She was raised by beasts
Photographed by vultures
Here come the Wolfman!
The Abominable Snowman!
Gotta little poison
Gotta little gun
Sitting in the bathtub
Waiting for the Wolfman to come
– Nick Cave, Heathen Child
If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers. – Thomas Pynchon
‘I have difficulties seperating my nightmares from reality,’ Jim Sclavunos, eyes locked on mine like I’m the very hypnagogic incubus sat on his sleeping back. ‘My dreams are populated by the people I know.’
‘Are you potentially in a nightmare right now?’
‘Oh man, this one of the worst fuckin’ ones.’
Pow.
At least we’re all in the Sclavunos night terror together. To call spades spades seems barely necessary – nobody locked in a small room on a sweaty day with Nick Cave is bound for sweet dreams. And this interview takes place in a very small room on a 30 degree hot London afternoon.
Cave is reclined in a member’s club chair dressed not in the expected three-piece suit, but a Hawaiian shirt buttoned down to the belly-button, his chest saved from total exposure by a knackered gold chain, faintly perspiring. He looks like a Tussaud’s version of himself dressed up accidentally as the Miami Vice’s Sonny Crockett.
He doesn’t like me. I can tell because he’s not really looking at the side of the table I’m on, and also because he keeps saying things like ‘Jesus man, the Norwegian guy who was in here before you was easier to understand than you.’
Sclavunos today is his sartorial antithesis, amply-bearded, preacher-suited, and making some laser-like eye contact that doesn’t hide the fact he doesn’t like me very much either. But here we are in a makeshift EMI meeting room, so let’s just all try to get along.
After ten oppressive minutes, Cave demands: ‘Ask better questions.’
I’m trying! I’m trying!
Rather than exploring the golden, but well-worn path into Cave and Sclavunos’ artistically fascinating and turbulent careers, the aim is to hack into the core of the Grinderman project. Shoot me for saying it, but I’ve never really lost myself in either the Bad Seeds’ or the Birthday Party’s work. Grinderman, on the other hand, has a 100% hit rate so far.
Formed in 2006 as an outlet for a more visceral sound and an open-plan band dynamic than the Bad Seeds, the self-titled debut of Cave, Sclavunos, Warren Ellis (who brings not just the most fascinating instrumental contributions to the band, but has far and away the sickest beard), and bassist Martyn Casey was a coiled cobra of an album, all slither, death stares and venomous fangs. It was a sexual record in the swamp rock tradition. From the frustrated libido of No Pussy Blues to Get It On’s narrator who has ‘fucked the girls you’re probably married to’, the positioning of rudimentary guitar at the centre of the album’s most compelling moments offered a throbbing phallocentric alternative to the more flowery, evangelical direction of latter-day Bad Seeds. (The trait running through both these bands is feverish obsession.)
Grinderman 2 is a different beast. I mean this quite literally: the artwork of its predecessor featured a monkey, this one an arctic dog prowling a living room – ‘you’ll have to see the inner-sleeve artwork for the wolf to make sense’, Cave says. It opens with Mickey Mouse and the Goodbye Man in a fit of Shellac-y post-hardcore bass and No Pussy Blues explosions, but grows into a stoner-rock monster (When My Baby Comes hits like Queens of the Stone Age) with exemplary atmospheric work by Ellis (What I Know is composed of just Cave’s voice, a hushed mix of looped ghost noise and gentle kick drum). Violins and pianos are more prominent. It draws from a lusher template. Thematically, though, Kitchenette and Worm Tamer stand as the only overtly sexual songs – you can guess at the innuendo from the latter’s song title alone.
The first album seemed a lot more overtly sexual, lyrically. What happened to the No Pussy Blues? Did Grinderman get laid?
‘You young guys,’ Cave drawls. ‘You see everything through a prism of sleaze. When you get to our age you have a different view of sex. It doesn’t have to permeate everything, you know?’
Well, yeah, but you sing about putting your fingers in someone’s biscuit jar. Grinderman definitely deals with masculinity a lot, sex is surely part of that?
‘Exploring masculinity is a big part of it. It made a lot of people very uncomfortable with the first record.’
Why do you think that is?
‘I don’t feel very comfortable even talking about it. It’s unpleasant for people to be confronted with.’
(Cave is getting in to his stride here. Continue asking short questions!)
There seems to be this particular character that runs through a lot of your work, on Get It On, back in stuff like [The Murder Ballads’] Stagger Lee, and in The Proposition [Cave’s Ray Winstone-starring movie that remains possibly his most intriguing piece of work to date], and particularly throughout Grinderman, a character I’d call ‘the motherfucker’.
‘The motherfucker?’
The guy who’s a law unto himself and does whatever he wants. Is there not a degree of persona between you all in Grinderman that is playing out that character?
‘No.’
No?
‘I think there’s more focus on our particular personalities in Grinderman that isn’t the Bad Seeds, because it’s just the four of us,’ Jim takes the reigns. ‘I wouldn’t have thought there was any persona involved.’
Perhaps fearing that he’s on the verge of offering me some useable copy, Cave leans across the table and swivels the notes sheet in front of me towards him.
‘What else have you got here… The Abominable Snowman?’
Yeah, you invoke the Abominable Snowman on two different songs on the album. What’s the significance?
‘I used to have all these terrible nightmares as a kid about the Abominable Snowman.’
Really? He couldn’t have been very much of a threat in Australia.
‘I don’t know. People have stopped worrying about him, like he doesn’t exist anymore. But he’s fuckin’ scary.’
A motherfucker, you could say.
Let’s move away from lyrics. The template on the album includes more familiar elements from the Bad Seeds, is the function of the band still the same?
‘We recorded this album in the same fashion as the last album, in a short burst. We’re very, very happy with it. Grinderman for us is still an entirely different unit.’
Do you still surprise yourselves as musicians?
‘Yes, completely. It’s not worth pursuing if you don’t grow from one work to the next.’
Time is called after this philosophical nugget. I’m offered a no-hard-feelings pat on the back by one of Cave’s spindly hands – “just ask better questions next time, kid.”
Grinderman II is out right now.
Words Daniel Gray
