From Her to Eternity

The First Born is Dead

Kicking Against the Pricks

Your Funeral... My Trial

Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds were born in 1984 following the not unexpected implosion of The Birthday Party, a band who made The Stooges seem relatively functional. Addictions, arrests, jettisoned drummers, collaborations with Lydia Lunch, violence, and West-Berlin became the order of the day.

Following 1982's classic Junkyard, The Birthday Party had become more minimal with Mick Harvey taking up the drums and a couple of e.p.'s released, their sound probably too intense for a long player. Both e.p.'s had portents of what would come, the first release titled The Bad Seed, while the title track of Mutiny! featured Einsturzende Neubauten's Blixa Bargeld on guitar that sounded like a braying donkey; meanwhile Nick Cave's lyrics seemed very literary on songs like 'Deep in the Woods' and 'Swampland.'

From Her to Eternity saw Cave 'featuring' The Bad Seeds, whose line-up included Harvey, Bargeld, Barry Adamson, Cave's then partner Anita Lane, and Hugo Race. It still sounds like a bunch of drug addicts working through a sound somewhere between the blues and the Swans - 'Cabin Fever!' seasick stuff, though it opens with grandiose intentions with a patchy cover of Leonard Cohen's 'Avalanche.'

The roots of the Bad Seeds are probably here; songs like 'A Box for Black Paul' and 'St Huck' advancing further from the Birthday Party. On the title track, included twice with the great version from Wings of Desire, it all comes together with Cave's desperate sexual lyrics set to an industrial approximation of 60's Scott Walker.

There is the notion that The Bad Seeds couldn't quite deliver an album, though this reissue is bolstered by the inclusion of a cover of 'In the Ghetto' which had been the highlight of the performance of The Immaculate Consumptive (who included Marc Almond, Cave, Lunch, and Jim Thirwell). As with the other reissues there is a DVD documentary and remastered sound courtesy of recent ex-Bad Seed Harvey - though isn't a great sounding From Her to Eternity missing the point?

I've always been rather enamoured with The Firstborn is Dead. It seems a much more cohesive album than its predecessor, and is the lyrical missing link between 'Swampland' and Cave's sole novel And the Ass Saw the Angel. This is where the gothic blues of the Bad Seeds was definitely nailed on songs like 'Train Long Suffering' and the decimation of Bob Dylan's 'Wanted Man.' A certain refinement took place with 'Say Goodbye to the Little Girl Tree' and the epic 'Knockin' on Joe', whose tales from Death Row predict Cave's masterpiece 'The Mercy Seat'.

Best of all is opener 'Tupelo', which collides Christ and Elvis, Bethlehem and Tupelo where a primal holler ("The Sandman's Mud!....Until the King is Born!...O Tupelo!") is married to the blues, Neubauten industrial clatter, and the beginnings of the soundtrack-inflected work Adamson would get acclaim for with Moss Side Story.

While Cave is now viewed as a figure of stature equivalent to Lou Reed or Tom Waits, if not Cohen and Dylan, there were some that doubted him - which is perhaps why the very unpleasant 'Scum' was penned in response to certain music journalists. Cave's heroin addiction was the stuff of rock and roll cliches and things had got so bad, Andrew Eldritch could take the piss out of a junkie cliche working on his masterpiece holed up in West-Berlin. I was quite amazed that there was still a bit of this critique in last year's book Faking It where the composer of 'The Mercy Seat' was contrasted with Johnny Cash (who later covered it). And the Ass Saw the Angel was a masterpiece, by the way...

Upon its release, Kicking Against the Pricks even has some grumbling that Cave's muse had vacated the building. If the template for the Bad Seeds was found with The Firstborn...then their more expansive sound was worked out with this album of covers, easily one of the classics of that genre alongside Easy Come, Easy Go, Famous Blue Raincoat, and Music for Parties. The notion that a Bad Seeds covers album is lazy is probably as misguided as the notion that Murder Ballads was Cave & co drifting into self-parody - there's so much great on both those albums which feel like relatives. One of those records where Cave et al capitalise on their qualities rather than break new ground?

The Bad Seeds here began to feature a few guest musicians, including a returning Race and the other two members of The Birthday Party, Rowland S. Howard and Tracey Pew - the latter would sadly die from an epileptic seizure later in 1986.

Cave's interpretation of 'The Folk Singer' was bold stuff, since it was a song associated with the Man in Black himself, Johnny Cash, equally so covering songs like 'By the Time I Get to Phoenix' and 'Hey Joe' which had already been definitively covered by Isaac Hayes and Jimi Hendrix respectively, is quite audacious. The cover of the Velvets' 'All Tomorrow's Parties' is quite terrible though, though atoned via the inclusion of live favourite 'Black Betty' and a lush treatment of The Big O's 'Running Scared'. This record manages to remind you that the Blues was the original Gangsta Rap with a howling take on John Lee Hooker's 'I'm Gonna Kill That Woman', which contrasts well with some barbershop-gospel in the form of 'Jesus Met the Woman at the Well.' There's even a version of Gene Pitney's 'Something's Gotten Hold of My Heart' whose arrangement was 'borrowed' by Marc Almond for his chart topper in the late 80's.

Doubts about Cave's muse and state were silenced just a few months later with Your Funeral...My Trial which was originally released on two 33 1/3 12" singles, splitting an album of mostly original material over four-sides like PIL's Metal Box. Sadly the reissue still persists with a stranger running order that featured on the prior compact disc issue. Either way, this was probably the Bad Seeds first true classic album and an album to rank alongside The Boatman's Call, The Good Son, Let Love In, No More Shall We Part et al.

The central trio of Bargeld, Cave and Harvey meshed well with the exiting Adamson and new arrival Thomas Wydler - the changes in line-up forcing a more condensed sound that would develop into the soundtrack work Ghosts..of the Civil Dead and the soundscape of 'The Mercy Seat.' The highlight of this approach here is 'The Carny', which also featured in Wings of Desire, at the start when Solveig Dommartin listens to this LP and later when the Bad Seeds are playing it live before 'From Her to Eternity.' It's a gorgeous dirge where Cave's lyrics go into the kind of overdrive that would recur later with songs like 'O'Malley's Bar' and 'Papa, Won't Leave You, Henry.'

'Hard on for Love', meanwhile predicts the joys of Grinderman - which is something many put together for themselves last year when Cave did it for an encore in a Grinderman T-shirt! Such wonderful crudeness is tempered by original opener 'Sad Waters', where Harvey plays a Joy Division-quality bass-line to Cave's longing lyric, and the Bargeld/Lane-composition 'Stranger Than Kindness', where Cave sings the words of a female - this song is still a favourite of the band and it's no surprise they have returned to material from Your Funeral... on a frequent basis. The title even hinted at some ironic self-awareness, at least a little two-fingered and Australian.

These first four reissues are must-haves if a fan; it's especially worth the journey if upgrading from LP/tape to cd - though owners of the prior cd-versions and the b-sides box-set might feel there's not much here they don't already have. But it all sounds grea,t and the DVD extras are an uber fan's wet dream!

I am already looking forward to the next batch, which I assume to be Tender Prey, The Good Son, the troubled Henry's Dream, and Live Seeds (or Let Love In?). Mick Harvey's remastering work is probably worth the cost of entry alone, though I wonder if the Henry's Dream reissue will transform a troubled production from Dave Briggs into the LP it should have been? I feel that if the Bad Seeds ever do a Don't Look Back -performance of one LP, it should be Henry's Dream, just so we can hear how it should have sounded.

Great to look back, though it should be noted that there is a new version of the Bad Seeds featuring Ed Kuepper (Laughing Clowns/The Saints), Cave and Ellis have recorded a soundtrack for the upcoming adaptation of The Road, and a second Grinderman album on the cards, so still very much in the present tense...

I'm generally of the opinion that Cave & co get more interesting from Murder Ballads onwards, and the releases since Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus are as great as anything in that brilliant career...and funnier. It seems that Cave is a much better artist when straight, though as is demonstrated by these reissues, he certainly wasn't that bad when smacked out in London and West-Berlin in the 1980s...