Grinderman, the side project of Nick Cave and his Bad Seeds, are back with album number two. Scott Kara talks to Warren Ellis.
How is Grinderman different from your many other projects and bands?
The idea behind Grinderman was that we created this project where we could throw a whole lot of things up in the air, and do things that we may not necessarily do with others. It's really about freedom. And trying to keep the thing alive and moving on.
Anyone that's in any creative area, you constantly feel like you're banging your head against the wall and going around in circles, so you have to find ways of getting back into it and challenging yourself. And we enjoyed it so much [the first time round] that we wanted to do a second album as soon as we did the first one. And for me, I've been pushed into areas I've never been before and playing instruments I don't generally play.
So how does the new album move things forward from Grinderman's debut?
I find this one wilder than first one which I think was probably more ... obvious. We were just banging away looking for something and enjoying doing something together as a project.
It was explosion after explosion, but this one seems wilder, more challenging, and the big difference for me is that we took a few more chances and we were able to go further with it and to take the themes and ideas further than we ever did before. Everything from Mickey Mouse to the kitchen sink pops up on this album.
So how do you relate to Nick Cave's words?
In much the same way most people relate to him. They draw things from his words, but I also don't try to look at them too literally, and sometimes I understand them and sometimes I don't [laughs].
Nick's taken a really different way into the lyric thing this time. He did a lot of ad-libbing and making stuff up on the spot - he'd just start singing, paying no mind to what's going on, there's nothing regular about it and it moves all over the place.
What was the recording process like this time round?
Most of it was recorded during four days where we would bang away relentlessly - we just kept going and going - and finally we had bits of music that were going somewhere and it felt like they were different from what we'd done before, and different from something we wouldn't generally look at doing in the other projects that we do.
- TimeOut
