![]() Also, in certain situations, Blixa doesn’t have a very well-developed sense of humor, to say the least. Plus, I suggested to the band that we base our performance on the Muppets – just totally frenetic and mad and super-whacked-out.Īnyway, Wim is there and he’s filming away, and we’re jumping about the place like fucking idiots, doing take after take, and Blixa is getting increasingly frustrated by the whole thing because, well, I guess he couldn’t get to grips with the song. ![]() They require a certain amount of technical finesse that Blixa, despite being one of my favorite guitarists, lacks. But these up-tempo songs are tricky and not as easy as they seem. Lenoir, mostly because, at the time, the thought of the Bad Seeds doing some slow, lugubrious oh-so-worthy blues cover filled me with horror. I wanted to go against type and do a super-upbeat version of “I Feel So Good” by J. Wim had asked various musicians to perform his favorite blues songs. We were recording a song for a Wim Wenders documentary about the blues that he was making for Martin Scorsese. He thought his job was to augment the song. Blixa never thought his job was to carry the song. He really thought about the song, the lyrical content, and what his contribution should be, conceptually, rather than just strumming along, which a lot of guitarists tend to do. And he did that in a very beautiful and considered way. Blixa liked to spend a lot of time deciding what he was going to play and then methodically applying it to the song that was already there. In fact, most of Blixa’s guitar was laid on the tracks as overdubs after the song was recorded. No, we never sat down and wrote together. That brutality of thinking, that resoluteness, that German-ness, is what Blixa brought – alongside his distinctive guitar playing, of course. I found that enviable because I was often indecisive. I admired that in a way, because he’s able to make difficult decisions in the studio. Well, Blixa is the least nuanced person I’ve ever met in my life. But I do love him very much.”Ĭan I ask about your creative relationship with Blixa, which, to put it mildly, ended pretty abruptly? I emailed him on his last birthday and I’m still waiting for a reply. It was a great blow to us to lose him, actually. “The thing about Blixa is that he always brings something different to the process and has always been an incredible force in the studio, as well. “He is, as far as I’m concerned, always a member of the Bad Seed fraternity or whatever it is,” Cave said. In addition to his Birthday Party bandmate Mick Harvey, the longest tenured original member of the group was Blixa Bargeld, who played expressionistic guitar in the Bad Seeds as a side gig to his long-running industrial group, Einstürzende Neubauten.ĭuring his 20-year Bad Seeds tenure, Bargeld cowrote a handful songs, including the haunting “Stranger Than Kindness,” and occasionally duetted with Cave, notably on “The Weeping Song.” He left the group in 2003 for undisclosed reasons and has ever since focused his attention solely on Neubauten.Īt a 2018 concert in which Cave took questions from the audience, he addressed Bargeld’s importance to the Bad Seeds. After several years fronting gothy art-punks the Birthday Party, Nick Cave ventured out as a solo artist with a new band, the more traditionally rock-focused Bad Seeds, in 1983.
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