But wait, is that the ghost of Ute Lemper’s immaculately conceptualised but over-egged ‘Punishing Kiss’ I hear tapping at the window?

Well, yes, but this time it’s different. The crucial point here is, instead of hiring a bunch of session players attempting spruced up approximations of the authors’ most conspicuous characteristics, Faithfull has gotten Harvey and Cave involved in the performance and production processes.

So you can imagine the shock of hearing Faithfull’s racked and ruined but romantic croak placed next to PJ’s ugly blues redux riffs and the throw-you-a-curve drumming of Rob Ellis on tunes like ‘My Friends Have’ and ‘In The Factory’. At first it seems like the music is roughing up a grand dame of British pop, until she sings, and you realise her voice is twice as harrowed as any of the sounds, and that several lifetimes of interpreting the punk in Brecht have made her phrasing hard as nails (see the majestic six-minute rendition of ‘No Child Of Mine’, of which we only heard but a snippet on ‘Uh Huh Her’).

Faithfull of course shares many abiding interests with Nick Cave – a comprehensive knowledge of the geography of the gutter and the stars, plus an abiding interest in the point where European cabaret and blues avant garde overlap.

‘Crazy Love’ and ‘There Is A Ghost’ are stately and spare and executed just so by the Bad Seeds skeleton crew of Warren Ellis, Jim Sclavunos and Martyn P Casey. This much is well within their remit, but there’s also a rather barmy 70s blaxploitation spoken word blow-out entitled ‘Desperanto’ whose conceptual origins are anyone’s guess, although one suspects co-producer Hal Willner had a hand in the madness.

Of the remainder, the Albarn co-write ‘Last Song’ is Marianne doing baroque melancholic pop not unlike Nico circa ‘Chelsea Girl’ while the closing Brion-orchestrated ‘City Of Quartz’ is a bewitched music box. Here’s a bunch of orphan songs you won’t hear played on the radio. Take them home and clutch them to your bosom.

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.