Music

There’s a good reason why they’re called vanity projects. When any band – or part of a band – embarks on an enterprise concurrent with, yet separate and distinct from the mothership, the results are often grisly beyond the imagining. Powered by tendentious enthusiasm and steered by the cast-iron self-belief peculiar to major stars, The Passenger (U2 with Eno and Pavarotti), Temple Of The Dog (moonlighting members of Soundgarden and Pearl Jam) and BS 2000 (Beastie Boy Ad Rock, plus drumming chum[p]) are just three of the shamefully bumptious vehicles to have set off down rock’s highway in recent years. Naturally, there’s a direct link between the calibre of the parent band’s output and the quality of any offshoot. Put inflated egos in, you get puffed-up nonsense out; quality and tempered individualism in, quality out.
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Cue Grinderman, which features four elder statesmen of rock – Nick Cave (vocals, piano, organ, electric guitar), Warren Ellis (violin, viola, bouzouki, acoustic guitar) Martyn Casey (bass acoustic guitar) and Jim Sclavunos (drums, percussion). Their debut, self-titled album is a very different kettle of kippers from the music they make as members of the Bad Seeds. It’s a raw, intensely visceral and thrillingly immediate affair which clocks in at a punkily brief 39 minutes and was banged out in just five days in the studio. Its energy and dark vigour lend it an almost feral feel, especially on tracks such as scrofulous opener, ‘Get It On’, with its hammered piano and monstrously fuzzed guitar. In some ways, it harks back to The Birthday Party, while touching too on Suicide, The Stooges, Television, ’70s jazz and Sun Studios’ production techniques. It’s far from an eruptive, inchoate racket, but ‘Grinderman’ favours distortion, atmospherics, noise and physicality over the (superlative) formal narrative structure and considered melodrama that distinguishes the Bad Seeds’ oeuvre. With Grinderman, Cave and co have broken out and their new incarnation becomes them. Brilliantly.

‘We went in with the idea of making an album that was raw and to-the-point,’ Cave begins. ‘We wanted to make a record that sounded different from The Bad Seeds and we had to discover what that sound was in the studio…’

‘…and figure out a way to get in and change our way of working,’ Ellis chips in, ‘which involved taking away the responsibility from Nick of arriving with a bunch of songs that we’d then work out how to play. Here, we all went in and sat down, Nick improvised, we played for five days solid and then the material was drawn from there. That’s the only thing different with Grinderman; in terms of speed and recording methods, the Bad Seeds’ albums are done no slower.’

How do you go about making a record that is markedly different in both content and style from your usual output?

‘There’s a very practical way of doing it,’ Cave reckons. ‘We went into the studio for five days straight, with very little sleep. There were about 50 hours of recorded music, we sat down and listened back to it and started pulling out particular pieces that sounded unique and were going places we felt we hadn’t really been before.’