Peter Hoflich

Hell And Hell, Vol 0 – I saw Nagoya’s Hell And Hell live in Singapore in January, and they were really wild! The visuals are dominated by the crazy lead singer, with his fright clown make-up and wild fatman antics. The recording comes off as much harder, full of really wild metal. The album also fills for me the huge void left by Malhavoc, as I’ve yet to find anything as supremely awesome as “Premeditated Murder”. The vocals are twisted and distorted, the tempos change, the riffs pummel, there’s an industrial feel to it all, and there’s lot and lots of heaviness!!

“Hell Bloody Hell” is one of the better songs, with a great Black Sabbath-ish breakdown in the middle, and a cool double solo, with a wild bass-led bridge (the bass player was truly awesome), scary sound effects, a brief stop, and all sorts of coolness. It’s all there! “Blind Truth” features Yukito Okazaki of Eternal Elysium for some additional insanity, and the vocals are quite enhanced on this great song. “Not Stoned Yet” has great fat riffs that just snake around and around your brain. Great solo on the outro part, love it. “What Happens Next” starts off with a riff that sounds like a distant Metallica riff, then it blasts into its own space. Great, solid industrial thrash, love it!

The album shows incredible consistency, and it just gloms on and on and on. Definitely one of those albums I’m glad I bought at the show, since who knows when I’ll ever come across these babies again. Plus I like the lime green Black Sabbath piss take.

Carsick Cars – It’s hard to review Carsick Cars other than to call them the embodiment of Daydream Nation-era Sonic Youth, with the nutty guitar sounds abounding. The difference is, of course, that they sing in Chinese. Nutty guitar effects abound, great sounds, great beats, wonderful drumming and bass, great vocal harmonising, wonderful riffs. The songs are mainly pretty same-same-y, but in that sense it’s easy enough to say that all of them are very good songs!

The album’s best song is Zhongnanhai“, which is also the name of China’s “White House”, a compound for the Chinese Communist Party. Kind of a ballsy thing to sing about, I’d say, as it could be easily (and enthusiastically) misunderstood by Chinese nationalists of all stripes. It’s mainly a repetitive riff over the word Zhongnanhai, with a great chugging beat, with some great groovy noise in the middle, before a return to the regular song and its repetitive mantra/lyric! Here’s a video of the band playing it live.

After listening to this album repeatedly, it’s really very hard to say anything about it, other than how very Sonic Youth-ish it sounds. I really can’t. But the musicianship is great, the sounds are cool, and the beat and structure is great. Hearing someone ramble in Chinese is actually not all that different from hearing someone ramble in English. I mean… nobody really understands what the Sonic Youth guys are talking about anyway, right?

Boredphucks, Banned In Da Singapura – The Boredphucks were a Singapore band that put out one album (that I know of), got arrested and banned in Singapore for uttering a vulgar phrase in Hokkien from a public stage; they disbanded, moved to Australia to find fame as the SunS, before band drummer Wayne Thunder dropped dead suddenly on May 20th 2007. Sad, that…

The music is great, though, and quite varied throughout this album, as they try out nearly every rock style, and then some! “Boredphuckin” comes off like the Sex Pistols, with some surf rock, the Beach Boys, and snotty yelled Datsuns-ish vocals. Good fun. “Ballad Of Tabitha” is a sweet little punk ballad. “Kita Nak Seks” is a combination of a bunch of genres, and starts off with some island music, sounds from a party (including some pretentious “I are/is the most happening party, mon” mock rasta), and a bit of sweet singing over a good beat, mixed up with some gnarly punkism. Fun talking lines, sugary lyrics, some steel drums, all make it a lot of fun. “Your Friends” has naughty lyrics, is a bit tighter than “Kita Nak Seks” and seems to be from the same session – punk mixed with steel drum and an island vibe (and naughty lyrics). “Baby When You’re Gone” is nearly a Bon Jovi-like power ballad a la snotty vocals. “Phuck You Pt 1″ is a sort of country song, “Phuck You Pt 2″ is strange and experimental at first, then quickly becomes the best song on the album – a great punk song full of energy and obscenties and insults. Love it! “Grunge Car” is about a dirty, crappy car, and is done in a pretty pop-punk way, with a bit of silly German-voice, Brit-voice chatter about cars. “Untitled” is a girl moaning in ecstasy for the Boredphucks while silly music plays. Hmmm… “Rock With Ya” is very AC-DC rock-y… or maybe more like Cars-y. “She’s the only reason I go to church, praying for a chance to look up her skirt.” “Battle Over Endor” is a lame pop song with piano that becomes a screaming scum/grindcore song that moves as fast as these guys can hit the drums, before becoming a cookie monster death metal song (I wasn’t kidding when I said that they go all over the musical map with these songs); in the end they return to the “loveliest flower” stuff. I want to see the lyrics for this… “St Pats Classroom” is a bunch of talking, simulating a gang of jaded boredphucks sitting through a calculus lesson, insulting each other, sparring with the teacher, talking about watching pornos… “Phuck Da School” is the natural follow-up to this, a snotty punk song full of shit and piss and snot. Great sounds, great riff, powerful chorus, fantastic sound. “Ai So Kan Mai (Live)” is a powerful live track of the great song, starting off with crowd sounds, big gongs, a Wu Bai-ish riff, and the full rock assault with plenty of cymbals going, crowd anthem singing, lots of gruff singing and playing, pure rock! Lots of crowd shouts too as the vocalist talks to the crowd as if he were from MC5, great response. The song that follows it, “Beautiful Day”, is a weird disco track that has a sorta Bollywood/Indian feel to it, with its vocoder vocals in the chorus and all that shimmering stuff. “1-2-1″ is a silly Hokkien cowboy song. “Zoe Tay” is the famous song that makes fun of the Singapore Star’s bad English. It rocks!

Here’s The SunS doing their version of Zoe Tay.

Wow, there’s a new Black Sabbath single, “God Is Dead?” Hallelujah!

As someone who plays in a Black Sabbath tribute band that does over 30 Black Sabbath covers, I have an extra special interest in this song, which I hope my band quickly learns how to play!

While I find the song’s overall structure most similar to “Megalomania”, with its distinct song parts, it’s also fairly dissimilar from that song – the contrast between the two parts of “Megalomania” is quite stark, less so for “God Is Dead?”; there may even be a bit of similarity to the aborted “Scary Dreams” from the post-Reunion sessions that had produced two new recorded songs. “God Is Dead?” starts off like a bunch of familiar Black Sabbath songs, with a combination of a quiet guitar bit and a blast of heaviness (which is spiced up by boomy bass from Geezer), that quickly goes into the verse chorus verse bit of part 1 of the song. Near the middle it enters a bridge, then goes into the regular verse and chorus of part 1; there’s a heavy guitar bridge about two thirds into the song, with some great new verses and nice old Ozzy shouting, with the big “RIGHT!” just before another riff and a solo of less than 20 seconds that is, well, pretty lame. I can only imagine that this is a bit demo-ish, and that the album version will have more solos? Iommi is, of course, a great soloist, and some of his songs have multiple solos (“Into The Void”), long solo outros (“Dirty Women”). The solo for paranoid is an ultra-short solo, of course, but that’s for an ultra-short song.

Overall the song is satisfying for a Black Sabbath song, even if it clearly doesn’t rank with the band’s best output. But it is fairly brave for the band to put out such a long song as their first single. Nobody puts out singles this long, of course, but by giving the fans a big chunk of something to satisfy them I’d say that they’ve really done a great job.

Wow, someone’s already covered it:

Something about this song reminds me just a little bit of Scary Dreams:

Yes, it was my birthday today – I turned 44. April 20th, 1969, that was a long time ago, but hey… it is what it is.

My band MegalomaniA doesn’t have a gig today, so I had no special plans – I spent most of the day doing my favorite things – playing guitar, listening to music, drinking beer, eating Naoko’s awesome pizza, watching the Lemmy documentary, reading comic books. I went swimming with Zen and also played catch-ball with him (first time in a while), Zen and Naoko played guitar for me, Naoko gave me a bottle of eau de toilette, I got a bottle of gin from my parents… best birthday ever!

Even better – tomorrow Naoko’s making pizza for me again!!!

Om, God Is Good – Om is definitely one of the coolest bands out there. It used to be a two-mand band comprised of two thirds of the band Sleep – the drummer and the bassist – until the bassist got rid of the drummer and continued Om with a new guy on this 2009 album. Okay – I had to hear it.

Four songs, 35 minutes, the first one a full 19 minutes long; that song starts off with Indian drone and bobbling bass, for 3.5 minutes until the voice comes in, and then a bit of bongo. Sounds build slowly – a sound drifts in momentarily, another sound visits us, a different type of bass sound kicks in, the drum sound shifts slightly, here comes a slow cymbal tap… visionary stuff. Very very cool. Too bad the vocals are a bit too normal-sounding. Nothing ominous about them at all.

“Meditation Is The Practice Of Death” is another similar song that also has a bunch of great flute in it.

“Cremation Ghat I” and “Cremation Ghat II” are instrumentals that sort of roll on and on.

Thor, The Eternals Saga – In which someone who is not Jack Kirby tries to tell a Jack Kirby story. This collection gathers Thor 283-291 and a few other things; it’s kicked off by Thor Annual #7, which provides very good background by telling the tale of how… many, many years ago… Thor hung out with the Eternals for a while, and dealt with the strange phenomenon of the Celestials, and their 50 year judgement of Earth (they assume that they’re going to judge the Earth not worthy of continued existence and sentence us to eradication, which leads to plenty of misunderstandings with Odin, the Greek pantheon, etc). Apparently, Thor first encountered The Eternals many thousands of years ago when he was a just a young god, seeking worshippers in Africa and South America. They fought, reconciled, hung out for a while, and had a deadly encounter with Dromedan (we also get to meet the slithery Eternal Druig, whose Loki-like machinations cause his uncle Virako to be wiped out; his father forgive him, of course). Strange tales of Dromedan’s earth-eating worm and other bizarrely unnecessary battles. And, of course, at the end of it all, the Eternals give Thor some sort of memory wipe, so he flies off… just missing the Celestials’ third visit!

That recounts the linked tale of Thor and the Eternals from Annual #7; the tale proper begins with Thor’s visit to South America and the modern base of the Celestials to solve some mystery of Balder’s near-death and the false-Ragnarok (crazy, I know), before getting drawn into that “must save Earth at all costs, even though I have no real connection to Earth” story that both Superman and Thor share. We see Thor from time-to-time turn back into Dr Donald Blake -seems like it’s just the end of that part of Thor’s world, since I believe the Donald Blake character was phased out around this time.

Thor goes around searching for answers to riddles – why did Odin block him from re-entering Asgard after Thor tried to end his self-imposed exile, why did Odin bow to the Celestials when they came to Earth on the third visitation, who was his birth-mother, why was Odin so bent on blocking any attempt to stop the Celestials from destroying the world? He goes to South America, visits the Celestials stronghold, and meets Eternals, Deviants (like the sexy winged goth Ereshkigal, once worshipped in Mesopotamia, also called Hecate by the Greeks), SHIELD agents, nutty Deviant mutates like Karkas and the handsome Reject, and then also the ostracized Hero (blind herald of the Celestials).

To be honest, though, with all of its flaws it’s just cool to read adventures that center around the tall, dark, mysterious and silent Celestials, creatures without faces that tower 2,000 feet above us that just scream “JACK KIRBY WEIRDNESS!!!”, even if Jack didn’t draw them! There’s a great story of Thor, Karkas and Sirsi attacking the city of the Deviants and spinning a wonderful ruse for the Deviant warlord Kro.

Plenty of great rumbles between super-powered beings, like the battle between Eternals and Deviants under the streets of New York (awesome four-armed mega-beast fights Ikaris and Thor), or the mega-rumble between the Eternals and Thor on one side, and Odin and the hordes of Olympus on the other. There are also cool one-on-many battles, like when Hero takes on Thor and all of the Eternals himself, and nice one-on-one fights like when Thor is defeated by Destroyer/Sif and thrown off Bifrost, to fall to Earth and be destroyed (cool – it doesn’t happen, of course, but it’s great nonetheless). Then there are also superfluous stories, like the one where Sif fights storm giants to recover the Destroyer automaton, or when the warriors three fight Fafnir. Silly. Another superfluous story is Thor 290, where he meets the Eternal who has become a Lucha Libre wrestler called El Vampiro, who has married a human woman and who is tormented by the Deviant wrestler El Toro Rojo (the Red Bull). Huh? Actually the battle with El Toro Rojo is pretty epic, but it doesn’t make the story any less silly. Read it!

Bonus feature: list of weird items

One thing that’s funny about this collection is the amount of oaths and exclamations we get here:

“Heimdall’s eyes!”
“Odin’s blood!”
“What in the name of the Uni-mind?”
“By the Gunnunga-gap, from which all things did spring!”
“By Idunn’s golden apples!”
“By all the colors of Bifrost!”
“By all the hordes of Hela!”
“By all the sailors I ever turned into swine!”
“By the cloven hooves of Chiron!”
“By Kronos’ bottomless maw!”

Here are a few fun images from the show:

Soundgarden, King Animal – I wanted to think that Soundgarden was back in force when this album came out, and I was happy to see this special edition come out with bonus tracks (demos). Sadly, it’s hard at first to find any standout tracks right, so what we’re left with is a lot of punchy guitar-ness, scratchy vocals (without any of the impressive, soaring screams of Louder Than Love – although this does come out on one of the better songs, “By Crooked Steps”, which has a bit of a trance feel to it), and the odd pop-ish number that attempts to re-create the best tracks on Superunknown. “A Thousand Days Before” is a nice, groovy little ditty that has a good chorus, and some very very nice riffs. “Bones Of Birds” is also a pretty good song, with some nice verses, a good bridge, and a groovy, heavy chorus; yes, a wonderful Soundgarden ballad. “Attrition” is a punky punker with interesting guitar sounds that sort of gloms on nicely. Actually, the album really grows warmly on repeated listens, and soon you hear a method behind the madness, and some very cool, sophisticated music. This is not “Full On Kevin’s Mom”, this is something different – and better. It’s also not the pop-influenced Superunknown… not is it “Jesus Christ Pose.” Well – it’s Soundgarden in this space and time.

Still, the album occasionally has a pretty good lyric, like “no one knows what intelligent life is.” And it’s interesting to have the demos at the end, even if they don’t sound all that different from the final versions (minus the flourishes). Oh well!

I first heard about Wormrot a few years ago, this really great grindcore band from Singapore that hardly ever plays here, who were signed to Earache Records. And then it turns out that they record in the same studio we do – Ar Boy’s TNT Productions in Dhoby Ghaut! Nice!!

I got a chance to see them live in March 2013 when they were part of a big thrash and grindcore festival with Nagoya’s Hell And Hell (another great band, although a very different sound and show from Wormrot’s). Wormrot came out, tore up the stage, the drummer hitting the drums faster than anyone I’ve ever seen, the guitarist grinding away quickly and efficiently, the vocalist just tearing it up. Cool, funny, crunchy – that’s Wormrot.

I wanted to buy some of the band’s CDs, because everyone knows that gigs are the best places to buy CDs in Singapore (availability, price, money getting back to the band – it’s all good). Hell and Hell were selling their Volume Zero CD, but no Wormrot! Too bad, I would have bought one for sure.

Then a month later, I was in Toronto on a business trip, and I came across Abuse and Dirge, their Earache Records releases from 2010 and 2011. Great! That was an easy sale for HMV (who had properly labelled their slot “grindcore from Singapore” – cool rhyme!!). I hope Wormrot someday write a song called “what rhymes with Singapore?”).

The songs are very fast, have both cookie monster and screamed lyrics, with some relatively slow metallic and thrashy bits, with plenty of pace and rhythm changes – the band stops on a dime. These songs are really strangely beautiful!

Wormrot, Abuse – With songs ranging from 0:08 to 2:16 (and more than half of them under one minute in length), this 20 minute-long album really covers a lot of territory in its 23 songs!! “Lost Swines” starts off the album, with a round of screaming that’s probably sampled from some actual incident, and then some great thrash sounds, before ripping into the lightning sounds of grindcore. It’s a long one, at 1:19, with plenty of cool-sounding screams and lots of heavy change-ups in timing and beat. The drum is going much faster than a piledriver, with laser precision. Wow! Studio magic, maybe, but these guys do pull it off live – that’s what makes them so great. Love this stuff – it’s beautiful in its own way.

There are no gaps between songs, so it’s hard to tell where one stops and the other begins, but that’s cool. Great titles like “Born Stupid”, “So Fierce For Fuck!?” (the shortest song on the album – the follow-up Dirge has the similarly-titled “Fucking Fierce So What”) “Shitlack”, “Fuck…I’m Drunk”, “Operation Grindcore”, “Overgrown Asshole”, “Blasphemy My Ass”, “Scum Infestation And Last Song” (the only song on the disc that’s over two minutes in length). It is the last song. “Good Times” is probably the most accessible song on the album, with a crunchy Rage Against The Machine sound at the start before it gets really nutty and fast. Love it!

Wormrot, Dirge – The songs on Dirge are even shorter than the ones on Abuse, ranging from 0:04 to 1:49. “Principle Of Puppet Warfare” is one of the very cool one, with a groovy funk riff starting it out before it blasts right into the sonic atmosphere. Love it dearly! “A Dead Issue” is also sorta funky and groovy and it sort of gloms on and on… slowly… kind of like “Mandatory Suicide” or something slow-thrashy, before zooming into the stratosphere of speed!! Love it!!

Great song titles like “All Go No Emo”, “Public Display Of Infection”, “Fucking Fierce So What” (0:05), “Stench Of Ignorance”, “Meteor To The Face”, “Addicts Of Misery”, “You Suffer Buy Why Is It My Problem” (0:04), “Erased Existence”, and “The Final Insult” (last song).

Bad Seed, Ian Johnston – I adore Nick Cave, so naturally there was no issue in reading this on my first opportunity. The work is generally very good, covering the early years and the Birthday Party years with incredible detail and perspective; while Johnston couldn’t interview Cave for this book, he did interview nearly everybody else in his circle (and quotes Cave extensively from external sources). He’s certainly done his homework.

But the book has plenty of weak areas, in particular the Bad Seeds era from the fourth album onwards, where he falls into the rut of padding out the manuscript by describing the albums song-by-song, and covering the entire plot of And The Ass Saw The Angel; not sure if this is really necessary. Johnston also has a weakness for planting page-long quotes from protagonists into the text; while it’s not horrible to get the words in their original form (a la Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine), it’s also fairly unconventional, and a sign of lazy journalism (believe me – I’ve been there).

The book has plenty of magic moments, including one recounted by music journalist Mat Snow, with whom Cave and Lane stayed for a few weeks at one point (curious, considering Cave’s difficult relationship with journalists – it would, indeed, end in tears, when the ensuing battles took musical form in the brilliant “Scum”:

I remember coming in one night and Mick and Katy Beale and Nick and Anita were sitting around listening to Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, Neil Young’s After The Gold Rush and Fun House. Anita used to play Fun House all the time.

How cool it would be to sit around with Nick Cave and Anita Lane and listen to After The Gold Rush, one of my favorite albums of all time (I once listened to it 35 times in a row). The book describes how Cave appeared on Die Haut releases. Nice that so many interesting bands were setting out at the same time – couldn’t happen now. Interesting also to note that Jim Thirlwell (of Foetus fame) was friends with Cave both in Australia and in London; he later wrote the song “Sick Man” about their falling out.

There’s discussion of the Immaculate Consumptive project Cave did with Lydia Lunch (with whom he didn’t really get along), Thirlwell and Marc Almond. Some info about that here:

“Well I’m big in New York,” said Lydia.
“Well, so am I,” replied Nick.
“The only place you’re big is in your head, dear, ” she replied.
It would go on like this all the time.

“I have fond memories of Nick and Marc [Almond] proposing a dirty tour of the Far East playing in the slooziest places in Singapore,” Johnston quotes Chris Bohn, who accompanied the Immaculate Consumptive people on the tour.

There’s discussion about how fascinated Cave was with tapes of Elvis Presley’s deteriorating performing condition, as seen in his later performances in Rapid City, South Dakota on June 21st, 1977, when he struggled through “Are You Lonesome Tonight” and “My Way”.

He had become increasingly obsessed with the singer’s final “Las Vegas” years. While rock critics deemed that Elvis was only ever of importance before being drafted into the US army in the late fifties, Cave, who was now embracing ever closer the ethos of mental and physical collapses as an artistic statement, took inspiration from the twilight of his career. Throughout Elvis’ suposed artistic decline, his repertoire consisted manly of “easy listening music” which displayed no innovation whatsoever; but this was not what primarily interested Cave – he believed that Presley on stage, in an advanced state of disintegration, finally presented the truth about himself, and with such passion that his performance was totally uncontrived. “Here’s a man who’s got everything, and he’s getting up on stage only to fall apart. He fucks up ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight’ completely. Sweat is forming on his face, his eyes are crazed with drugs and fear, like a trapped animal. He can’t remember anything, so he tells bad jokes in the middle, for which he has forgotten the punch lines. But then he concentrates and manages to sing ‘My Way’. It was a truly inspired performance. That’s what it’s all about if you ask me… What is good is what affects me. There’s no reason why a group should have to get up on stage and be ‘good’, ‘youthful’ or whatever. Why should it be that way?”

Naturally, the early days of his youth are interesting – he must have been a difficult kid to grow up with in rural Australia in the early 1970s. The stubborn youth, getting in trouble, and then being in a band that, through some herculean effort, managed to get all the way from Australia to London (how many sensational Australian bands withered and died without ever being heard outside of their continent?) Interesting early influences from Pere Ubu and The Pop Group (back in the days when Cave could be influenced by someone else; now it would be the other way around). There’s insanity in those early years, when Cave was constantly high on drugs and alcohol, constantly mis-reading his audience (when the Birthday Party audiences whipped themselves into a frenzy that seemed rote to Cave, he became disgusted). Then they got sick of their success and the popularity of “Release The Bats”. It’s amusing how the band despised the goths, and in particular the band Bauhaus. “‘Bauhaus’ bass player asked me if I was into William Burroughs!’ exclaims an indignant Rowland Howard. ‘It was horrible. We couldn’t believe how bad they were.’” Hmmm… doesn’t seem that awful to me. Not as bad as the crazy antics that they got into when they were bored, like blowing up cars! Sounds like a real bunch of confused nuts. “Dead Joe apparently was based on a single chord – have to check that out…

There’s an interesting note that the Kicking Against The Pricks album produced recordings for a lot of songs that never made the cut, such as The Saints’ “No, Your Product”, The Loved Ones’ “Everlovin’ Man”, Johnny Cash’s “Bullrider”, Leadbelly’s “John Henry”, and Harry Belafonte’s “Have You Herd About Jerry?” I’ll have to check those out.

There’s reference to a strange concert that Cave did with Mick Harvey on bass Thomas Wylder on drums and Roland Wolf at the piano, that consisted of 15 minutes of Karen Carpenter songs. Now that must have been crazy!! There’s also a tale of a riot that occurred at a gig that Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds played with Die Haut, Crime And The City Solution, The Swans, The Butthole Surfers and The Fall (!!!!!!) that led to a riot, that included burning tires rolling towards a gas station, the city was on fire.

Lots of tales of excess – of violence, of drug use, of extreme exertion onstage, of being sick and poor and hungry and starving for art. Wow. Then there’s the obsessions with murder and death and poetry and writing and creating… art. While not all of it is interesting, it is interesting to see how Cave, a musician, approached the non-musical form. This comes naturally, though, for a man of so many interests and passions: extremism, the Bible, drugs, sobriety, murder, life, and the human condition.

What is interesting from the book, though, is Johnston’s recountering of some of Cave’s inspirations from the time before he became sober, such as a reference to The Shoemaker, a biography by Flora Rheta Shriber of the tormented weirdly and evil psychotic murderer Joseph Kallinger. There’s also a fascinating plunge into the process of creating the screenplay for Ghosts Of The Civil Dead, the film Cave worked on with director John Hillcoat to create a version of In The Belly Of The Beast, Letters From Prison, an insane account of prison life by intelligent author Jack Henry Abbott, whose release from prison was championed by Norman Mailer – only to have Abbott kill again, this time a promising young writer he picked a fight with.

There was also mention of Cave’s meditation on the life of the supremely evil American mas murderre Carl Panzram, who “embarked on a spree of sodomy and murder across the world that claimed twenty victims”. When a penal reform group campaigned on his behalf for clemency against his death sentence, he said “the only thanks that you and your kind will ever get rom me is that I wish you all had one neck and that I had my hands on it.”

Even at the scaffold he was defiant, admonishing his hamgman with the words, ” Hurry it up, you bastard! I could hang a dozen men while you’re fooling around.”

No wonder this man felt he had to record a collection of murder ballads!

A final reservation – the book was published in 1995, so it misses nearly 20 years of Nick Cave’s story, including the release of some of his best albums! I wonder if there are any gooder Nick Cave bios out there?

Overall, it’s interesting to read about Cave’s early life, about the people he knew in the early days in Australia, and especially what a sensation The Birthday Party was, especially in London; I had only come across them a decade after they had broken up! It’s also interesting to learn more about Anita Lane, one of the very amazing, sensuous rock ‘n’ roll muses, and very poorly understood.

Unfortunately, one thing that Johnston never really explains properly is how Nick Cave and Mick Harvey could not tolerate each other in The Birthday Party, but worked amicably together in The Bad Seeds when Cave’s leadership was full and apparent. Oh well – maybe no one has figured out that yet (and now Mick’s gone…).

——

By the way, here’s the movie “Dandy”, Cave’s second film appearance (after Wings Of Desire).

In the book there’s references to Heiner Muhlenbrock’s “The City” short film, which documents The Birthday Party in its bickering-est moments. That might be nice to see….