In this archive feature from Uncut’s March 2009 issue (Take 142), Cave and Mick Harvey discuss their career, album by album – from the Birthday Party “crossover” of From Her To Eternity, to the “general chaos” of Abattoir Blues/Lyre Of Orpheus… _____________________ On the telephone ...
YOUR FUNERAL… MY TRIAL
(Mute, 1986)
A moody and surprisingly melodic effort, this album sets the tone for the occasionally shambolic, but continually widescreen music the Bad Seeds will become renowned for…
Harvey: “It was recorded at [Berlin recording studio] Hansa, which is such a great sounding room. It’s very much a Hansa/Berlin record. I was homeless at the time, I had no fixed abode. I was in Berlin for a month in the summer – maybe that’s when we did it.”
Cave: “This has always been the band’s favourite record – or for a long time it was. We really hit on something there. We found it really beautiful – to me there’s some really delicate, strange abstracted kinds of songs, that I really loved. One of my favourite Bad Seeds songs is ‘Stranger Than Kindness’, which has a kind of unearthly beauty about it, and I think that’s largely because I had nothing to do with writing it. I mean that in the way that it remains mysterious to me, and very beautiful – Anita Lane wrote it, and Blixa wrote the music.”
Harvey: “That was a real way forward for the band – the use of a lot of different elements comes to the fore in that album. Somehow they seem to indicate a way forwards for the group, and I think we continued working off that template for quite some time. It was a touchstone in a way, for what we should do and could do: probably all the way up to Let Love In, and even the Murder Ballads album.”
Cave: “I discovered I was a natural crooner. Shane MacGowan once said to me, around the time we made that record, ‘You’re a crooner,’ and I went, ‘Get fucked – you can fucking talk.’ But in a way, he’s right.”