary from 1999 below.  

 

LINKS

Billboard Marianne Faithfull turns 75 – celebrate with her 10 best songs (according to Joe Lynch)

Dave Gahan channels Nick Cave for new Imposter covers project

Judging by recent performances, Depeche Mode mainmain Dave Gahan appears to have been studying the Bad Seeds. 

Nick Cave & Warren Ellis share new song "We Are Not Alone"

"We Are Not Alone" is from the Nick Cave & Warren Ellis soundtrack for the film "La Panthère des Neiges" available Dec. 17th.

Watch the trailer for the Karen Dalton documentary In My Own Time

Here's the trailer for the excellent Robert Yapkowitz documentary film Karen Dalton: In My Own Time. 

Chan Marshall previews Cat Power's new Covers album

Watch Cat Power perform Frank Ocean's "Bad Religion" off her forthcoming Covers album due in January. 

Here's the scoop...

Cat Power, aka singer, songwriter, musician and producer Chan Marshall, will release her new album Covers on January 14th 2022, via Domino Records. 

The announcement arrives after Cat Power debuted a fresh reimagining of Frank Ocean’s “Bad Religion” on The Late Late Show with James Corden. Watch that performance of “Bad Religion” below.  

Cover songs have always occupied a crucial place in the Marshall canon, and Covers completes a trilogy of sorts, following beloved past Cat Power collections Jukebox (2008) and The Covers Record (2000). While she frequently delights and surprises with the songs she chooses to cover, it’s Marshall’s total commitment to the performance - imbuing the songs with a creative singularity that rivals her original work - that make Cat Power covers so special. Says Pitchfork, Marshall can “rearrange a song simply by squinting at it.”

Produced in its entirety by Marshall, Covers features fully reimagined songs by Frank Ocean, Bob Seger, Kitty Wells, Jackson Browne, Iggy Pop, The Pogues, Nick Cave and more, plus an updated rendition of her own song “Hate” from The Greatest (2006), retitled “Unhate” for this album. 

Marshall’s take on “Bad Religion” originated after performing the excoriating original “In Your Face,” from 2018’s Wanderer, on tour: “That song was bringing me down,” she admits. “So I started pulling out lyrics from ‘Bad Religion’ and singing those instead of getting super depressed. Performing covers is a very enjoyable way to do something that feels natural to me when it comes to making music.”

Covers closes with a powerful take on the Billie Holiday-associated standard “I’ll Be Seeing You,” which was inspired by recent losses within Marshall’s creative inner circle—including Sun collaborator Phillippe Zdar, who tragically passed in 2019. “When people who you love have been taken from you, there’s always a song that holds their memory in your mind,” Marshall says. “It’s a conversation with those on the other side, and it’s really important for me to reach out to people that way.”

Covers is the first album from Cat Power since Wanderer, her widely-acclaimed 2018 Domino debut, which earned rave reviews and features with the New York Times, The Guardian, The Cut, a NPR Tiny Desk, and a duet with Lana Del Rey on "Woman," which The New Yorker called a "trembling manifesto." Marshall’s work as Cat Power has defied genre and convention, her legacy rippling through the work of a wide range of contemporary musical luminaries. 

Covers is available to pre-order now digitally, CD, LP and limited edition silver vinyl LP with an exclusive 7” featuring a cover of the Rolling Stones' "You Got the Silver" from the Domino right here. Watch Cat Power perform Frank Ocean's "Bad Religion" followed by her version of The Pogues' "A Pair Of Brown Eyes"

 

Cat Power – Covers 

Bad Religion - Frank Ocean

Unhate - Cat Power - Chan Marshall

Pa Pa Power - Dead Man’s Bones

A Pair of Brown Eyes - The Pogues

Against the Wind - Bob Seger

Endless Sea - Iggy Pop

These Days – Jackson Browne

It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels - Kitty Wells

I Had a Dream Joe - Nick Cave

Here Comes a Regular - The Replacements

I’ll Be Seeing You - Billie Holiday

Long overdue Karen Dalton documentary out October 1

Influential bluesy folk singer/songwriter Karen Dalton finally has her story told with help from Nick Cave & Angel Olsen.

Here's the scoop... 

Blues and folk singer Karen Dalton was a prominent figure in 1960s New York. Idolized by Bob Dylan and Nick Cave, Karen discarded the traditional trappings of success and led an unconventional life until her early death. Since most images of Karen have been lost or destroyed, the documentary Karen Dalton: In My Own Time uses Karen’s dulcet melodies and interviews with loved ones to build a rich portrait of this singular woman and her hauntingly beautiful voice.

Directed by Robert Yapkowitz & Richard Peete

Produced by Traci Carlson & Richard Peete

IN THEATERS OCTOBER 1. ON DIGITAL NOVEMBER 16.

LINKS

Karen Dalton: In My Own Time www.KarenDaltonMovie.com

Rolling Stone New doc tells story of Karen Dalton

Nico's Drama of Exile reissued with bonus alternate mixes

Modern Harmonic's update of Nico's post-Velvets return to rock, 1981's Drama of Exile, includes eight remixes.  

Here's the scoop...

As one critic memorably put it, when Nico spoke it was like coffin-lids creaking. When she sang it was like listening to ravens taking off 13 at a time. Nico was like nothing rock music had ever seen or heard before or since. Features originals along with stoic takes on Bowie and The Velvet Underground. Includes the complete original album plus alternate versions!

Get a copy of Nico's Drama of Exile via Bandcamp right here. Check out the track listing following a version of the original album, an unsettling 1982 performance of David Bowie's "Heroes" and a haunting rendition of "Genghis Khan" from 1978 which is actually creepier than the studio version. Nick Cave recalls a chance encounter with Nico in the links below. 

Nico - Drama of Exile

1. Genghis Khan 3:56

2. Purple Lips 4:16

3. One More Chance 5:44

4. Henry Hudson 3:59

5. Waiting For The Man 4:18

6. Sixty Forty 4:55

7. The Sphinx 3:34

8. Orly Flight 4:02

9. Heroes 6:09 

10. Genghis Khan (Alternate Mix) 3:34

11. One More Chance (Alternate Mix) 4:12

12. Henry Hudson (Alternate Mix) 3:46

13. Waiting For The Man (Alternate Mix) 4:17

14. Sixty Forty (Alternate Mix) 4:36

15. The Sphinx (Alternate Mix) 4:02

16. Orly Flight (Alternate Mix) 2:47

17. Heroes (Alternate Mix) 5:41

LINKS 

The Red Hand Files Nick Cave recalls a strange encounter with Nico