Nick Cave And The BadSeeds - B-Sides AndRarities

Wed 20th Apr, 2005 in Music Reviews

Telling my partner about how I remember buying my first Birthday Party record with my first real paycheck back in ‘88 or ‘89, I was met with only mild interest.

Back in the days when you lined up for a little yellow envelope at the HR department and vinyl was still a credible format in even the meanest of chart stores. Shit, that long ago. I took home Junkyard and played that fucken thing to death, night after summer temp job night, until my parents were ready to discuss the eviction of a 15 year old at the kitchen table (not that we ever ate dinner together). Hell, I didn’t know it were post punk or punk blues or just godawful posturing, but I loved the ham Shakespeare and the bruised dancefloor nonetheless.

When I hold this three disc set just released it is what I immediately think of, of how I have lived with the avenues of Cave and cohorts for more than half my life. Of how he saved me from veering from the path of righteousness ye, how he saved me verily from the fields of sin and loose wanton wenches.

It may have met with little interest but it sits somewhere deep beneath the loyalty to my football team and my love of most music – the way I stared at the back cover and dreamed stupidly and immaturely at the haircuts and the fucked up lyrics. In short, it formulates so much of my thinking of ‘real’ music that I am lucky to have chanced upon The Birthday Party years before I chanced ‘real’ music. I can credit Clapton and Zeppelin with skill; I just can’t bring myself to want to listen to them.

Packaged as it is in a stern black clamshell with embossed silver lettering, B-Sides and Rarities seems almost funereal in endeavour. Odd then, that it celebrates the most vital sounds of the Bad Seeds life. With the departure of Blixa Bargeld just prior to Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus (hailed as a masterpiece by all serious music rags I have read, though somewhat overly dramatic in intention for my liking) the Bad Seeds as we knew them no longer exists. No spiraling one chord thunder mid-song. No gallows atmosphere.

The three discs could be read more as an obituary than a celebration. Most of these tracks have long been deleted. In the case of disc one, issued (and kept safe within 7” vinyl sleeves out of reach of my drooling daughter) only on some form of limited vinyl. The fact that it is priced as a normal CD, and not as some kinda completist box set, is astonishing. The fact that I can hear them for the first time on digital disc knocks me off my keel.

Compiled in the main chronologically, its as fine a biography on the man as ever could be writ. It starts, noticeably, with a few acoustic tracks of Cave hits, rather then the first real b-side or rarity, and as such concedes (a sort of aural carrot) early on that the quality may just waver. From those 1990 recordings it darts back to Cave’s first ever b-side in 1984, The Moon Is In The Gutter. If you could imagine Presley on smack after having lived through the punk era, Beefheart in his walkman and rye whiskey on his breath, then you can imagine of what humble beginnings this magnum opus proceeds. As the flipside to his version of In The Ghetto, it was alright (and let’s pause to remember that song was once voted one of the five worst cover versions ever inflicted upon the public). Want to judge me as a credible witness? I still think it sounds like a hymn.

The first of the three discs features acoustic tracks from an era Cave probably now regrets – solid junkie and hopeless southern gothic devotee – but which, against the odds, featured a lot of his best work. (I guess I’m just not one for the papal balladry of recent years). Of course, by some time on the third disc (some three score songs later, it should be noted) he is still offering grim mutterings on resurrections, dead girls and the good Lord, so its not as if the content has turned significantly. Its just the ability of the Bad Seeds to accommodate those Jane Eyre whims of his, those wild windy moors, and keep them revitalised with the marching of time.

I won’t be the first or last to testify to you that it’s the Bad Seeds who are really the stars of this box. Even if they’d be nothing without Cave’s pastoral (nee pentecostal) charisma, you can still sense he would be the one on a street corner with a cap at his feet without them. It’s still hard though, to isolate exactly why this sounds better than any album of theirs since The Good Son.

There are dead ends and genuine b-sides, no doubt: but that is always the fun of such collections. Gaining a fuller idea of a seemingly infallible artist, that he and his band are capable of stumbling with sacchairine sentiment or last-minute bravado. Sometimes those moments stick with you longest, the warts, n’ all. The sound quality, like the song quality, knee jerks you like a trampoline. You start to admire the guts of this group in releasing shitty little ditties mere months after lush cinematic gestures as heard on Wim Wenders soundtracks. It is less Nick Cave as the careerist songwriter and more Nick Cave as the guy who sings in a band with a bunch of mates. Unsullied by industry pressure.

So it’s not 1984 anymore. Read of him arising at dawn with a cup of tea to trot off to his piano room for a day of writing. Read this and then hear some of the voodoo balladry enclosed in this set. Nick Cave will nearly always be typecast as an underground loose cannon, sadly. But name me one other significant modern songwriter – from Springsteen to Cohen to Dylan and back again via whoever you wanna throw in – who could compile a triple CD of this calibre of b-sides and I’m ready to throw in the game. This is no ‘best of’ – his record company have tried that previously. This is the scum. The bootleggers, the con artists, the false prophets, the back alley businessmen. The kind of guys Cave has built a career on. This is the best of.