it’s Christmas Eve, i’m tired and under the weather and can’t think of something new to post about so i’ve decided to go for one of my favourite stabs at a Christmas hit
19 years ago in 1992 good friends Nick Cave and Shane MacGowan got to gether to record a non-album single. as a charting single it didn’t fare well, peaking at just a humble 72 in the UK, but i remember it fondly, brightening up a dull afternoon as Cave and MacGowan’s voices reached my ears via a crappy little radio at work. it was never going to better Louis Armstrong’s superb recording from 1968, but i don’t think there was ever any intention of attempting to do such a thing. it’s simply two friends singing a great song
Krent Able will be familiar to the readers of The Stool Pigeon, a free. bi-monthly, and rather decent music newspaper. i pick it up in various independent record shops around London, though i believe it’s available throughout much of the UK
Krent Able is a comic writer/artist and his work adorns the most recent cover of The Stool Pigeon and regularly the middle, comics section, and it’s also dotted throughout. below are a few examples of what he does, including three comic strips that feature Nick Cave, Goldfrapp and Amy Winehouse. i’ll post a link to his blog at the end. any text beneath the pictures in italics is taken from that blog. his work is definitely what some fuckwits might call sick or tasteless or whatever, but since they are fuckwits i shouldn’t even be mentioning them really. since i have, i wonder if that makes me a fuckwit? i suppose it’s good to question yourself, though if anyone calls me a fuckwit, i’ll curl one out on their face
you probably don’t need telling, but click on the pics to enlarge them
Thanks to Phil and Mickey at The Stool Pigeon for letting me loose on the cover – the only proviso was that I couldn’t do a big picture of James Brown’s anus.
My third Doctor Cave story, featuring the first glimpses of the Cavemobile and The Cheese Factory Hillbillies. This one was inspired by Nick Cave’s increasingly sex-obsessed output (his ‘Bunny Monroe’ novel, ‘No Pussy Blues’ etc.). I figured a man with that much spare sperm could probably start his own cheese factory. I know I did.
This cheeky little tale is from the April 2011 edition of The Stool Pigeon
Hot Dog and Terror Cone. One day these guys are going to MASSIVE, like Mel Gibson and Danny Glover in Lethal Weapon.
Lady Gaga, Based on Manet’s ‘Olympia’. Pretty highbrow, eh?
From The Stool Pigeon, Sept ’09. In the original version of Goldilocks and the 3 bears from the 1830′s, Goldilocks was an ‘angry old woman’ and the 3 bears tried to kill her by burning, drowning and impalement on a church steeple
to check out much more of Krent Able’s work, click here
Nick Cave: Sinner Saint was published months ago and i devoured it in not time at all, being a huge fan of the mans work. so this post is rather overdue. interestingly, the editor, Matt Snow, is actually the subject of one of Caves songs, Scum, which appeared on the 1986 Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds album, Your Funeral . . . My Trial. this is what Matt Snow had to say on how, 25 years ago, he came to be called, “miserable shitwringing turd…fuckin’ traitor, chronic masturbator, shitlicker, user, self-abuser…” by one of todays most respected songwriters . . .
I’d got to know Nick Cave when he fronted the Birthday Party and I was just starting to write for a living. He made great music, I wrote gushing reviews. In 1983 he and his then-girlfriend Anita stayed in my flat in Brixton when they needed a room and I needed rent money. When they moved out, we lost touch, until in 1986 I came to interview him for NME. Frosty in the extreme, he explained why.
The previous year I’d mentioned in print that I found his forthcoming album “disappointing”. I was, he told me, “an arsehole”. And he’d written a song that developed this theme. Weeks later, I bought for £1 a green seven-inch flexidisc called Scum off his merchandise stall at a Bad Seeds show at Camden’s Electric Ballroom. “Miserable shitwringing turd,” he snarled to a grindcore accompaniment, “fuckin’ traitor, chronic masturbator, shitlicker, user, self-abuser,” adding, almost superfluously, “my un-friend, I’m the type that holds a grudge.”
It’s a brilliant record, and if I have any complaints it is that Nick has squirreled Scum away as a bonus CD track on his album Your Funeral, My Trial. Like Dylan’s Mr Jones or Pope’s Colley Cibber, I’d rather be memorialised as the spotlit object of a genius’ scorn than a dusty discographical footnote. Still, my Cave-fan wife-to-be was mightily impressed when, on our first date, I unrolled the story (not for the first time). Seven years later Scum is “our song”.
The Ship Song Project is a reinterpretation of Nick Cave’s classic and beautiful The Ship Song, from his 1990 album The Good Son, that is meant as a tribute to The Sydney Opera House. that song has already be honoured by the Australian people when in 2001, The Ship Song was selected by the Australasian Performing Rights Association as one of the top 30 Australian songs of all time (No 26 to be precise). not bad at all for an artist that is far from mainstream
so now here’s “a journey through the spaces that lie beneath our white sails“, performed by Neil Finn, Kev Carmody and The Australian Ballet, Sarah Blasko, John Bell, Angus and Julia Stone, Paul Kelly and Bangarra Dance Theatre, Teddy Tahu Rhodes and Opera Australia, Martha Wainwright, Katie Noonan and The Sydney Symphony, The Temper Trap, Daniel Johns and the Australian Chamber Orchestra
and from 21 years ago, this is Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds promo video for The Ship Song, directed by John Hillcoat
UNKLE have been busy finishing material which will be released on April 4th, as a five track EP entitled Only The Lonely
UNKLE have always produced interesting and dynamic music, often born out of collaborations, so when i heard they were getting together with one of my favourite singer/songwriters, Nick Cave . . . well i was rather excited to say the least
all the songs on the EP are new and it’s headed up by the Nick Cave track as well as featuring Liela Moss (The Duke Spirit), long time UNKLE vocalist Gavin Clark and Rachel Fannan (ex Sleepy Sun)
the EP is rounded off with a classic UNKLE instrumental
track listing as follows:
1. Money and Run (feat. Nick Cave) 2. The Dog Is Black (feat. Liela Moss) 3. Only The Lonely (dub) 4. Wash The Love Away (feat. Gavin Clark) 5. Sunday Song (feat. Rachel Fannan)
it’s Christmas Eve, i’m tired and under the weather and can’t think of something new to post about so i’ve decided to go for one of my favourite stabs at a Christmas hit 
