While rummaging through various bits and pieces rapidly accumulating on my shiny new Sky-plus box, I found and watched a BBC special on Glastonbury (mostly at fast forward, to avoid losing my eyesight through looking directly for too long at Tom Jones), and stopped abruptly at the appearance of Nick Cave; that man and his band could stop traffic, let alone a remote control. The first track shown was ‘Red right hand’, never one of my favourites, but the subsequent performance of ‘Mercy seat’ took my breath away, and needs to be seen here. Not appearing on Youtube (yet?) I scoured the vast plains of the internet more widely and found it on Vimeo (new to me!), from which the embed below comes.
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - The Mercy Seat (Pro Shot, Glastonbury 2009) from maicasajusta on Vimeo.
Look at that! Look at those terrifying and grizzled men, and try and work out how they can in theory belong to the same employment and planet as people who appear in the charts today or on X-factor. Look at Warren Ellis’ biblical beard and those two mad drummers (this song has always been driven and its dark mood dominated by drums), and Cave himself (definitely better without the moustache) like a mad and deadly spider, attacking the keyboard beside him reluctantly but dramatically at key moments. And, of course, just listen to that song, and the apocalyptic confluence of music and lyrics, and the chant of doom into which the song builds, with the cycles of chorus going round and round like a doomed madman circling his cell while the hour of execution approaches. This is clearly not a song designed for daylight, which ill-fits the performance – the darker live version below works in some ways more explicitly; it is like the difference between watching ‘The exorcist’ in the afternoon or at night with the lights off.
Of course, as I have mentioned several times before on this blog, one of the most fascinating things about Cave is the difference between this kind of loud demonic scariness (albeit always melodic and lyrical and with an undeniable dark black beauty) and the Cave that can create things of soft and gentle beauty like the first six tracks of ‘The boatman’s call’, much of ‘No more shall we part’ and some of ‘Nocturama’ (especially ‘He wants you’). No artist, as I have said before, swings between such extremes of light and shade, and below is a version of this song which is delivered solo at the piano (by an unusually neat looking Nick, definetely the good cop to his own bad cop in the clips above), and crosses the lines between dark Cave and bright Cave, like a concert at the line on the moon which divides the light and dark sides.
There is also a lovely acoustic version of this on Cave’s B-sides and rarities compilation from a few years ago. To finish, I will offer a fourth version of the song, but give Nick a break, by showing Johnny Cash’s famous interpretation, which places the song in a while different, ancient and biblical, context, still scary but in a calmer, more deliberate, and infinitely more weary way, like the difference between Robert De Niro (Cave) and Joe Pesci (Cave) in ‘Goodfellas’.
As a final thought, I would almost seem more fitting if the song was originally Cash’s, with Cave the cover version, so entirely at home does it seem within the older outlaw country tradition within which Cash came to his tremendous power. How would this song have rung through the halls of San Quentin prison, I wonder?
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