Music

We’re reliably informed that Nick Cave is writing another screenplay for John Hillcoat, his director friend who realised, in expertly gloomy fashion, the bloody, pillage-fuelled Western that Cave dreamed up for their 2005 film, ‘The Proposition’. This new film of theirs is apparently a ‘sex romp’. And so continues Cave’s break from the bleak, a sojourn that was jump-started by his picking up the axe in howling, leather-tough blues monsters, Grinderman.

It’s almost as if Cave has stepped out of a one- dimensional picture in the last year, one that painted him, a bit unfairly, as a right old miseryguts. Since rocking out with the G-men, a band who are promising to groove noisily for the foreseeable future, Cave has judged last year’s World Beard And Moustache Championships in Brighton and now, with the rest of Grinderman, he’s brought the dangerously trousered, redemptive powers of rock ’n’ roll into The Bad Seeds, as you’ll hear on the grubbier, looser, less stately ‘Dig! Lazarus! Dig!’.

Cave has said he felt guilty and dirty on his return to The Bad Seeds fold. ‘It was like going back to the wife and telling her you’d taken a mistress,’ he told a website recently. But, as these furious, drama-loaded gigs will show, Cave was having way too much fun to repent and The Bad Seeds seem to be getting along famously with their new guest.