Which is this twin-set, whereupon Cave has largely renounced the piano and resolved the schism, the tunes being built in tandem with the band and producer Nick Launay. For want of a better barometer, you can distinguish the two records by their beat-keepers. New Yorker Jim Sclavunos sits for the first set, crowding the tempo like a tailgater late for a date, while Berliner Thomas Wydler takes the second, hanging a bare brushstroke behind, smoky and laconic.

‘Abattoir Blues’ may not be the butcher’s ball suggested by the title, but it contains multiple new twists in the plot. ‘Get Ready For Love’ and ‘There She Goes, My Beautiful World’ suggest Bryan Ferry doing ‘Hard Rain’, with gospel singers clad in slinky silk rather than purple robes – not a million miles from the hellfire-and-gold-lame of Dylan’s ‘Slow Train Coming’ period. It’s at least one part the hot buttered soul-man symphony Mick Harvey has long threatened. On songs like ‘Cannibal’s Hymn’ and ‘Hiding All Away’ bass player Martyn P. Casey manages the not inconsiderable feat of finding dirty hot funk inside lurching waltzes.

Up in the higher frequencies, Cave himself has much sport setting profound/profane poetics against the voices of the London Community Gospel Choir, who turn from ghostly white to carnal red on command. Space prohibits lyric quotes, but sample this: “John Willmot penned his poetry riddled with the pox/ Nabakov wrote on index cards, at a lectern, in his socks/St. John of the Cross did his best stuff imprisoned in a box/And Johnny Thunders was half alive when he wrote Chinese Rocks”.

The songs are shorter, built around sly hooks (Warren Ellis’s bouzouki on ‘Let The Bells Ring’, James Johnston’s lethal Hammond, Mick Harvey’s guitar throughout). Cave’s melodies always rang with celestial import, but rarely at such pulse-racing tempo. On ‘Nature Boy’ (a sober cousin of Cockney Rebel’s ‘Come Up And See Me (Make Me Smile)’) he reconciles both, making for ecstatic music.

The second set is pastoral pop with inbuilt anomalies such as the title tune, a blues-in-a-brothel reworking of Ovid’s myth with a gag tagged on the end, and ‘Supernaturally’, all Spanish castellations and flamenco drinking games. But ‘Breathless’, ‘Spell’ and ‘Babe, You Turn Me On’ are exercises in how to make songs of guileless adoration as be-still-my-beating-heart as those of still-aired sorrow. Any old versifier can describe pissoirs of rain; it’s early morning redemption that vexes the apprentices. Indeed, in the last named tune, Cave goes from Hopkins’ pantheism to Shakespeare’s sonnets to Serge’s libidinous toss-offs in a single stanza: “Now, the nightingale sings to you/And it raises up the ante/I put one hand on your round ripe heart/And the other down your panties”. Here are songs for lovers astray in a world threatened by odious forces. Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds have painted their masterpiece.

One of Ireland’s foremost music and pop culture writers, Peter Murphy (b. 1968, Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford) got a taste for journalism at the age of 17 when he won first place in an EU sponsored competition for young essayists. After ten days of being wined, dined and chauffeured around Europe on someone else’s tab, the only proviso being that he file a report at the end of it, he figured this was the way to live. But first, he had to get the rock ‘n’ roll bug out of his system, and spent most of the next decade playing drums with a succession of bands. He quit music to become a journalist in 1996, quickly establishing himself as a senior contributor to Hot Press. Since then he has written over 30 cover stories for the magazine, accumulating a portfolio of interviews that includes Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Nick Cave, Willie Nelson, Radiohead, Public Enemy, Shane MacGowan, George Clinton, Sonic Youth, Television, Henry Rollins, PJ Harvey, Richard Hell, David Johansen, Warren Zevon, Wim Wenders, Iain Banks, Will Self, William Gibson, Billy Bob Thornton, FW De Klerk and many others. His work has also appeared in the Bloodaxe Books anthology Dublines, the Sunday Independent (Ireland) plus international publications such as Rolling Stone (Australia) and Request (US). Miscellaneous assignments include writing the programme notes for jazz legend Miles Davis’ art exhibition hosted by the Davis Gallery in Dublin (2000), collaborations with cult author JT LeRoy for the American magazine Razor (2002), and co-producing Revelations, a two-hour radio documentary about The Frames (2003). He is frequently employed as a rent-a-mouth by the BBC and Irish national radio and television, is a contributor to the online archive Rocksbackpages.com and more recently gave a talk entitled Nocturnal Emissions at the ReJoyce symposium in the National College of Ireland, tracing the influence of James Joyce’s writings on Irish music. He has also been invited to contribute an essay to the liner notes of the 2004 remastered edition of Harry Smith’s Anthology Of American Folk Music, and is currently writing his first novel.

© 2004 Laura Hird All rights reserved.