“Everyone was fucked up”: The album Nick Cave called painful to make
The history of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds is a fascinating but tumultuous one. It was to be expected given how the group formed with members of The Birthday Party, a group once deemed the most violent band in the world, grouping after its collapse. Once they’d united for a new troupe with some new faces, the same carnage continued with their first records made on rocky ground. In particular, their leader Nick Cave said the process of making one album was nothing short of “fucked up”.
The story of the band is inextricably interlinked with the story of Nick Cave, their leader. Cave is not just the frontman but is the force and vision behind the band. He writes the songs, sets the tone, and pulls it all together. That’s their superpower, as he’s established himself to be one of the most formidable forces in the rock world. But for a while, it was also their downfall as Cave’s early years, struggling with addiction and moving around Europe’s various seedy artistic scenes, were all that conducive for a productive and easy creative process.
Cave was a heroin addict for close to 20 years, but he splits the time into two distinct decades. The latter was strangely ordered from the early 1990s to the start of the 2000s. He’d shoot up in the morning and evening but be able to work with incredible focus and creativity during the day. But the first decade was nothing short of chaos. In the punk crowd of the 1980s, enjoying new notoriety and surrounded by a band of other addicts, it’s miraculous that the Bad Seeds ever managed to put a single song out, let alone create music of the high quality they did.
That was especially true of 1988’s Tender Prey, an album that Cave sees as representative of the band at the high of their carnage. “That record was so fucked up, the making of it was seriously difficult for everybody,” Cave said of the process. He thinks that’s audible in the mix, and he said, “I think you can kind of hear that a lot.”
That could be correct, as the album is a spiralling ten-track tour of darkness, devotion and grit. Instantly, it launches in with ‘The Mercy Seat’, one of Cave’s most defining creations that still shocks and perhaps even scares listeners to this day. It has the same effect on the band as Bad Seeds member George Vjestica told Far Out, “It has a life of its own,” adding, “Every single time we play that song, it’s almost ‘What is going to happen here?’” It’s a song that seemed to have the chaos of the album built into it, capturing the energy that Cave feels surrounds the record.
But then later down the tracklist, there’s ‘Deanna’, which is about the closest the band ever got to a pop song. However, in the lyrics, the strung-out, frantic nature of Cave’s life at the time is clear as he sings, “I ain’t down here for your love or money / I’m down here for your soul,” turning a love song into something altogether darker and more obsessive.
“It’s a complete basket case of a record,” band member Mick Harvey said of the album. But what else could be expected from an album made by a team of people, all at the very worst point of their addictions? “Everyone was very fucked up, in a standard kind of way, and a little bit more so,” Cave said, adding that even their producer Tony Cohen was worse for wear during their sessions.
“It was a nightmare, that record. It is reflective of a group—particularly myself,” Cave said but later was able to look back at the album with more care and sympathy towards its creators as he added that it was “was made at a difficult time in my life when things were spiralling out of control in a lot of areas.”
