Grinderman Have Their Way

Last year the Bad Seeds’ Nick Cave, Warren Ellis, Martyn Casey and Jim Sclavunos took a sonic detour away from the piano-driven atmospherics that have dominated much of the band’s post-millennial output to deliver a riotous kick in the balls dubbed Grinderman – the fruits of a highly productive five day whirlwind recording session.

Now, with the Seeds taking a momentary break – no more, no less, they’ll be playing Edinburgh in November – the Grinderman machine is in the midst of another tour of duty. Jim recently fielded a call from us in advance of the band's appearance at Hydro Connect this weekend.

You’ve been a Bad Seed for a long time, how did a New York musician come to connect with a group of Aussies, a Brit and a Swede?

“I’ve been in the band since 1994. I got a call from Mick Harvey, he said ‘Can you be in London in a week, we have a three month tour and by the way can you play organ?’ I just lied and said yeah. They needed somebody to ring the bell on Red Right Hand and then there were some other odd jobs that came up in the set, like shake a maraca - I carved out a little niche for myself. It felt quite arbitrary for a while, but I guess I was amusing company because they let me tag along. I’ve basically always played drums in various bands – Cramps, Sonic Youth and this or that…”

You also play with Grinderman. Nick Cave has drawn his own distinctions between the way both groups function [they crank the guitars, remove the polish and Cave trades in his considered, office-dwelling song writing approach to drop freestyle poetry in the studio, for starters] and it’s easy to hear a dramatic departure in tone from latter day Bad Seeds material - this year's Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! notwithstanding – to Grinderman’s fast and loose approach. But do you really feel as though you're wearing two different hats, given that you're working with three of the same players in both bands?

“Probably more like 10 hats! But really, it’s not that schizophrenic. You know what I do? When I’m playing with Grinderman I grow a beard; it’s sort of like the method acting approach where I get into my Grinderman headspace. But, yeah, it’s the same people in both bands and we’ve been doing this for years; Warren, Marty and I started out as Nick’s backing band when he was doing his solo shows, so the evolution to Grinderman was very smooth and natural – not forced at all. The radical leap was just giving it a name and saying ‘OK, this really is different from the Bad Seeds and we’re going to give it a public identity.’”

I remember seeing one of the first promotional pictures of the band...Nick’s Fu Manchu look wasn’t a big disguise but yourself and Warren were harder to place with that extreme facial hair…

“It was like wearing a mask!”

Video: Grinderman - No Pussy Blues

In retrospect, was the formation of Grinderman a happy accident - just a by-product of those gigs played as a quartet - or was it a necessity you saw coming, a premeditated means to go somewhere that the Bad Seeds ordinarily wouldn’t?

“Nick and Warren had been toying with the idea for a while, but Nick has such a strong identity with the Bad Seeds that it was probably a bigger issue for him than anybody else; the rest of us have been in and out of bands for years. But it was definitely intentional and it became necessary after a certain point to acknowledge that we were making music that was distinctly different from the Bad Seeds. It was borne of necessity, but that only has positive consequences.”

In saying that, this year’s Bad Seeds LP [the aforementioned Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!!] bears some of the most abrasive material the Bad Seeds have recorded in years. Has the distinction started to blur?

“I think once you open the Pandora’s box of the tempting liberations that Grinderman has to offer it’s pretty hard to put all the toys back in the box. It’s like that with any kind of musical experience, you reach a certain level of development and you carry that with you to the next thing you do and that’s completely appropriate. Obviously Grinderman was going to unavoidably influence the Bad Seeds somehow or other, but were we going to veer in a completely opposite direction and be reactive or were we going to absorb some of it? As it turns out we absorbed some of it. I don’t think it’s healthy to force it one way or the other.”

Video: Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Midnight Man (Live)

The Grinderman debut only appeared 18 months ago and you’ve been kept busy with the Bad Seeds in the meantime, but whispers of a new record abound. How are the sessions going?

“Pretty slow to start, there are a few distractions, including these festival dates and various other commitments we all have. We’ve done one song so far but we’ve already been talking about rerecording it. I guess we’re not really going to have the kind of time we really wanted to dig in for a couple of months yet. But the good thing about the summertime festival thing is that we’ll have an opportunity to talk about what the next album could be. Before we did the first one we spent an awful lot of time talking about it, which may seem odd for such men of action but the thing is, when we go in the studio we work really, really fast. We work intensively; we can just go in there for a couple of days and come out with dozens of songs. The question is: what are the right songs? We throw away oodles of material, and it’s important for us to know what the vibe of the album is going to be, what we feel is the right next step. I reckon it’s mostly going to be a jaw fest for the next couple of months, and then when the time is right we’ll dive in and come out with days worth of music.”

Is all of this instigated independently, or have the record company been knocking on your door for quick turnaround on another album?

“I wouldn’t exactly say they’re breathing down our neck. Mute’s always been pretty good about being hands off. I mean, compared to the kind of stories I hear about other labels and their expectations and demands, I’d say Mute’s quite good in that respect. But by the same token, sometimes a little bit of direction and expectation isn’t a bad thing either. We’re so ornery that I couldn’t really think that anyone would count on us to do what they say anyway.

“I’ll tell you what is going to come out from Grinderman soon, though. It’s already a little bit late, but it is coming out. We’ve got some remixes on the way; a few different people have done them. T. Raumschmiere - for example - and Adam Freeland have done remixes and I think we’re going to get that out in the next couple of weeks or so – proper dance remixes! So you can boogie down in Ibiza, or wherever.”

But will you be boogying down? In putting this out, presumably you’re all quite happy with the results?

“The first reaction – obviously - is you just laugh, because the whole idea is so absurd and that’s what appealed to us about it - is that it was so wrong, in a way - and I think Grinderman is very much about experimenting and doing things that the Bad Seeds would consider sacrilegious. With Grinderman it’s sort of like ‘what the fuck, why not? It’ll be good for a laugh.’ And it is good for a laugh, actually, and they sound pretty good. I don’t make dance music, I only occasionally dance to it and most of the time - if I hear it - it’s more of an annoyance than a pleasure. But every now and then I do like to hear it, there’s a lot of stuff I do enjoy and I’m pretty tickled that we’ve got some dance remixes coming out. Who knows, maybe some drunken idiot who’d otherwise never even considered listening to one our records is all of a sudden gonna think ‘oh, that’s not so bad!’

Stranger things have happened, surely?

“Well, one can hope that a whole new legion of fans will sprout up from the seed sewn by these remixes. Then we’ll really regret it!”

In terms of the forthcoming gigs, have you found the time to rehearse and refine the Grinderman live experience to the standard you want to roll out with?

“We recently had a so-called ‘secret’ show down in Brighton, a couple of blocks from where Nick lives at the King Alfred Leisure Centre, which is the kind of place where people have afternoon aerobics classes. The festival dates aren’t so bad because the sets are a bit shorter, but in this case we had to fill a whole set, so we started mucking around with the songs and extended some of them…that turned out to be good fun. Now my favourite parts of the songs are the ones that weren’t there before. It’s new, it’s a novelty; people always tend to think that their newest stuff is their best. So there’s been some mild amendments to the basic Grinderman set, but it’s still essentially the first album plus a new song we've called Dream that we’ve been playing.”

Much was made of Nick’s lyrical output on the first record; in interview with us last year, you talked about how he was essentially lamenting the demise of patriarchy. Is Nick still pulling his words from the same place?

“Haha! That’s a very eloquent and high flung way of putting it! The actual feelings behind it are a bit more robust than that, but yeah, it’s a bit about male frustration and impotency. You get to a certain age when ranting against the world becomes quite natural to you. It’s a take-off on that. Will the next album be more ranting? I have no idea, but we’re still angry. Well, we try to be.”

The band is quite literally spread across the four corners of the globe, has that presented any hindrance to your productivity? I'm guessing it maybe hasn't in the last few years...

“It’s easy; you’re only a plane ticket away and we have a lot to answer for our carbon imprint. It’s essentially still an Australian band though, three of them to one of me, so I reckon it’s an Australian band with an American interloper. But the fact that we’re spread out, well that’s just down to falling in love with different girls. Love’s to blame!”

Video: Grinderman - Electric Alice

Lastly, a mandatory festival question…

“What is this festival we’re playing in Scotland?”

You’ll be playing in the grounds of Inveraray castle, near Loch Fyne…

“Is that why it’s called Hydro Connect? I was wondering about that, the name’s not very rock ’n’ roll - it sounds like a plumbing company or some sort of enema fetish website.”

It was a bit muddy there last year, mind your wellies.

“I’ve reached a milestone where my wife bought me a pair of Wellingtons. It’s taken this many years to actually find them in my size. I won’t be wearing my Prada shoes.”

The festival question is: Oysters, are you a fan or do you find them minging?

“Are Oysters the food of choice at this festival? Sounds very civilised, I’m all for it. See you by the oyster tent - I’ll be the huge guy in the pink suit and Wellingtons.”

Rocking the beard, of course…

“Got it, I’ll be dribbling sea slime all over it. It’s very hard to have any dignity while you’re eating when you have a beard. It’s just messy. I’m of Mediterranean stock so I’ve got all this unruly hair sprouting around my mouth. It’s really rather unsightly, I have no idea why I do this to myself.”

There’s a guy called Beardyman on the bill, this could easily become a convention...

“Beardy man? Sounds intriguing. If our whole audience could show up with beards, nothing would please us more – even the women.”