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Friday 01 March 2013


Push the Sky Away: Nick Cave Draws On Everyday Brighton As Inspiration For New Album

Long-term Brighton resident Nick Cave is into his fourth decade as frontman of his sometime main project, The Bad Seeds. As they impart their latest release, Push The Sky Away, on the record buying/downloading public, we find out what inspires the great man's muse to keep delivering the goods.


"Well, if I were to use that threadbare metaphor of albums being like children," said Cave, "then Push The Sky Away is the ghost-baby in the incubator and Warren (Ellis)'s loops are its tiny, trembling heart-beat."

The album, which clocks in at nine tracks in total, is scheduled to drop on 18 February 2013 and will be the group"s fifteenth studio record to date.

Cave continued: "I don"t know, this record just seems new, you know, but new in an old school kind of way."

He was, from 1980, the frontman of Melbourne-based The Birthday Party, before upping sticks and moving to London, then West Berlin. 


The band were notorious for their provocative live performances which featured Cave shrieking, bellowing and throwing himself about the stage, backed up by harsh pounding rock music laced with guitar feedback. 

He utilised Old Testament imagery with lyrics about sin, curses and damnation.

Cave adds: "I'm not religious, and I'm not a Christian, but I do reserve the right to believe in the possibility of a god. 

"It's kind of defending the indefensible, though; I'm critical of what religions are becoming, the more destructive they're becoming. 

"But I think as an artist, particularly, it's a necessary part of what I do, that there is some divine element going on within my songs."

After establishing a cult following in both Europe and Australia, The Birthday Party disbanded in 1984.

 

But it was his next project, the Bad Seeds, which has remained at the forefront of creative output:

"If you are involved in making art you have to sit down and do the work. It"s not like there"s a matter of choice. 

"Songs for me don"t just drop out of the sky whilst I have a blonde sitting on my lap. It"s quite an excruciating process. 

"I say all that but I"ve never enjoyed being in the Bad Seeds as much as I am now."

New album Push The Sky Away is infused with a naturalism and warmth that makes it the most subtly beautiful of all the Bad Seeds albums. 

The contemporary settings of myths, and the cultural references that have time-stamped Nick"s songs of the twenty-first century mist lightly through details drawn from the life he observed around his Brighton seaside home, through the tall windows on the album"s mysterious and ambiguous cover.

"I enter the studio with a handful of ideas, unformed and pupal; it"s the Bad Seeds that transform them into things of wonder. 

"Ask anyone who has seen them at work. They are unlike any other band on earth for pure, instinctive inventiveness."

Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds new album "Push the Sky Away" is out on 18th February. To purchase a copy CLICK HERE.



by: Mike Cobley



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