Grinding up the Bad Seeds

Martyn Casey, Nick Cave, Warren Ellis, and Jim Sclavunos are all pondering the point of their band Grinderman, who have just released their second album, Grinderman 2, the rather tidily titled follow up to 2007's debut release, eh, Grinderman.

Cave acknowledges the validity of the question given that all four band members are members of the highly successful and long-standing Bad Seeds. In a nutshell, it appears to be confusing for everyone, a point Nick himself hammers home. “It's a very good question as to the 'why' of Grinderman, and it's something I don't think any of us can really answer successfully. It's very confusing for everybody within The Bad Seeds and sometimes even within Grinderman itself as to what we're actually doing and why. The fans find it confusing on some level and the record company definitely find it confusing. But at the end of the day we really like the Grinderman records and we really like the chaotic and confusing effect that it's had.” Consider Nick 'confused'.

Casey is a little more specific about the raison d'etre of the band: “I think it gives us an opportunity to explore other kinds of music. With The Bad Seeds; I don't know why but because there are more people it tends to conform to 'what it is'. It's been going for such a long time that it has this particular sound. Whereas with just the four of us, it's easier to explore kinds of music that The Bad Seeds wouldn't do.” Ellis agrees that it's all about getting a different atmosphere going. “It was a way of downsizing the band because The Bad Seeds is really big. I guess psychologically it was good to try something different. For Nick it was a case of him being able to let go of, to a certain degree, of a lot of the responsibility he feels with The Bad Seeds. With this, everybody was taking the risk. On paper it might not seem like a big deal but these were really important concepts for the project.”

Sclavunos chimes with the notion that Cave feels almost unlimited responsibility for the successes and failures of The Bad Seeds. “Nick is very much in the foreground in The Bad Seeds and that's one of the advantages of Grinderman in that he can allow himself to be subsumed by the Grinderman machine.” Do these pressures not affect each of the members, given their cumulative years of service? “I think the whole legacy thing; it doesn't matter to me personally,” says Sclavunos. “It maybe matters a lot to the fans because they have expectations and there's a history. There's no issue, for example, if Grinderman does remixes, or allow other artists to do remixes of our stuff. Whereas, there's no precedent with The Bad Seeds. They, to my knowledge have never done a remix in the whole life of the band.”

Cave himself admits that he revels in the somewhat more egalitarian approach of the four-piece. “The songwriting pressure is off. If we make a bag of shit I don't have to take full responsibility. That's how I feel, y'know. Even though The Bad Seeds is a collaboration, at the end of the day I still have to take the rap if it's a bad or a good record and I guess that influences things for sure. There's a legacy there and a sense of duty to that legacy.”

Given that they work so closely on a variety of projects (Ellis and Cave, for example, have collaborated on a variety of film soundtracks), are there ground rules about the type of music they're going to play as Grinderman? Ellis suggests there may be the vague notion of a blueprint. “With the first album, Nick and I had spoken about it quite a bit before and it was this talking that got the ball rolling. When we started messing around in the studio, Nick sat down on the piano and started playing a certain kind of song, so we were like 'OK, you're not playing the piano, play the guitar'. I didn't play the violin, because as soon as I start it sounds like The Bad Seeds. I also said to Nick 'Let's not have any songs about love or God,' and he was like 'Well what do I write about then?' There wasn't a structure as such but I guess there were certain guidelines to stop us going to places whereby we knew what would happen if we went there.”

Sclavunos comments on the idea that whilst there may be certain principles agreed to in theory, it's really all about the dynamic between the members. “There are things like that verbalised but for me the essence of the difference between the two things is not so much in what's forbidden or the arbitrary rules that we set up momentarily and then dispense with; it's more about the numbers. It's easier for people to follow each other and go off on tangents and pursue the unpredictable in a more compact combo. A smaller band lends itself to impulsive, instantaneous responses. A larger band lends itself more to orchestration and arrangement.”

Cave seems to bristle at the idea there are ever any strict guidelines in place, no matter which project he's working on. “It's not like I'm walking around in The Bad Seeds saying 'we can do this and we can't do that,' it's definitely not like that at all. It's just re-energised everybody, even those people who aren't in the band. With Dig Lazarus, Dig, it wasn't like we went in to do a record like Grinderman or anything like that, it just gave the rest of the band the licence to make a fucking racket again. And they felt 'well, if they can do it, we can do it'. I think. I'm not sure where the trajectory of The Bad Seeds would be, but I think that Grinderman has been hugely beneficial for it. I don't know what the next [Bad Seeds] record's going to be like at all but I can't help but think that Grinderman would have had a really positive effect on it.”

Casey agrees with the sentiment, adding: “That's the thing, there aren't any rules of engagement. It comes from us just playing together in a room. I think we all know when it's not working when there are hours and hours and hours of what is basically fucking rubbish, and we just winkle out the good bits and then form something from that.”

When it's pointed out that the end result seems to be a sound more overt than The Bad Seeds, often quite explicit and straight up by comparison, Casey has the last word. “So far that seems to be what we end up with but I don't think we're deliberately trying to be 'in your face', we just end up making a lot of fucking noise basically.”