GENERALE LEE A TUTTO GAS LIVE, IN QUATTRO O CINQUE SARA’ PRESUNZIONE MA ABBIAMO RIDOTTO UN BEL CAFFE’ CHE NON INVIDIA NULLA A NESSUNO

a me comunque generale (l)eels piaceva molto! …e gran video di ferdinan!

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Un bel Eels sito

http://www.eels.nl/index.html

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BUZZ SE VUOI MAGARI AGGIUNGERE LA SETLIST IN CIMA AL POST…….L’HO TROVATA DOPO AVER SCRITTO!

1. Grace Kelly Blues
2. Little Bird
3. End Times
4. Prizefighter
5. She Said Yeah (S. Bono / R. Jackson)
6. Gone Man
7. Summer In The City (Lovin’ Spoonful)
8. Tremendous Dynamite
9. In My Dreams
10. In My Younger Days
11. Paradise Blues
12. Jungle Telegraph
13. My Beloved Monster
14. Spectacular Girl
15. Fresh Blood
16. Dog Faced Boy
17. That Look You Give That Guy
18. Souljacker Pt. I
19. Talkin’ Bout Knuckles
20. Mr. E’s Beautiful Blues
21. I Like Birds
22. Summertime (G. Gershwin)
23. Looking Up

encore

24. I’m Going To Stop Pretending That I Didn’t Break Your Heart
25. Oh So Lovely

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Aggiungo per Grinderman anche l’intervistona di Pitchfork, a questo link:

http://pitchfork.com/features/interviews/7843-nick-cavegrinderman/

e anche di seguito…

Nick Cave is five feet away from me, nearly on all fours, back arched, mimicking a wolf taking a piss. We’re in a room in the comically posh, members-only Soho House in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District, and Cave’s animalistic outburst is apropos considering the subject at hand; Grinderman is the punk die hard’s lewdest outlet. At 52, Cave’s id is still raging, perhaps more than ever before.

Talking about the band’s new album, Grinderman 2, Cave slouches into the hotel room’s couch– which he witheringly describes as “the color of a footballer’s wife’s skin”– his shirt barely buttoned, his thinning hair a bit scraggly, his tan deep. The one-time pale crusader of darkness looks more like a Miami beach crawler. But his attitude is erudite and sneering. He’s at points jokey, dismissive, arch, and heartfelt– all while emitting the sort of untouchable frequencies one would expect to come out of one of punk’s most enduring and uncompromising lifers.

Grinderman is his latest and most playful project, and the new record once again transposes Cave’s corrupted themes of lust, god, and America through a screaming blues-rock blitz. While the band’s hilarious single “No Pussy Blues” may have led some to believe the project was a one-off goof, that is most definitely not the case. Grinderman gives Cave the opportunity to blow up his past– something he’s more than happy to do. I spoke with him and Grinderman (and Bad Seeds) drummer Jim Sclavunos about the new record, relevancy, and, um, hair gel:

Pitchfork: It seems like Grinderman simply acts as this outlet for you guys to unleash your most badass ideas, especially with the videos and artwork…

NC: [laughs] No, we can think of much worse. It’s sort of perverse, but as people buy less and less records, it’s become more and more important for me to spend more and more on them– to lavish that much more attention on them. The Bad Seeds were always quite protective and old school, but Grinderman has opened us up to do anything and be shameless. We’re not so precious about it.

Pitchfork: Is that a real wolf on the album sleeve?

NC: Yeah. We had to build the set in a cage– we wanted something like a masculine Grecian bathroom from the 70s. Then we put a camera up to a hole in the cage to film the wolf. So the wolf crept in, got to the middle of the room, stretched out and urinated for ages all over the floor and the little bath mat. It had this beautiful ecstatic expression.

Jim Sclavunos: Well, it is a bathroom.

Pitchfork: Was there a moment when you knew Grinderman was going to be more than a one-album endeavor?

Nick Cave: It was never going to be like that. We wanted to find an alternate way of making music to what we were doing with the Bad Seeds, and as soon as we finished Grinderman we wanted to make Grinderman 2. If it hadn’t served its purpose we wouldn’t have done anymore, but it had a really invigorating effect on the Bad Seeds.

Pitchfork: This new Grinderman album is a bit more diverse than the first one. At this point, how do you differentiate Grinderman material from Bad Seeds material?

NC: I don’t really care about those distinctions much. With the Grinderman project, we were determined we could go anywhere, so this record was an attempt to expand.

JS: It’s probably just difficult for people because the Bad Seeds have such a long history. If it’s the Arctic Monkeys guy doing Last of the Shadow Puppets– or whatever it’s called– it’s not so hard for people to wrap their heads around.

Pitchfork: The new song “Palaces of Montezuma” is one of the poppiest things I’ve ever heard from you. With all its Americana imagery, it’s almost like a fucked up version of a Bruce Springsteen song.

NC: There are a lot of Americans in it– JFK, Steve McQueen, Ali MacGraw– but that song is about being an artist and being able to give you anything you want because it comes from the imagination. But, actually, it’s nothing and it’s not real and it’s absurd and maybe magical. And all I want from you is a tiny bit of truth.

I’ve got loads of that shit. You can have some if you like. [laughs] There’s a lot of Americana through the record in general, but that was never intentional. It’s just the best shit comes from America. It’s quite easy to take a modeled American archetype like Mickey Mouse and put it against a classical archetype.

Pitchfork: Are you skewering American archetypes out of love?

NC: I love America. I really do. It’s by far the place I like visiting out of anywhere in the world. I get a palpable sense of excitement when the plane’s landing. It’s a cliché, but there’s still an incredible energy about New York in particular. Whereas somewhere like Paris is always Paris, New York still has that power to amaze and disgust. Though staying in this hotel might have been a slight mistake.

Pitchfork: Why?

NC: It’s like being on the bad end of a Bret Easton Ellis novel, just wall-to-wall assholes. And I’ve also had all sorts of problems. For example, the hair gel they had in the drawer doesn’t even set. It must be something else…

JS: Oh no. [laughs] I can see the Pitchfork headline now…

NC: …”‘The Gel Won’t Set’ Cries Cave!” Never mind. Edit the hair gel stuff out. I don’t want to have to set the dogs on you.

JS: I know where you live. I know your Facebook. I’ll Twitter you to death. [laughs]

Pitchfork: Speaking of– there’s a strong predatory bent to a lot of the songs on the album, too.

NC: It’s dark and evil. We’ve actually done a version of “Heathen Child” with a four-minute guitar solo by Robert Fripp at the end. It’s really fucking great and really heavy. I always wanted “Heathen Child” to end with a guitar solo in the classic tradition– it’s a good example of something the Bad Seeds can’t really do. And I’ve always been a big Robert Fripp fan, but I didn’t know him at all. He’s a really weird dude. I mean really weird.

Pitchfork: How so?

NC: He speaks about himself in the third person, like: “The guitarist feels that his performance on this take was the preferred one.” He’s like the Buddha via 10 Wellington Place.

Pitchfork: I saw you open for the White Stripes at Madison Square Garden in 2007. And, since then, Jack White started the Dead Weather, which seems to be going down a similarly devilish blues-rock path as Grinderman…

NC: Well, we’re glad to help others…

JS: …find themselves. [laughs]

Pitchfork: Are you guys friends with Jack?

NC: We are actually. We met at Madison Square Garden, and he was a good guy. We see each other around and hang out.

JS: We got called out of the blue by his agent to be on that bill. He’s always latching onto new things that wouldn’t otherwise be seen by his audience. That’s a good thing.

Pitchfork: Was that thrilling for you to play Madison Square Garden at this point in your career?

JS: The idea of it was more thrilling. But once we got closer and closer to the date it just seemed like another gig.

NC: They’re always are the same– it doesn’t matter if you’re playing at a small club or something like that. I mean, I fell over flat on my back in the first song during that show. I remember that quite clearly because it was real hard to get back up [laughs]. It really threw me back to when I was starting off in a band, when you’re playing to audiences that aren’t actually interested in what you’re doing. You wish you were dead.

That’s how it was the first two years of playing with my first band– we’d play these beer barns in Australia. Everyone would fucking hate you. You really got this us-against-them mentality, and there’s huge energy in that. It creates this tension on stage. We enjoyed it.

Pitchfork: The Grinderman project almost reads like a parody of a midlife crisis at times.

NC: Well, I wish it was a parody. [laughs] I suspect it’s not.

JS: You touched a nerve there.

NC: I write songs from the point of view I had at the time; I’m not trying to write songs from a young person’s point of view. That only ends in disaster. There’s obvious humor that goes on with what I write about, but it’s addressing serious issues: love and death and violence and sex. I wouldn’t spend all this time doing some sort of parody.

Pitchfork: It’s rare for an artist to get a touch lighter as they get older– the usual trajectory is for people to get more and more serious.

NC: You mean “wiser.”

Pitchfork: Yeah. What’s your strategy as far as staying relevant?

NC: I’ve never been interested in being relevant. In fact, I don’t know if we’ve ever been relevant. The Birthday Party and the Bad Seeds were always flying in the face of what was popular. At some level it’s not my business to be worried about whether people are relating to what we’re doing or whether people are buying the product. That’s other people’s business. Mine is to keep things in a state of flux but at the same time remain true to myself.

JS: If we’re trying to stay relevant to anyone, it’s ourselves and our own impulses. We’re not pandering to any outside expectations. I was excited how there were a whole bunch of new Grinderman fans that weren’t Bad Seeds fans. There was a lot of bullshit talk like, “It’s a return to the Birthday Party,” which it most certainly is not. It’s refreshing to have fresh feedback instead of people scratching their heads like, “Oh yeah, it’s different from the last Bad Seeds album, isn’t it?” Two years later they’ll tell you it’s your greatest album ever, but at the time they’re having a hard time coming to terms with it because it’s too different.

NC: There are people who have been longtime Bad Seeds fans who just think Grinderman is a pile of shit. But there’s nothing that satisfies me more than upsetting people in my own milieu. There’s something far more exciting about being a contrarian among your friends and colleagues and pissing-off the status quo.

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