1986: Your Funeral… My Trial

Featuring Nick Cave on harmonica on tracks 1 & 2

Your Funeral… My Trial by Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds: track by track

Sad Waters

You can blame Larry Adler for what you are about to read.

In September 1990 my student friends and I were entering our second year at university, and had just moved into a shared house. Until we got around to renting a TV, the only source of entertainment was the trusted companion of my adolescence, a little Panasonic audio system. Being middle class kids we mostly used this to listen to Radio 4, from ‘Farming Today’ in the morning to ‘Sailing By’ at closedown.

Then, late in September, Radio 4 broadcast, at 11:30 at night, a four part series about Larry Adler, Britain’s most famous harmonica player (go on, name another one). It was a rather too exhaustive accounting of Adler’s career, featuring a lot of mild anecdotes about blowing into a mouth organ. (To be fair he also sometimes inhaled, which produces a different sound.) Even worse was that at the top of each show in this series the listener was treated to the theme tune from Genevieve (1953), Adler’s most famous bit of musical breathing. Genevieve is a superannuated little comedy in which a superannuated little Kenneth More drives a superannuated little car. The theme is inoffensive and undistinguished and we were soon heartily sick of it, releasing an anguished cry whenever we heard the opening wheeze.

Fortunately my Panasonic machine featured, preposterously, a record deck, which slid out from the bottom like something from Thunderbirds. We didn’t have many records with us, being limited to what we could fit in our luggage on the train; but we did have Your Funeral …My Trial. And at the first warning toot of Adler, we would throw the switch and slip gratefully into the cooling embrace of ‘Sad Waters’.

The Carny

My introduction to Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds was courtesy of Wim Wender’s 1987 film Wings of Desire, which features a sequence in which trapeze artist Marion sits in her circus caravan and listens to ‘The Carny’. This is incredibly on the nose, of course: a depressed performer who has just been told that the circus is closing for the season listens to a goth song about a circus losing its purpose and drifting away into the darkness.

But if you’re an adolescent who has gone to see a black and white movie about angels haunting Berlin, you’re in the market for precisely this sort of thing. This was especially true in 1987, after the early ‘80s post-punk pop explosion had been replaced by an impenetrable wall of arena-scaled flatulence, ‘60s revivals and ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’. [Editor’s note: Tobias originally rendered this as ‘Never Going To Give You Up’, which gives you some insight into his mindset.]

‘The Carny’ was something else: not the conventional platitudes of a chart pop song, or the yelping inanities of a dance record. It’s a weird and twisted little story of death and circuses, half spoken and half sung, with Blixa Bargeld (Bad Seeds band member and also the lead singer of Einstürzende Neubauten) declaiming in the background with an alarming teutonic flatness.

The words are dark and lyrical (‘The whole valley reeking of wet beast/ Wet beast and rotten, sodden hay/ Freak and brute creation/ All packed up and on their way’; later on, Cave even uses the correct collective noun for crows). And musically, it was unlike anything I had ever heard before; Bad Seeds co-founder Mick Harvey had dragged the metal guts of a piano into the studio, re-tuned it, and then plucked it like a monstrous harp. It’s a malevolent broken calliope of a song, lumping along like an unhappy dancing bear, a weird and woozy waltz.

Your Funeral My Trial

Harvey has said that this album was when the band found their sound. The title song is a great example of this, because it wasn’t the first song to have this title; in 1959 Sonny Boy Williamson had released ‘Your Funeral And My Trial’, a reasonably traditional blues track: verse, chorus, verse, chorus, solo (harmonica again), middle eight, chorus and done.

This one is three verses with a falling tune that ends in a plaintive refrain: ‘Your funeral, my trial’. Rather than a solo there is a repetition of the arrangement, which stumbles like a drunk, teeters over a rattle of drums, plunges, and rises again to soar on the wings of a Hammond organ. It’s a strange and unpredictable shape for a song, both satisfying and challenging. If it is at all influenced by the Sonny Boy Williamson track, it’s a prime example of David Sylvian’s description of Japan’s approach: ‘trying to copy something else and failing miserably’. The Bad Seeds play their own blues and, in doing so, invented a strange new form of music.

Stranger Than Kindness

‘Stranger Than Kindness’, written by Blixa Bargeld and Anita Lane, is an excellent example of this kind of strangeness. It is hard to say what it is. It is dark and soft, the percussion faint and distant, the guitars swelling gently, Cave crooning. But those distant drums thunder, those guitars keep pulsing away, the lyrics are doomy, the whole song has a tone of threat that stops it ever being gentle. If it’s a love song, it’s about a lost one. If it’s a ballad, it’s for a wake. It is the darkness of a gathering thunderstorm, the softness of the fall of dust in empty rooms.

It was also, on my double album copy of the album, at the end of side B, the end of one record. If you started listening at the beginning of that Larry Adler programme it was about midnight by now. What ‘Stranger Than Kindness’ turned out to be was a strange new kind of lullaby, full of ominous dreams and elusive premonitions.

Jack’s Shadow

OK, not an entirely new strange music; but at least drawing on different traditions from the ‘60s rock, soul and pop that still hypnotised mainstream pop. The Bad Seeds released two albums in 1986; alongside Your Funeral… there was also Kicking Against The Pricks, an album of cover versions. What’s noticeable is what they choose to cover. There is a ‘60s rock song, but it’s ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’ by The Velvet Underground (also covered by Japan, of course); there is a Jimi Hendrix track, but it’s ‘Hey Joe’, a ballad with a long history and contested authorship.

Most of the songs are blues and folk and, most significantly, country. Country was not a wildly popular genre in the British alternative scene of the late ‘80s, associated as it was with rednecks, backwoods and Republicans. Cave, however, had grown up in Australia, where he had watched the Johnny Cash show on TV. As he says: ‘At that stage, I had really no idea about rock ‘n’ roll. I watched him and from that point, I saw that music could be an evil thing; a beautiful, evil thing.’ You can hear Cash’s influence throughout Your Funeral …My Trial: the Western imagery in the title song, the quotation from ‘The Green, Green Grass Of Home’ in the lyrics of ‘Sad Waters’, and the dark, sardonic storytelling of ‘Jack’s Shadow’, alongside a chugging, relentless accompaniment.

One of the great pleasures of discovering new music is how it encourages you to discover new music: how you follow the train of influence back, picking up clues from liner notes and interviews and reviews. Just as Tom Waits brought me Captain Beefheart and David Sylvian brought me Can, so Nick Cave introduced me to Johnny Cash. Which is recommendation enough, frankly.

Hard On For Love

We’re being very serious, but it’s worth pointing out that Nick Cave is frequently very funny indeed. ‘Hard On For Love’ is a list of sexual metaphors that degrade from double entendres, to single entendres, to a collection of over-excited yelping noises:

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want
But he leadeth me like a lamb to the lips
Of the mouth, of the valley, of the shadow of death
I am his rod and his staff
Yeah, I am his scepter and shaft
And she is heaven and hell
At whose gates I ain’t been delivered
I’m gunna give them gates a shove

It is ludicrous, and undoubtedly deliberately so. But in its welter of sex, religion and death it achieves a hysteria that is both manic and amusing.

There’s often a mischievous gleam in Cave’s eye, although it can be hard to figure out how knowing it is. Much of ‘The Carny’ is concerned with the burial of a dead horse named Sorrow. At the end of the song, the rain floods the shallow grave and the body of the horse floats back into view. All of this enables a line in which the circus workers are ‘wishing they’d done a better job of burying Sorrow’. It has all the arduous, objectionable construction work needed for a despicably delightful pun.

But bizarre as the music might be, it is never quite comic. ‘Hard On For Love’ has an ominous, driving pulse to it that undercuts the overwrought lyrics, giving them a fierce vitality that acknowledges that the impish glee of the words is not so far from the wild ecstasy of the act.

At first the comedy might seem incongruous in a goth band, but it’s been there in the genre right from the start. The song that arguably founded the genre, Bauhaus’s ‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead’, was actually — according to singer Pete Murphy — ‘dead funny’. Cave’s previous band, The Birthday Party, had had their biggest hit with ‘Release The Bats’, a parody of a goth song. Goth rockers The Cramps were capable of being simultaneously hilarious and terrifying, and Robert Smith of The Cure is a delightfully amusing man.

She Fell Away

Part of what The Bad Seeds were doing, though, was building a different kind of goth. It was partly the Southern Gothic of Flannery O’Connor and The Doors, and partly a decayed European Gothic of rotting rococo ballrooms and The Brothers Grimm. The lush, rumbling lyricism of ‘She Fell Away’ is dark and ominous, but it’s a world away from the striplit stark angles of Bauhaus and the muffled mournfulness of peak-era Cure.

The Birthday Party was formed while the members were at boarding school together in Australia, and this kind of comfortable background tends to produce a certain arch detachment, no matter how much heroin you take. It makes you think it’s jolly fun to record endless songs about men being violent towards women: your ‘pistol going crazy’, as ‘She Fell Away’ puts it. Later on Cave recorded a whole album titled Murder Ballads, and the trouble with this repetition was that it began to feel less like playing with genre conventions and more like barely sublimated misogyny. It also became a little boring: here comes skeevy old Nick the Ripper again, with his scalpel, blues records and a pocket full of Penny Dreadfuls. It’s something of a relief that he seems to have finally grown out of it.

Long Time Man

It probably says something about me that I still listen to these early Bad Seeds albums regularly. But then I too am a boarding school goth, prone to not taking things seriously enough. These were the records that helped shape who I am as an adult, so they’re hard to let go of.

Cave, meanwhile, has matured. He has endured the deaths of two of his children, and has become a genially gruff gothfather, leading gigs with the embracing fervour of a preacher and dispensing worn wisdom through his blog, the Red Hand Files. But his longevity is also surely due, in part, to the sound The Bad Seeds arrived at on this record: the grotesque C&W-influenced storytelling, the simple refrains of folk made complicated, the emotional heft of orchestral pop curdled and monstrous. Something strange and dark and wondrous.

Thank goodness for Larry Adler.

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We’ve covered The Bad Seeds before, and the joy of discovering Tender Prey (the follow up to You Funeral …My Trial) through the gift of a pirate cassette from a friend.