‘St John of the Cross, he did his best stuff imprisoned in a box;

And Johnny Thunders was half alive when he wrote Chinese Rhymes.’

Nick Cave

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds do all kinds of songs: weird fables, howling bad dreams, exquisite love songs. Blues straight from the abbatoir; lullabies filled with desire; stir-crazy sermons: my little list represents only part of what the band can do and what Nick Cave, as principal songwriter, can create. But still we find the greedy Cave is hungry to do more. This Elvis-Odysseus is on a mission to ‘move the world.’ He doesn’t stop. ‘There She Goes My Beautiful World’ is the song that tells us of Cave’s greed, but also of his male muses, two of whom are named above. The rest? John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester; Karl Marx; Paul Gauguin; Philip Larkin; Dylan Thomas; Vladimir Nabokov. Grisly lives, grisly deaths: debased, obscene and comic, all of them, even speccy old librarian Larkin, become rockstars the way Cave writes about them. They suffer and endure, but above all they carry on creating as they disintegrate.

‘There She Goes:’ a more joyous and desperate love-song you can’t imagine. A gospel frenzy, a prayer for the muse to ’send that stuff on down,’ Cave’s song is one of his best. It’s like seeing  some crazy man walking into an open field in a thunderstorm and watching him bear his chest to the lightning–not so much prayer as dare.