Grinderman: Heathen Child
ANY SORT OF ATTEMPT TO GROOM IT IS VIEWING WITH A GREAT DEAL OF SUSPICION. ITS UNRULINESS IS ENCOURAGED. BUT I GET A BIT BORED, IT FEELS LIKE A SWEATER HANGING OFF OF MY HEAD SOMETIMES. - JIM SCLAVUNOS
It is terribly fitting that on Nick Cave’s birthday; (he’s been granted the day off…ah) we get to celebrate our first threesome with the Grinderman team, with early bird interview slots one-after-the-other. Yes, wince away; of course we had to embrace the filthy punning opportunity. With Grinderman back on the radar, it’s difficult for anyone to avoid falling in-line with their old lewd ways, especially with such a provocative return as Grinderman 2. Pushing further boundaries than Grinderman, from the ironic, “speaking in tongues” lyrics to the non-existent instrumentals in ‘What I Know’, this beastly release raises the bar yet again from these pros. Despite being all quiet on the Nick Cave front, Martyn Casey, Jim Sclavunos and Warren Ellis deliver insightful morning grunts, arguing why simply “freedom” is what really these aging rockers are about.
SS: First, it’s Nick Cave’s birthday today! Have you given him any birthday surprises?
Martyn P. Casey (bass, acoustic guitar, backing vocals): We actually had a party for him. I gave him a CD…
Jim Sclavunos (drums, percussion, backing vocals): We sang him happy birthday a couple of days ago, but we are always looking for opportunities to make him cringe (laughs).
SS: You can hear how much you all bloody loved making the last two records; it’s definitely invigorating as a listener to experience…
Warren Ellis (electric bouzouki, Mandocastor, violin, viola, acoustic guitar, backing vocals): We had a ball making this record. We just constantly wondered “why can’t we do this? Let's do this.” The making of this one (more so than others), was trying to push it as far as we could and we didn’t spend a lot of time in the studio on it; we were incredibly focused what we were doing. We never spend a lot of time on any of the albums, we move pretty fast. This one we were really trying to sound (in the mixing too) extreme, confronting and immediate.
SS: The band has contradicted a lot of press in the past to set the story straight on how to understand Grinderman’s debut, do you want fans to understand Grinderman 2 in a certain way?
Warren: What I think is good about this one; we haven’t made the first album again, it feels like it’s expanded the whole sound in a really major way, and really exciting, and we’ve gone down a lot of road we wouldn’t have gone before, and it feels courageous for that. Hopefully people see that Grinderman (the way we see it) is limitless and the potential is there to do whatever they want. Like any group should be, we’re just looking to kind of have some freedom and some action.
SS: As with the last album, the lyrics almost take you by surprise or hoot with laughter. Was this the case for you at all when you heard the lyrics?
Jim: Nick ad libs the lyrics a lot. When we initially are putting the songs together, we don’t have anything prepared, we go in and improvise. There are no rehearsals; we’re straight into the recording studio, playing spontaneous music together. Nick, his part is not just playing an instrument, but he’s also jamming on his lyrics. Whatever impromptu phrases come up, those improvisations, he tries stay true to those in the lyrics and reworks them later. He doesn’t try to do the whole thing and make it like a Bad Seeds song where it’s just well thought out and narrative driven lyrics. He’s trying to stay true to the spontaneous utterances and speaking in tongues that happened in the studio. When you hear “I've got the No Pussy Blues” blurted out for the first time, you gotta laugh. Sometimes those exaltations and shouts are working to but others, it’s sort of like a conceptual lyric, like he’s exploring. It’s the same kind of culinary process that’s going on with our instruments. Sometimes wailing but sometimes the entire thing ends up on the album unadulterated, un-manipulated. Maybe ‘When I Know’ is like that, but that was quite a weird one.
THE IDEA IS TO BE ABSTRACT, AND HOPEFULLY PEOPLE HAVE THEIR OWN INTERPRETATIONS, WE’RE NOT TRYING TO CORRUPT ANYBODY, JUST [CELEBRATE] A CERTAIN ENERGY IN THE MUSIC. - MARTYN P. CASEY
SS: The halfway point, ‘What I Know’ leaves the guitars and drums non-existent, even the vocals are pretty warbled, what was the direction in this song, a kind of peace before the storm?
Warren: There wasn’t actually a direction. When we made this album we just went in for five days non-stop and record everything, from the incredibly inspired to the absolute rubbish. That song was cut out of probably about an hour of just wiggling away, and there was a bit in there that sounded really cool and we cut a bit out of it, Nick sang a vocal over the top of it and that was just it. It just felt like it was a great sort of moment and just odd, and it breaks the album up. I love that song, it’s immediate. I love songs that you really feel like you are actually spying on something taking place, like a real atmosphere, like a song like ‘Smokestack Lightning’ by Howlin' Wolf or you listen to any old recordings and you really feel like you are sitting in the same room…in the same moment.
SS: You move towards spiritual commentary down to the illustrations and ritualized percussion throughout. Is Grinderman 2 a way to rebel against religious institutions?
Jim: It’s interesting that you see that, but no, I wouldn’t say there’s any kind of agenda like that, whatsoever. But if want to stake a claim on that concept by all means - it’s the first time someone’s taken that tact on it! (Laughs). But yes there is a bit of tribalism in the percussive aspects and yes, it does invoke ritualism, but again it’s a texture. I think one in particular, ‘Heathen Child’ in that people go, “Oh, he’s referencing religion again!” but in fact really, if you think about what the song is truly about, it’s sort of a psychological study of young girl on the cusp of finding herself, in a miso poetic terms, not actually an attack on religion, but sort of voyage of exhalation. It does have a spiritual aspect too, one could argue. Nonetheless I don’t think the point of the song is an attack on religion, despite all the topicality of that with the Pope and the [Quran] burning…(laughs). To overly simplify what that song is about – it’s discovering the God within. I wouldn’t want to go on record saying, “that is the full meaning” but it’s certainly an implicit action one could take with the lyrics.
Martyn: I think the idea is to be abstract, and hopefully people have their own interpretations, we’re not trying to corrupt anybody, just [celebrate] a certain energy in the music.
SS: Last time you couldn’t wait to get back into the studio, are we to expect a Grinderman 3 to come out in the next few years?
Jim: Right now, it’s the next Bad Seeds album. Having said that we are about to embark on a couple of months of extensive touring into early next year, so the music takes on a whole other dimension when you play it live, that leads a sort of new perspective of what you’ve done and weave ideas about what to do next time. For example, when we toured the first album, we only had one album to play. We didn’t want to play any Bad Seeds material, because we wanted to keep the two things quite separate. What we found we had to do was to play a little loose with the structure of the songs, don’t make them quite so terse and quick as on the album, so we elongated a few of them and let them stretch out a bit. [This] played into our penchamp for doing a bit of improvisation anyway and that kind of led to much a looser and expansive approach to how we were going to present the songs on Grinderman 2.
SS: Did the band ever struggle trying to recreate their jamming recording sessions into the live performance for this album?
Warren: I’ve always preferred playing live than in the studio. The last few years since I did The Proposition, that was when I started to really enjoy the studio, before that it was just a means before an end to make a record. I like how the music develops when you are on stage. I like the fact that you are playing for a moment that’s not going to be analyzed or you’ll go over again. I don’t get that with a making of a record; you are engaged with the formation of it…it’s a whole different intensity. It’s interesting because once there is an audience there, the whole dynamics shifts.
I LOVE SONGS THAT YOU REALLY FEEL LIKE YOU ARE ACTUALLY SPYING ON SOMETHING TAKING PLACE YOU REALLY FEEL LIKE YOU ARE SITTING IN THE SAME ROOM…IN THE SAME MOMENT. – WARREN ELLIS
SS: For your recent music video for ‘Heathen Child’, did it take much convincing to get into those rather fetching Roman outfits?
Warren: That was fine, that didn’t bother me at all. Once you’ve had kids. you see how low you have to descend to entertain them, so you get over most things… (laughs) I’ve dressed up as lots of things, I have no problem at all. I think really it’s the older you get, the funnier it gets. (laughs).
Jim: Well it didn’t take much to convince me! (Laughs) It felt quite natural being of Greco, Italian and Mediterranean stock myself, it might have been different for the Australians but as the one true Mediterranean in the band, I was entirely too comfortable.
SS: So, thanks to the perversion of the internet, we found out that you (Jim Sclavunos) had his beard groomed in Brighton a few days ago. Are you under strict instructions to keep it a certain way for the Grinderman?
Jim: No, no! In fact, any sort of attempt to groom it is viewing with a great deal of suspicion. (Laughs) Its unruliness is encouraged. But I get a bit bored, it feels like a sweater hanging off of my head sometimes so for my own amusement, I groom. Sometimes it goes away entirely, sometimes it reappears. It can be a matter of controversy I’ve noted. There’s even a theory that it came depending on whether I was in Grinderman or Bad Seeds at that moment. But as a matter of record, you can see beards cropping up all over the place.
SS: The illustrations are simply beautiful – was the album given to illustrator to interpret or did the band have a hand in the creative direction?
Martyn: It was a woman from Germany who’s been sending Nick stuff before, and we asked if she could do something (with Nick’s help). There’s a video version of it. But to tell you the truth, I haven’t seen the video version of it yet. I love the illustrations.
SS: With B-side ‘Star Charmer’, you play the violin – isn’t Grinderman meant to defer away from the orchestral or strings based music?
Warren: We can do whatever we want in Grinderman, you feel what’s appropriate for the song and it felt like it needed something like that. The first album we tried to steer clear from any moments maybe like that, but this time some snuck in and it felt alright.
SS: Which song speaks to you the most off the new record?
Martyn: That’s a good question. Today, it would be ‘Kitchenette’.
Jim: That’s a difficult one for me to answer, not to be evasive; I guess I could have answered that a lot easier six months ago, because at that point the album was still coming together. But now I feel it as an album…see it as a whole and we enjoy it as an experience where one songs bounces with another one, and then even in the lyrics, you’ll see characters leaping from one song to song, the Wolfman wolf (laughs) or the Abominable Snowman or whatever.
Warren: ‘Kitchenette’. I love that song, because there’s such a space to it in the way it just builds and something kind of sleazy and great about the feel of it.
SS: The new album itself is a physical, engrossing piece - but what body part of Grinderman do you represent?
Martyn: The groin area…
Jim: The feet, without me they couldn’t stand (laughs) they’d topple right over.
Warren: I’d probably have to be the arms; Nick would have to be the head.
ONCE YOU’VE HAD KIDS. YOU SEE HOW LOW YOU HAVE TO DESCEND TO ENTERTAIN THEM, SO YOU GET OVER MOST THINGS. I THINK REALLY IT’S THE OLDER YOU GET, THE FUNNIER IT GETS. – WARREN ELLIS
Words: Gemma Dempster