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Nick Morgan and crew
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Concert
Review by Nick Morgan |
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GRINDERMAN, SUICIDE, SEASICK STEVE |
The
Forum, Kentish Town, London, June 20th 2007
The
term ‘Special Guest’ is one that needs
to be taken with a big pinch of salt when it comes
to many gigs, but not, I have to say, tonight’s.
Whether by design or coincidence we have two Mojo
Awards winners on stage before the main event.
Whiskyfun favourite Seasick
Steve begins his set in typical style
by strolling through the still half-empty stalls
playing bottleneck on his bashed up acoustic guitar
before climbing to the stage. It doesn’t
feel like quite the venue for him but he makes
a fair fist of enchanting those who are prepared
to pull themselves away from the bar or noisy
idle chatter. He’s won, by the way, ‘Breakthrough
Act of the Year’, and well worthy of it
he is. |
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| Following
him on stage are New York’s controversial
synth and vocals duo Suicide,
who’ve snatched the ‘Innovation in Sound’
award. Controversial? Well, not really. It’s
just that they seem to have had a polarising effect
on audiences ever since they started in 1970, and
tonight is no exception. They are of course much
admired and cited as inspirational by bands as diverse
as the Chemical Brothers and Nick Cave’s Bad
Seeds, but I guess that doesn’t mean that
people have to like them. There is a kind of compulsion
about the keyboard playing, Martin
Rev finding bass notes lower than you might
have thought existed. And to give him credit he
does look as though he’s playing with his
tongue at least half in his cheek (do you have this
saying in French Serge?). Alan Vega’s echo
driven vocals (more ranting than singing) are virtually
unintelligible, and though he has forsaken his trademark
chain wielding, he still goads and baits the audience.
Once sinister, he now holds all the threat and menace
of an arm-waving crazed old man at a wind-swept
bus stop on a deserted South Shields sea-shore.
But like the old man he does manage to piss almost
everyone off big-time, which is perhaps the intention
of this alienating stuff. It’s nasty, brutish,
and not very short, but either way, the audience
isn’t going anywhere. By now the pace is pretty
rammed and no one wants to lose their spot. Oh yes
– no chance of pictures as the Photographer
has her hands pressed to her ears for the whole
set. |
| We’re
really here to see Nick Cave’s new band, Grinderman
(who didn’t win a Mojo Award), a stripped
down version of the Bad Seeds featuring Cave, Warren
Ellis on violin and guitar, Martyn Casey on bass
and the pink suited Jim Sclavunos on his pink drum
kit. Now you might think that in these days of ‘unplugged’
and ‘acoustics sessions’ that this would
mean a gentle and reflective version of the Bad
Seeds, full of tender violin and piano. Not a bit
of it – Grinderman is a brutal back-to basics
distillation of Cave’s sound. You could almost
think it’s a melody free zone (of course it’s
not). Cave plays electric guitar on many of the
songs, with only occasional forays to the keyboards.
In some respects this is clearly inhibiting, certainly
on his movement, but it also gives his vocals more
immediacy, and less consideration. His playing is
‘primitive’ – fractured, spare
and loud. Behind him is Ellis – switching
between bouzouki, violin (mostly strummed and plucked,
rarely bowed) and a small red guitar whose size
belies the noise it generates (could this be the
mysterious Fendocastor listed on the Grinderman
album sleeve notes?). I’m not sure if he plays
his Hohner Guitaret. He certainly never stops -
with an array of percussive instruments at hand
for idle moments. Casey and Sclavunos, as befits
their garage style sound, provide the engine-power.
|
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‘Grinderman’
is the opening song – a crotch hugging Cave,
guitar slung behind his back, almost chanting the
lyrics to a spare backing that like many of the
songs is reminiscent of the Cave/Ellis soundtrack
to the Cave written film The
Proposition – particularly so ‘Electric
Alice’ with its jarring loops. Ejaculating
with sexual innuendo ‘Grinderman’, according
to Sclavunos, also represents the way the band play
– “we grind songs out” –
hence the name of the album. And from Grinderman
to the organ grinder’s monkey – the
band’s nut clutching logo. Actually it’s
a bit of a nut clutching collection of songs –
many having a recurrent theme of the inadequacies
and frailties of modern man. Listen to the Johnny
Dowdesque ‘Go tell the women’ or ‘Love
bomb’ (in which Cave manages a triumph of
writing by getting both the BBC’s ‘Woman’s
Hour’ and ‘Gardeners
Question Time’ into the lyrics) and you’ll
quickly get the point. The songs, said Cave, “are
all deeply personal” – none more so,
I would imagine, than the wonderful ‘Man in
the moon” which dwells on childhood loss.
This is a really enchanting piece that would not
have been out of place on The Boatman’s Call,
and is probably the nearest to a Bad Seeds piece.
Otherwise it’s full on Grinderman, and when
some one calls for a Bad Seeds song Cave is dismissive
– “wrong band – that’s another
band”. |
| The
set comprises the album in a slightly reworked order.
Cave is in captivating form – it’s hard
to take your eyes off him, and the ears have no
choice as the volume and intensity grows. It climaxes
with the penultimate song – ‘No pussy
blues’. “Nick” asked an interviewer,
“Is there a deeper meaning to ‘No Pussy
Blues’?”. “No, it’s about
getting no fucking pussy”. And it’s
hardly surprising as the miserable and misogynistic
self-loving protagonist of the song works his way
through a series of rebuffs to his advances –
and I notice that it’s the ladies in the audience
who cheer most loudly when Cave whispers the chorus
line at the end of the song. But before that we’ve
all had to endure the ear-splitting visceral instrumental
sections between each verse – louder than
the Bad Seeds I’d say, and I’d guess
if you wanted to hear the influence of Suicide on
Cave and his cohorts then it’s somewhere in
here. They finish with the screaming ‘Love
bomb’. |
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|
And then Cave dropped his own bombshell –
“Thank you. We’ll be back in a few minutes
with Suicide”. There was a visible rush to
the door. The band remerged with Vega and Rev, the
former sparring vocals with Cave, ‘though
I have to say what they were singing about I couldn’t
tell – the song, I believe, was ‘Harlem’.
The audience dwindled in direct proportion to the
noise, a shame really as the set had been so good.
Cave eventually left the stage, exchanging grins
and raised eyebrows with Casey as he did so, but
Vega had to be persuaded off by his roadie about
four minutes later, otherwise I suspect we might
still be there. Suicide? Well it’s a deeply
personal choice, but personally I wouldn’t.
However I can commend Grinderman who delivered a
five star high-nineties performance. - Nick
Morgan (photographs by Kate) |
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Nick's Concert Reviews
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