This was in the news over the weekend. Thought you'd be interested.
Cowboy Nick on the lineJames Wigney
March 10, 2007 11:00pm
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IT IS just as well Nick Cave is having the time of his life making music – because his acting career is going nowhere fast.
The perennially busy songwriter, performer, author, poet and scriptwriter, who has dabbled in acting, was fired from his only line of dialogue on the set of Brad Pitt's coming movie, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.
Cave helped write the orchestral soundtrack to the Western, directed by Australian Andrew Dominik (Chopper), and has a small part as a singing cowboy.
His scene, for which he grew his alarming porn-star moustache, has him singing The Ballad of Jesse James in a bar in front of an ornery Robert Ford, who draws his gun when he realises how history will remember him.
"I was supposed to say, 'We don't want no trouble here, boy'," says Cave in Melbourne on one of his annual trips home to visit his mother.
"So I practised this line for a month and in the rehearsals I sang the song and said the line and then Andrew exploded into laughter and said, 'Maybe we could get one of the extras to say that line'."
So it's probably a good thing the lanky Cave won't be troubling the Academy Awards any time soon – the last thing he needs is yet another career.
After his well-received screenplay for last year's Australian western The Pro<myspace>position</myspace>, Cave is working on another for friend and director John Hillcoat, called Death of a Ladies Man.
But <myspace>right</myspace> now he is keen to talk up his latest project, an album called Grinderman, the product of his collaboration with violinist Warren Ellis, drummer Jim Sclavunos and bassist Martyn Casey.
The three musicians are all members of his regular outfit, the Bad Seeds, but the stripped-back Grinderman set-up allowed them to work in a new way.
"We had been together for a long time talking about different sorts of music, a different sound we would like to investigate, a different way of working and writing and we just thought we could do that with the four of us," Cave says.
"We wouldn't have been able to do it with the Bad Seeds because there are so many people."
The self-titled debut album was born out of a controlled chaos, captured when the foursome locked themselves into a studio and just started to play, with little idea of where it would lead.
The informal, ad-libbed style had not only worked marvels for the most recent Bad Seeds album, the tour de force double CD Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus, but also took some of the songwriting burden off Cave.
"I write lyrics in a totally different way and a lot of the Grinderman stuff comes from improvised lyrics where you are just grabbing themes out of thin air and riffing on them."
The bubbling cauldron of ideas and the longstanding bond between the players comes across in the music – a blend of musical styles from grinding blues to grungy rock and cabaret – and also the often darkly funny lyrics.
From the rough-and-ready Get It On and No Pussy Blues to the more tender Man in the Moon and (I Don't Need You To) Set Me Free, the album seethes with an infectious experimental enthusiasm.
But amid the humour there is also a pervading sense of menace, the result of hours of relentless jamming.
"We just played for hours and hours and hours and a certain kind of delirium or hysteria creeps in," Cave says.
"We are laughing all the time. That's not to suggest it's not serious stuff we are doing, but we are just not interested in doing it if it's not going to be enjoyable."
The rawness and rage on Grinderman also give the impression that the angry young man of the Birthday Party and the Boys Next Door won't be drifting off into docile dotage yet.
"I'm nearly 50 and I am waiting for the wisdom that has been promised to me, but it doesn't feel like it is coming," he says, with a hint of despair.
Cave, whose lyrics have long invoked the divine, writes in Go Tell The Women: "We are scientists, we go do genetics, we leave religion to the psychos and fanatics."
Does he feel religion has been hijacked by a lunatic fringe? "I have certain tendencies in that direction and it is hard work having them and admitting to having them these days," he says carefully.
"I am sad about the decline of the Christian religion. It's sad that it seems to no longer be a functioning religion and it has no relevance any more.
"There is a message in there that I think is the relevant and <myspace>right</myspace> message, but unfortunately the whole idea of Christianity is so tainted these days that it is an anathema."
Grinderman is out now
