Nick Cave & Grinderman
Forum Theatre, Melbourne
Tuesday October 16, 2007 with 0 Mess+Noise champion in attendance.
For his current tour, Nick Cave is supporting himself – his fresher and louder alter-ego band Grinderman are opening proceedings. While the musicians’ union ought to have something to say about this, for Cave and his band (Warren Ellis, Martyn P. Casey and Jim Sclavunos) it’s licence to let things get loud and loose. Playing songs from their debut record together, the heavily bearded quartet come off like proficient outlaws. The band, set against a shimmering glam curtain tonight, isn’t the purported return to some primal garage, but a series of ominous and threatening experiments with a harsher form of rock – one that Cave and friends only touch momentarily in their Bad Seeds work.
The rhythmic dynamics of this are impressive tonight, rippling beneath the thickly woven blanket of organ-grind, violin, bouzouki and guitar: Ellis and Cave, ever the swanning men, indulge in some obscenely suggestive work with maracas and bells; Casey and Sclavunos, like the best rock & roll rhythm sections, keep things together – although Casey’s wonderful bass work is always six notches above merely ‘functional’.
After a short break and, for Sclavunos at least, a change out of a sweaty rose-coloured suit, the quartet emerges for the nominally more subdued half. But this double act performance doesn’t quite work as two discrete sets. Cave is clearly energised by the raucous opening salvo. The tenderness conjured in previous tours with the full Bad Seeds line-up isn’t evident tonight. Cave’s in a lighter mood than he is with the Bad Seeds – the fun-sized line-up here allows a bit more freedom to re-interpret and re-work some old songs. In a make-it-up-as-we-go set, he touches on work from across his career, reaching back to ‘The Weeping Song’, ‘Red Right Hand’, and a handful from his recent Abattoir Blues/Lyre of Orpheus twin-set. A reunion with Mick Harvey delivered a theatre shaking, encore-ending rendition of ‘Stagger Lee’.
It’s a freer Cave than we’ve seen for a while. The crowd – here for the fourth of a sold-out five-night stint at Melbourne’s large Forum Theatre – is buoyant and free-spirited, willing to indulge the band’s unscripted flourishes.
by Ben Gook
