The Boatman’s Call

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We’re making a Bad Seeds record soon. We haven’t gone into the actual recording of it, but we have a brilliant bass player in the Bad Seeds, Martyn Casey. Marty lives in Perth, Australia, but maybe Colin will come in and play something. He has a completely different style from Marty. Marty’s a jaw-dropping powerhouse who holds everything together. Colin tends to be more fluid and melodic. Anything that offers a kind of ego death, a moment of self-obliteration, can be—at least for me, in my grief, in my life—such a balm. Often, I just want to turn the volume down on myself a little bit. The opener is a modern-day classic. Into My Arms is a love song so perfect you wonder why any other composition of its kind bothers to go up against a ballad that all others should rightfully refer to as ‘Sir’. Cave opens his heart from the outset, the song beginning with the stunning line of "I don't believe in an interventionist God / But I know, darling, that you do". It’s such a gorgeous song that Peaches Geldof even has its lyrics tattooed on her (but don’t let that put you off). It’s also the only Bad Seeds tune you’re likely to hear at a wedding.

The Bad Seeds' mid-90s pinnacle forms the basis of the latest round of Mute's excellent reissue series, which include vividly remastered versions of the original albums, along with a 5.1 surround sound mix, B-sides, official videos, and the latest installments of Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard's illuminating fan-testimonial documentaries, Do You Love Me Like I Love You? The title of the film series is taken from the two-part song that opens and closes Let Love In, an authoritative show of force that was perfectly timed for the Bad Seeds' insurrectionary appearance on the 1994 Lollapalooza tour. The Bad Seeds had always traded in high drama and dissonance, but never before had they sounded this imposingly heavy-- the lecherous intimations of "Do You Love Me?" explode into a torrent of chain-gang vocals and drummer Thomas Wydler's machine-gunned snare rolls, while "Loverman" triggers its quiet-to-loud eruptions so masterfully, Metallica would later cover the song to the surprise of no one. Suddenly, the world is full of radical possibility because you’re not scared of anything anymore. It’s kind of naïve, because you can always lose more, but it also feels very real.That can happen through deep listening, too, I think. One thing you said earlier, and this comes up in the book also, is the faulty idea that doubt somehow precludes faith—that you can’t have both doubt and faith at the same time. Yet maybe the act of balancing the two is the act of religiosity? Carpenter, Susan (28 October 2004). "A fertile mind for dark tales". Los Angeles Times . Retrieved 2 January 2012. Deep down I suspected that drugs might have been a problem between us, but there were other things too,” he said, answering a question from a fan in Brazil. Selected items are only available for delivery via the Royal Mail 48® service and other items are available for delivery using this service for a charge. AMP winner Sampa The Great creates history". Sydney Morning Herald. 6 March 2020 . Retrieved 13 April 2020.

The song takes the form of a love ballad, with a piano and an electric bass as the sole instruments used. Music journalist and critic Toby Creswell included "Into My Arms" in his book 1001 Songs: The Great Songs of All Time and the Artists, Stories and Secrets Behind Them, in which he attributed the song's melancholic lyrics to the break-up of Cave's long-term relationship with Viviane Carneiro and his subsequent brief relationship and break-up with English musician PJ Harvey. [1] [2] In Cave's lecture "The Secret Life of the Love Song" to the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, he counts the song among those he is most proud of having written. [3]James Johnston. "Working With Ken Russell: Actor & Musician James Johnston Remembers". The Quiteus . Retrieved 1 April 2013. Robert Dimery; Michael Lydon (23 March 2010). 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: Revised and Updated Edition. Universe. ISBN 978-0-7893-2074-2.

The EG Awards (known as Music Victoria Awards since 2013) are an annual awards night celebrating Victorian music. They commenced in 2006. Cave and his bandmates also pursued other creative ambitions around this time. In 1987, the Bad Seeds appeared in the Wim Wenders film Wings of Desire, [18] and Cave was featured in the 1988 film Ghosts... of the Civil Dead, which he and Race co-wrote. [19] Cave's first novel And the Ass Saw the Angel was published in 1989. [20] Growing success (1989–1997) [ edit ] Jim Sclavunos – drums (6), melodica (12), bells (5, 14), percussion (13), organ (15), bongos (16), tambourine (17)

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In mid-1993, the group returned once more to London and recorded Let Love In, the follow-up album. Let Love In expanded upon the fuller ensemble sound that was established in Henry's Dream [21] and featured contributions from Howard, Ellis, Tex Perkins ( Beasts of Bourbon) and David McComb (The Triffids). [ citation needed] Several popular songs, such as " Red Right Hand" (which featured in the Scream film series [22] [23] and was used as the theme song for Peaky Blinders) and " Loverman" (later covered by Metallica), [24] were drawn from the album. During the promotional tour for the album, American percussionist and drummer Jim Sclavunos joined the group. [ citation needed]

Cave has written about the death of his son, his friendship with Warren Ellis, and the meaning of lyrics. In more political moments, he has called out homophobic fans and decried the cultural boycott of Israel as “cowardly and shameful”. Exactly. I read a beautiful line by the poet Ellen Bass, in a poem about grief called “The Thing Is.” She says, “Grief weights you down like your own flesh / only more of it, an obesity of grief.” That was quite a startling but deeply familiar image. Grief squeezes the common oxygen out of the room so that no one has air to breathe. Also in 2005, Cave completed work on his script for The Proposition, set in 19th-century Australia directed by John Hillcoat. [19] [30] Cave and Ellis collaborated on the film's score, [31] a partnership that later also scored the films The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007) and The Road (2009). [6] [32] Grinderman; Harvey's departure (2006–2012) [ edit ] It is genuinely difficult to sit down, with all your human limitations, and write a song. I am writing the lyrics to a new record at the moment, so all this is extremely raw, and I may be a little sensitive about these matters, to say the least! [ Laughs.] But, as the months drag on, you slowly draw the small threads of ideas together that hopefully, eventually, make up a group of songs that become an album. Once you’ve got that done, things start to reveal themselves and make sense, and you go into the studio with your band members, and you start recording the music, and it’s like collecting treasure. By the time you get these songs onto the stage, they have grown immensely in emotional stature. It can be a truly transcendent experience. So it’s a beautiful, upward journey, to write songs and present them onstage. These small, wretched, little lines that you’ve clawed out of yourself are suddenly amplified onstage, by the brilliance of the musicians who play them, to the absolute delight of your audience. It’s an extraordinary feeling, really, the trajectory of a small, inconsequential idea to something of true importance.Exactly. I find that it has made me bolder. I’m not so concerned with how I will be perceived, or what other people think of me. On an artistic level, there’s more risk-taking. You lose some of your concern about the outcome of things. Grief can be, in time, liberating artistically. Because what’s the worst that can happen? You get a bad review? O'Donnell, John; Creswell, Toby; Mathieson, Craig (October 2010). 100 Best Australian Albums. Prahran, Vic: Hardie Grant Books. ISBN 978-1-74066-955-9.