Mick Harvey always had a reputation as the backbone of Nick Cave’s Bad Seeds, whose headlining slot at the Electric Picnic coincides with the release of the multi-instrumentalist’s new album One Man’s Treasure (Mute)
It was clear from the outset that the band had upped the ante for the home show and, bar a number of softer tracks mainly culled from his more recent albums, the gig was an exercise in measured intensity
Goth’s not dead, at least not in Leeds – the international centre for all things gloomy and the home to The Ivories. As befits a band who’s singer used to run a club called Release The Bats and front an outfit called The Holy Terror, this isn’t the cheeriest of stuff. Instead, it visits the darker corners of the Banshees and the Bad Seeds. B-side ‘Disappointment’ is actually the better track, upping the tempo to a psychobilly howl, but this is an impressive debut all round.
With the release of The Best of Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds, it's obvious that someone's been rummaging around in the grim annals of ol' Nick's extraordinary back catalogue. But who?
Interview: Peter Murphy
With the release of The Best of Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds, it's obvious that someone's been rummaging around in the grim annals of ol' Nick's extraordinary back catalogue. But who?
Interview: Peter Murphy
With the release of The Best of Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds, it's obvious that someone's been rummaging around in the grim annals of ol' Nick's extraordinary back catalogue. But who?
Interview: Peter Murphy
With the release of The Best of Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds, it's obvious that someone's been rummaging around in the grim annals of ol' Nick's extraordinary back catalogue. But who?
With the release of The Best of Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds, it's obvious that someone's been rummaging around in the grim annals of ol' Nick's extraordinary back catalogue. But who?
Interview: Peter Murphy
With the release of The Best of Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds, it's obvious that someone's been rummaging around in the grim annals of ol' Nick's extraordinary back catalogue. But who?
Interview: Peter Murphy
Inevitably, The Best Of Nick Cave ... The Bad Seeds can only hint at the scope of the band's back catalogue. But if one listens to the group's ten studio albums chronologically, there are no gear-grinding changes of direction or radical overhaulings of the sound, all the more remarkable considering the amount of personnel that passed through the line-up.
At the ripe old age of 50, when most of his peers are floundering in the doldrums, Nick Cave has hit a purple patch with Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!, his most commercially successful and critically acclaimed album to date.
From dark age to middle age, Nick Cave is such a far cry from the blood-spilling junkie of rock legend that these days you’re likely to encounter him commuting to his 9 to 5. Except of course that his job is writing and making music, his new album is called Nocturama and there are, he admits, some sizeable blow-outs in the memory banks.
Fatboy Slim, Flaming Lips, Damien Dempsey, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Mercury Rev and Public Enemy are some of the heavyweight attractions at the Electric Picnic, which this year is a two-day event taking place on the Stradbally Estate, County Laois on September 3 and 4.
Here’s the deal. You can have the full bells-and-whistles Nick & the Bad Seeds production with all its attendant kinetics and dynamics, staged in a high-ceilinged cow palace or festival tent, or you can take your chances on the more roughshod and ragged-gloried variety up close and in your face in Vicar St, which isn’t nearly as slick but affords plenty of rarified moments.
We hope you're feeling hungry because on September 3 and 4 over 50 of the hottest live acts and DJs around are descending on Stradbally Estate in Laois for the Electric Picnic.
By day he's Nick Cave's trusty lieutenant, but Conway Savage is also spreading his wings as a solo artist, tipping his hat to James Joyce along the way.
Primal Scream bandmate Kevin Shields may be complaining about the neighbours, but Mani hasn’t thrown the towel in yet. He tells us why things are looking up for the Scream.
Frazer Guided Melodies
TARNATION may make soundtracks to cinematic desert scenes but there s more to Paula Frazer s beautiful songs than a fistful of spaghetti western themes. Interview: Nick Kelly.
From the early excesses of the Birthday Party through meisterwerks like The Good Son to his new release, Live Seeds, Nick Cave has spent nearly fifteen years probing those crevices of the human psyche that few care, or even dare, to venture into.
Here, in a highly personal, in-depth interview, Gerry McGovern grills the god of Goth about his ambivalence towards and obsession with religion, his love of dysfunctional people, his thoughts on the past and his hope for the future, oh, and how to reconcile life as an internationally renowned icon of doom with being a mummy’s boy! (Only joking, Nick!).
"The record is a less sonically abrasive affair than the album Cave released last year with his side-project Grinderman, but it teems with as many musical and lyrical ideas as ever..."
She has spent her life being defined by the men around her - as daughter of Arthur Miller and wife of Daniel Day Lewis. With the release of her big screen adaptation of her novel, The Private Lives Of Pippa Lee, Rebecca Miller proves that she is very much her own woman.
Or should that be Pub Stars? Either way, their debut album is soaked in the strong spirit - and stronger spirits - of their native city. Nick Kelly meets Dublin's JUBILEE ALLSTARS.
Purveyors of pristine psych-pop, cult rock heroes and musical innovators par excellence – Mercury Rev may be many things, but garrulous interviewees they certainly aren’t. Frontman Jonathan Donahue grants hotpress an audience and grudgingingly opens up enough to discuss music, religion, quantum theory and the delicate balance between commercial success and artistic integrity.
To celebrate hotpress’s thirtieth anniversary issue, we thought we’d break out the bubbly (and the tea!) and invite round a collection of Ireland’s biggest stars.
They love Ireland and Ireland loves them. As the Arcade Fire ramp up for world domination, the band talk about love, death, war and making music in churches.
1993 may not have been a classic year for rock ’n’ roll but away from the bright lights and the glitter of chartland, there is still great music being made. GERRY McGOVERN talks to five bands who went to the heart of the matter over the past 12 months and made great and memorably soulful albums: TINDERSTICKS, LUNGFISH, MARXMAN, GIRLS AGAINST BOYS and SCRAWL.
Alex Barclay used to write about fashion and beauty products. Now she’s a best-selling crime author with a lucrative book deal. What sets her apart from other whodunnit writers is her forensic eye for detail and chilling mastery of plot. She’s just getting started, she tells Peter Murphy.
U2 are about to unleash their new album How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb. The world’s media are descending on Dublin. And Bono is back at the punch-bag, getting into fighting shape before the shit storm really explodes. The gloves are off. He’s got work to do. And he’s going to do it. Words Stuart Clark, additional reporting by Niall Stokes.
It's been a long strange trip and no mistake, one that describes a discernible line from
Harry Smith's Anthology Of American Folk Music through to the Handsome Family.
But there's even more going on beneath the surface. GREIL MARCUS, the music critic's music critic,
is PETER MURPHY's guide on a mystery train whose other passengers include Elvis Presley, Robert Johnson, Mark Twain, Nick Cave, The Blair Witch, Bill Clinton, The Band, Siniad O'Connor, Beck, William Burroughs, William Faulkner and Bob Dylan. And that's just the first class carriage. All aboard
I’d caution the casuals, but if you are a fan then dive straight in. You’ll love this rich stew of subtle pleasures and nocturnes that’ll ferment and season with each listening.
Melbourne’s favourite experimental, instrumental, indie-folkists The Dirty Three make a welcome return to Dublin for an intimate show in Whelans on Wednesday December 9.
His melodies do the job, and this new record utilises a peculiar but pleasing palate of muted drum figures, manipulated guitar and synth strings, but as I say, the vocal tone grates
They’re all here tonight – the freaks, the weirdoes, the confused, the lost, the trapped and the marginal. And that’s just the characters in the songs. You really want to see the crowd.
One fine day about a decade ago, your reporter was idly hitching a lift to Wexford town when he chanced to glance up and realise that, to his horror, he was thumbing a hearse, the incriminating digit standing obscenely erect in full sight of the driver, the mourners and their grim cavalcade.
Here’s the pitch. Take one ’60s pin-up turned crawler from the ’70s wreckage turned Weimar Republican and furnish her with a body of songs drawn from co-writes with and original compositions by PJ Harvey and Nick Cave.
Located just 10 minutes from central Budapest, the Sziget Festival is simply Europe’s biggest party. Taking place over seven days in August, it’s where Hungary and the rest of Europe collectively let their hair down!
THE CRITICS PANEL WHO VOTED FOR THE TOP 30 ALBUMS AND SINGLES OF THE YEAR ARE AS FOLLOWS: BILL GRAHAM, LIAM FAY, GEORGE BYRNE, STUART CLARK, LORRAINE FREENEY, TARA McCARTHY, GERRY McGOVERN, NEIL McCORMICK, DERMOT STOKES, OLIVER P. SWEENEY, SIOBHAN LONG, STEVE AVERILL, ANDY DARLINGTON, COLM O’HARE, JOE JACKSON, HELENA MULKERNS, DAN OGGLY, CATHY DILLON, NIALL CRUMLISH, OLAF TYARANSEN, PATRICK BRENNAN, JACKIE HAYDEN AND NIALL STOKES.
Skibbereen is the unlikely location for one of the most impressive festival line-ups of the year. Simon Basketter hears how Liss Ard can attract some of the biggest international names in rock.
The Oxegen bill has just become even tastier with ten new acts being confirmed for Punchestown.
These are Razorlight, Elbow, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Pete Doherty, The Ting Tings, White Lies, Fight Like Apes, Jason Mraz, Pendulum and Yeah Yeah Yeahs.
This May, Conway Savage will take to the stage for his new Irish tour. Best known for his role the keyboard/piano player with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Savage is flying solo this time around.
Think you've got them all right? Or maybe you fancy a sneaky peak (you're only cheating yourself you know!). Either way, you've got the questions – we've got the answers....
