Ennui and ivory

You’ll know him as the hollow-cheeked and somewhat lived-in looking gentleman who depresses the ivories onstage with Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, but Conway Savage has been plotting his own wayward course as a solo artist and collaborator (Robert Forster, the late David McComb, Suzie Higgie) for 15 years now.

Savage specialises in morose but intoxicating piano ballads, roominghouse madrigals and broken love songs that speak of one night engagements in the kind of establishments Jim Jarmusch might reject as being too down at heel.
It’s a beautiful place to visit, although the faint of heart (and liver) wouldn’t want to move in long-term. At his best, Savage’s melancholy standards (‘Never Going To See You Again’, ‘Don’t Plan On Leaving’) will break your heart in the same exquisitely pleasurable way as classic Hank, Lee Hazelwood, Tindersticks or Joseph Roth’s wino parable The Legend Of The Holy Drinker. The title of his intrumental piece ‘Saint Of Shitty Little Rooms’ says it all: such songs could have been written at any time since the 1920s.
“I was pretty proud of that one,” Conway says, nursing a glass of wine on the patio of his friend Jim Yamouridis’s house in France. “As I look back on my, ehm, body of work (laughs) it’s kind of interchangeable isn’t it? I can be a bit of a sad sack at times, but I think the basic underlying thing isn’t too sad, it’s just true; it’s more about feeling better for the experience. I think the new EP is perhaps an attempt to get a mood going and somehow lull you into my world, and the songs are a little different.”
The EP in question, Quickie For Ducky, recorded with Amanda Fox and Robert Tickner (who’ll also join him on the forthcoming Irish tour, alongside Yamouridis and Mark Corcoran), adds a few new colours to Savage’s spectrum, mixing honky tonk informality with vocoder vocals and elements of Burt Bacharach and Van Dyke Parks.
“Now you’re talking my language,” Savage says. “That’s an incredible compliment. I think I’m just getting better as a piano player and can realise those kinds of ideas, more melodic stuff going on there. And I sing a bit higher on this one. I’ve never really done that with my own stuff before, although I have sung high behind Nick a lot.”
The most notable example being the ghostly backing vocal shadowing Cave’s narrative on ‘When I First Came To Town’ from Henry’s Dream. Is Conway a disciplined songwriter, or does he simply do it when the fancy takes him?
“I’m a disciplined piano player,” he qualifies. “I get in there every day and hammer away ’cos it makes me feel good and I get stuff out of it. I write a lot but I shrink it down, I just grab an idea wherever I can and scribble on paper. With a song like ‘Never Going To See You Again’, I kinda like the way you can describe quite a nasty little sentiment in a melodic way.”
If it’s not a facetious question, who’s the Ducky of the EP title?
“I thought you’d be getting around to that sooner or later! It’s just a scoundrel I didn’t really like very much, so I thought I’d write a song about him. Let’s just call it an ex-manager.”
Will that keep us out of the law courts?
“Oh, fuck ’im!”

Conway Savage plays Cyprus Avenue, Cork (May 2); Sugar Club, Dublin (3); Roisin Dubh, Galway (4); The Spirit Store, Dundalk (5); and McHugh’s, Belfast (6th). Quickie For Ducky is out now on Beheaded Communications.