Music Arcades: Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds: Tender Prey

I got this on vinyl rather than CD because I'm a sucker for promotional 'rarities'. In this case the special offer was a "very limited edition Nick Cave 12-inch reading extracts from his forthcoming novel And the Ass Saw the Angel." The book wasn't published at the time the album came out. I guess you won't have read it. I think it was while on holiday in Umbria in 1991 that I made my way through it. Like Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers, the first 30-40 pages are an absolute tour de force, and give the impression that you're in for something very special indeed. But neither book can sustain that drive across the full length of a novel. Unfortunately the extracts read by Nick on the record aren't from the opening pages. But there is some moody (read: goth) musical backing. And it is rare (5,000 copies according to this page — that's actually not all that limited, is it?)

The album itself is another one of those that step by step built reputation and back catalogue. As I said of The Good Son, the first decade of Nick Cave's career just quietly crept up on me, and carried on doing so, with just the right mix of consistency and variability, up to the stage, over the most recent decade, where you look back and realise just how much he's done. Lucy's got his latest album, which we listened to a couple of times last week while driving around Dartmoor. On top of last year's Grinderman album, he's evidently on a bit of a roll, and the new stuff throws a light back on the old stuff, making it more interesting.

It was the two singles from this album, The Mercy Seat and Deanna, that really caught my imagination when I got the album. Looking back, they show the two sides of the Cave coin: the former is truly desperate and entirely free of ironic quotation marks in its sense of despair, and mix of remorse with spit-in-your-eye contempt; the latter has a firmly tongue-in-cheek sexual leer. He's refined both time and time again since. Like the wonderful Go Tell the Women by Grinderman, which is an older and more literate update of Deanna ("We're sick and tired of all this self-serving grieving / All we wanted was a little consensual rape [sic] in the afternoon, and maybe a bit more in the evening").

In truth, as with some Leonard Cohen albums, those two songs are the only ones that really matter on the album. But the others put more (rotting) flesh on the well-worn bones, and are amusing enough to listen to every few years.