Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds: Kicking Against the Pricks

I think I had a tape of this album in the early 1990s. Nick Thatcher in the Psychology Branch admin office was my source for all things Cave. And that was how I heard By the Time I Get to Phoenix for the first time. This is one of my favourite ever interpretations of a song. Yes, yes, it was a great song to start with. But if you've every heard the version by Jimmy Webb, who wrote it, you'll know how it is, remarkably, possible to kill that greatness by omitting any of the regret, any of the arrogance, any of the nagging ache that lies at the broken heart of the song.

And the guitar drone by Blixa Bargeld that runs like a weeping wound throughout the backing is enough to make you cry on its own. Again it may not be entirely original — I reckon it owes a little to Robert Fripp's playing on David Bowie's Heroes — but that doesn't make it any less exquisite.

The other songs on the album are fine, and it's a pleasure to be reintroduced to them each time I play the album, but when I paid my fiver to Fopp to buy the CD in 2004, it was By the Time I Get to Phoenix that I was paying for.

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