In Boy On Fire, Mark Mordue’s biography of Nick Cave that chronicles the artist as a young man, we find an adolescent whose musical world orbits the 1970s British glam rock scene of T-Rex, Roxy Music, and in particular, David Bowie. Obsessed with his British hero’s stylistic verve, Cave even cuts his moppy hair into a spikey mullet in order to see Ziggy Stardust when he looks in the mirror.
The haircut was just the start. Much of Cave’s career would go on to mirror Bowie’s. A young adulthood complicated by addiction, a self-imposed exile to the edgelands of cold-war Berlin, and a complicated relationship with notoriety. However, the most perverse of Cave’s emulations of Bowie would be his indulgence in the ‘mid-life crisis’ rock band. Cave had Grinderman, as Bowie had Tin Machine.
Founded in 2004 during a rare downturn in form for Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds, Grinderman wasn’t a retreat from the day job but a corruption of it. Comprised of Cave and three Bad Seeds – Warren Ellis, Martyn P. Casey, and Jim Sclavunos – the singer called Grinderman a “parallel project” rather than a side-project, citing its distinct modus operandi.
Firstly the songwriting was democratised, with the artistic cynosure of Cave absorbed into the terroir of the band. Second, it would throw its members out of their comfort zones; Cave would swap the piano for the electric guitar and Ellis was told to put the violin down. Third, it would be improvisational. Songs captured from energy emitted from unscripted studio sessions rather than drafted in Cave’s study. The resultant debut album Grinderman, released in 2007, is as chaotic as you would expect; tainted with an outpouring of repressed energy, uncorked after years of being The Bad Seeds.
It predominantly featured bluesey songs about blue balls, that would routinely be invaded by sadistic delirium. Creepy old men who were under-sexed and full of hate stalked the record, drifting into hallucinatory songs about Nick Cave’s father – ‘Man In The Moon’ – or waltzing around his extended impersonation of a bee, as on ‘Honey Bee (Let’s Fly To Mars)’. But most disconcertingly, the listener was blindsided by a heinous suggestion on ‘Go Tell The Women’: “All we wanted was a little consensual rape in the afternoon / And maybe a bit more in the evening”.
It was pushing… something, but what exactly that was, there was the sense that not even Grinderman themselves knew. Cave acted aggrieved that no-one understood the band’s “obvious humour” as he batted away allegations of misogyny after its release – but there felt like little driving reason for this sentiment. Sure, it was dream-like, but like one of those dreams you pretend never happened while on the morning commute. It was all poetically embodied by the porn ‘tache that Cave sported at the time.
However, Grinderman 2 was a different beast. Speaking before its release in 2010, Cave was focused: “There was definitely a feeling on this record that we wanted to get back to something that had a really malign feel to it and take great pleasure in it.” And great pleasure there is – for forty minutes, the quartet plumb the depths of depravity in a way that The Bad Seeds and even The Birthday Party never did. Grinderman 2 is their senseless murder ballads.
A vampiric lust slivers through the nine songs. Suspenseful and sordid, a psychedelic amnesia grips every track as it fails to remember the lurid crimes witnessed in the song before. Nameless narrators kill, rape, beg for love, sleep, and then get up and do it all again. The only central narrative being that of evil, and how deep it goes; every song a dark labyrinth with the minotaur at every turn.
In this pit of darkness, the band’s irreverent humour suddenly worked as light relief. ‘Worm Tamer’, a song about a spectral figure accosting woman contains one of Cave’s great comedic couplets (“They call me the Loch Ness Monster / Two humps and I’m gone”). And it all rests disturbingly harmoniously with the all-encompassing paranoia of ‘Heathen Child’, ‘Kitchenette’, ‘Evil’, and ‘What I Know’, where women cower in corners knowing, “A million things gonna happen to me / In rooms that are much like this”.
The sheer irreverence in the face of evil felt like a deliberate challenge to the listener. And as a result, Grinderman 2 slipped into a shared space with one of Cave’s heroes, Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov, and opened itself to the same scrutiny that Lolita endures.
Cave’s prickly challenging of the relationship between art and artist felt premeditated, on The Bad Seed’s 14th record Dig, Lazurus, Dig!!!, released between the two Grinderman albums, full, as it was, of references to Lolita. ‘We Call Upon the Author’, also posits that God – the Father, and the artist – aren’t responsible for their creations. It’s a grand gnostic recognition that Cave doesn’t have to care about all the suffering in his songs. And it marks a sea-change that would define Cave going forward.
If everything up until The Boatman’s Call is Cave’s Old Testament with a wrathful God, this period of his music is his Apocrypha. A sense of confusion at the order of things, that urges for a salvational voice. This is Cave’s darkest musical point and it would usher in the next era; the New Testament of Cave that we would hear from Push The Sky Away onwards.
Alongside this profound cognitive change, the democratisation of Grinderman would uproot the Bad Seeds’ sound forever. The pure-pop smoothness of ‘Palaces Of Montezuma’ edges Cave closer to the anthemic communal rapture that would begin to seep into The Bad Seed’s records thereafter. Likewise, the growing influence of Ellis’s potent soundscapes that define latter-day Bad Seeds is most convincingly reconciled with Cave’s literary structures in closer ‘Bellringer Blues’.
Looking back, Grinderman 2 stands in company with Chilean novelist Roberto Bolano’s 2666 (first published in English around the same time) and Rothko’s ‘Black Form’ Paintings. Ruthless pursuits to the heart of darkness, both irreverently told and extensively articulated. Uncomfortable truths stretched out along its medium.
And in its inchoate fostering of the Fall, there’s something that continues to stick about Grinderman despite its brief existence. A weird charm that Cave himself would address in a Red Hand File from 2018 when asked about whether they would re-form, “We thought that Grinderman appeared to be a lot more popular now than when it existed, and we wondered whether that was simply the band passing into folklore, or whether the world had become, in the last years, more puritanical, less playful, and more hypersensitive, and that there were a lot of people out there who just wanted to listen to a band that fucked things up a bit”. If Grinderman 2 did anything, it asked the uncomfortable question – do we just want art to submerge us in the world’s ugly chaos?’
