26/07/2010

Grief Came Riding


Songs about places aren’t always written as an ode or expression of a fond memory. Some set out to describe the seedier sides of a town or city for dramatic effect, like Lou Reed’s take on New York with Dirty Boulevard –‘your poor huddled masses, let’s club them to death and get it over with and just dump them on the boulevard’. There are others, however, that paint it black because of some thing bad or sad that happened to them there and that place will forever be in shadow regardless of how sunny it might appear to others. Kirsty MacColl’s Soho Square paints a heart-rending picture of an empty bench in Soho Square but, at least in this song, there remains some hope.

One song devoid of any such faint optimism is Grief Came Riding by Nick Cave, a study in introspective gloom with the Thames as backdrop. Nobody can do melancholic darkness quite like Nick Cave  - at times, his songs make Leonard Cohen seem like the cheerleader of a happy-clappy revivalist meeting- and this sketches a dispiriting and bitter view of London and its inhabitants as a consequence of depression. The mood is unrelenting - a dirty river with bridges crouching like malevolent gargoyles, the futility of existence, a memory of a psychiatric couch. Even so, there is a delicateness as well about it which makes it sound more poignant, with a haunting melody carried by piano, brushed drums and cymbals and muted guitar chords, with understated backing vocals (Kate & Anna Mcgarrigle?) towards the end. As first lines of songs go, Grief came Riding is pretty good: ‘Grief came riding on the wind, up the sullen river Thames’. It carries an image of something unpleasant coming towards you fast, like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse racing up the river, just as ninth century Londoners had seen the Vikings sweeping up to the city in longboats.

From the lyrics - ‘the wind blew under Battersea Bridge and a tear broke from my eye’-the location is presumably Nick Cave’s houseboat at Cheyne Walk, just past Battersea Bridge. This makes the contrast of the physical place in London with Cave’s morbid view of it the more stark. The author isn’t sitting amongst the derelicts and closed-down markets of the Streets of London. Chelsea and Cheyne Walk had long been seen as a bright and upscale area of bohemian glamour, where Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithful held court in the late sixties and Elvis Costello had sang that he didn’t want to go there in 1979 in his biting sneer at self-indulgent posers.

Battersea Bridge too, rebuilt in the 1880’s with cast-iron arches-and hence the song’s references to ‘hear the ancient iron bridge and listen to it groan’ - has often been presented by artists and poets in a very different light. Both Turner and Whistler painted it, Whistler describing it thus .’When the evening mist clothes the riverside with poetry...tall chimneys become campanili [bell towers] and the warehouses are palaces in the night and the whole city hangs in the heavens and fairy land is before us’. The grief of the song’s author casts the scene in a very different light- ‘If the Thames weren’t so filthy I’d jump in the water and drown’. Battersea Bridge is no longer the description of poets, passing over ‘the smooth rolling river to the green banks of fair Battersea’. Instead it has become the route by which commuters wend their way back to their failures and boredoms. There is no reason to suppose that the commuters themselves felt this, of course- it is the sour view of the world transferred to others through melancholy.

There is something about the song and its delivery that stops it falling into maudlin self-pity, The opening lines brought to my mind The Highwayman, put to music by Phil Ochs and becoming a poem with a tragic ending sung by a singer with a tragic ending. For me, the setting of the song largely brings up a sunny childhood memory of a holiday visit to Battersea Funfair across the river on the south side and many people wouldn’t share Cave’s view of London here-‘how nothing good ever came of this town’. However, there may well be some other place that is shut away in their mind because it is too dark or depressing to look at-but a place to remember nevertheless.

Link to song

31 comments:

  1. Wow, this was a harrowing listen! I always have your songs/links playing while I read the column, and this morning I realised that this is not a record to which you can listen while drinking coffee and reading! At least, not unless you want the rest of your day to be ruined..... It's not background music - it gradually darkened my mood, like poison seeping slowly into a well. It's definitely music for sitting on your own and sipping gin (not morning coffee). Not your fault though Geoff:)

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  2. Ha ha - genius! "his songs make Leonard Cohen seem like the cheerleader of a happy-clappy revivalist meeting".

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  3. It's definitely Kate & Anna Mcgarrigle (it was pretty sad when Kate died earlier this year by the way). Their accompaniment was one of the best things about that album I think.

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  4. Very moving and sad song. Speaking of which, I thought you might enjoy the opening of a recent(ish) review of Nick Cave, which affectionately pokes fun at his depressed-man image: "It has to be tough being Nick Cave -- taking off your coal-black trench coat, lecturing your lady about the darkness in your soul, calling down a curse from the Lord on the upstairs neighbors, and shooting out the lights." (from http://www.spin.com/reviews/nick-cave-bad-seeds-abattoir-bluesthe-lyre-orpheus-mute)

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  5. It's so crazy that he threw away this masterpiece on a flip side.

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  6. Of all the songs about London you've written on, Geoff, this IS London for me - world-weary, slightly sinister. Great column!

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  7. I love this analysis. I think the symbolism is very much about unhealable wounds, the Thames being the unhealable flow - a cut that won't stop bleeding, or maybe a river that can never be clean again.

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  8. I don't know Geoff (and J.J.), I do think there are some cracks of light in this song - some redemption - maybe just through the sweetening effect of the McGarrigles' vocals. It's not a Thames that you completely feel drowned in.

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  9. This song reminds me of the whole naturalist / socialist realist genre of literature - books like Upton Sinclair's The Jungle or Rebecca Harding Davis' Life in the Iron Mills. In fact the opening of Davis' novella could almost be inspired by this song's lyrics (or vice versa) - see below, especially the part about the river. Maybe we can say that Nick Cage's music is a kind of naturalism/realism......

    A cloudy day: do you know what that is in a town of iron-works? The sky sank down before dawn, muddy, flat, immovable. The air is thick, clammy with the breath of crowded human beings. It stifles me. I open the window, and, looking out, can scarcely see through the rain the grocer’s shop opposite.... The idiosyncrasy of this town is smoke. It rolls sullenly in slow folds from the great chimneys of the iron-foundries, and settles down in black, slimy pools on the muddy streets. Smoke on the wharves, smoke on the dingy boats, on the yellow river,—clinging in a coating of greasy soot to the house-front, the two faded poplars, the faces of the passers-by. The long train of mules, dragging masses of pig-iron through the narrow street, have a foul vapor hanging to their reeking sides. Here, inside, is a little broken figure of an angel pointing upward from the mantel-shelf; but even its wings are covered with smoke, clotted and black. Smoke everywhere! A dirty canary chirps desolately in a cage beside me. Its dream of green fields and sunshine is a very old dream,—almost worn out, I think. From the back-window I can see a narrow brick-yard sloping down to the river-side, strewed with rain-butts and tubs. The river, dull and tawny-colored, (la belle riviere!) drags itself sluggishly along, tired of the heavy weight of boats and coal-barges.

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  10. I respectfully disagree with Jackie. This is the opposite of realism, even naturalism - it's Gothic, darkly romantic. This would be such a perfect song for a soundtrack to a film noir about London....... Or in literature, the equivalent would be Edgar Allen Poe.

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  11. I saw him play in Long Beach (California) in early 1989. He had a band called Wolfgang Press with him, who were British I think. He seemed like a tortured soul, furious about something even though he was very polite to the audience. I was near the front and he kept looking right into the eyes of audience members - with an almost anxious expression as though trying to make us hear an important, urgent message he was communicating. It was pretty scary!! In a great way.

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  12. I feel like Nick Cave is part of an unofficial cadre of bands that are the heart of a Black London - along with the CLash, the Supersuckers, Concrete Blonde, the Sex Pistols, the Pogues, the Anti-Nowhere League, Generation X. Even though he's Australian originally. And this song is like the anthem of Black London - thanks for the column Geoff.

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  13. Yes Geoff, I love that clash you pointed out between the lyrics and the actual location of the houseboat - it's a stark contrast too when you actually see pictures of the light, bright interior - http://img.findaproperty.com/library/libp4454.jpg !

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  14. Love the painting you posted at the opening of the column, Geoff. For those wondering, this is the Whistler painting he references in the column..... (currently on display at the Tate).

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  15. For anyone interested, here's the Ochs song that Geoff talks about: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lB5vnpzm86g

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  16. Yes, there is actually a series of Whistler paintings of Battersea - they are all here - http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/turnerwhistlermonet/thamesviews/batterseabridge.htm

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  17. I think this is the Turner painting Geoff was talking about, but I'm not sure
    http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?workid=28269&roomid=5939

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  18. I liked this column but I listen (or did more when i was younger and it was fresh, anyway) to Nick Cave and other things like it, and very little that Cave does moves me at all. Most of all he reminds me of Jim Morrison (and I'm no Doors fan) - I just sense something insincere and contrived about his act. One song at a time can be great, but I've tried buying a couple of records to see if I can get warmed up to him and I just can't.

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  19. I liked this one song he did with Kylie (Where the wild roses grow). Don't know too much of his other stuff, but the music I know, gets me bored easily. Too much depressed/depressing mid-tempo songs for my gusto. Enjoyed the column though, cheers!

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  20. I’m a fan for over 20 years.I even saw him live in Athens in 1987 (and many times since then).IMO his best songwriting is from late 80s-mid 90s.Tender Prey,Good Son,Henrys Dream,Let Love In are full of great songs and a unique atmosphere .The Live Seeds is also a killer live (it includes the ultimate version of Mercy Seat).Mr Cave is not only doom and gloom-there is plenty of (dark) humour in his work ;)

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  21. Thanks for the links to Whistler's paintings. These comments are really interesting. I think the reference to Edgar Allen Poe is right-theres that sort of spooky darkness in it -but the very speciifc placing of it by the Thames at Battersea Bridge also brings reality to it.

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  22. Thanks too for the Phil Ochs clip-its pretty rare to see him in concert

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  23. That picture of the interior of a houseboat is something of a contrast!

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  24. hey there, I play drums with Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds and Grinderman. Thanks for the interesting column, I enjoyed all the comments too. I also have my band The Vanity Set. Where I sing instead of drumming. We leap from the sublime to depraved, filth to elegance, camp to heartfelt urgency like black-fisted Post-Romanticists. But no songs about places yet. I'll be sure to let you guys know if we record one. I have done a bit of writing myself about 'places' - if not SONGS about places - and the New Yorkers among you might like my review of Twenty Minutes in Manhattan: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/non-fiction/article6343880.ece. Come to think of it, that book lacked attention to music. OK well, See ya!

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  25. Thats a great review-I must see if I can get hold of the book

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  26. I was at the tribute concert for the late Kate McGarrigle at the Meltdown Festival. It featured performances by her children, Rufus and Martha Wainwright, Lisa Hannigan, Emmylou Harris, Teddy Thompson, her sister Anna, and Nick Cave - who did a duet cover of "Blues In D." Here's the best quality video footage I could find online......

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDPCyEIhohs&

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  27. Oh Geoff, I was hopeful this blog was about me when it showed up in my google alert. ok, so it's not about me, but you seem like a cool cat and you might be interested, so here goes: I'm the other Nick Cave. I'm a Chicago-based artist and I make 10-foot-tall, mixed media soundsuits. When worn, the suits make sound mimicking the rush of a river or the friction of a hundred balloons. It is the sound of motion, and my suits channel it all. Here is what I am talking about: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksm7LkzyFrk&. Ok, they don't make music exactly, but they are musical.

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  28. Thanks for the video link, Nick Cave!It looks pretty spectacular

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  29. There are others, however, that paint it black because of some thing bad or sad that happened to them there and that place will forever be in shadow regardless of how sunny it might appear to others.

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  30. This song reminds me of the naturalistic world / genre of social realism in literature - books like Upton Sinclair's the jungle or the life of Rebecca Harding Davis in the steel mills.

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  31. Thanks too for the Phil Ochs clip-its pretty rare to see him in concert

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