Featured Essay: The Nightmare Returns: Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' "Henry's Dream"

by Adam Steiner

When writing my book exploring Nick Cave’s music  Darker With The Dawn, I asked many friends for their go-to Bad Seeds record. The results were various, there is so much to praise, and little to dislike or reject–indeed–I would cite Nick Cave as one of the most consistent album artists I’ve ever known. 

In this spirit of relentless exuberance, I have decided to make a case for Henry’s Dream (1992) as one of the most overlooked Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds albums. Again, it is one of his most solid records as there are no songs I would wish to skip, it almost edges into concept album territory providing a script for an unmade movie. Following 1990s rather tuneless and muted, The Good Son, and often overlooked in favour of the more iconic Let Love In (1994)which in spite of the live show-stopper ‘Red Right Hand’ and its emotional intensity, lacks a degree of musical bite, rhythm and general raucous trouble-making that we heard in the early Bad Seeds (let alone The Birthday Party’s). Henry’s Dream is the first major step towards the revisionist Western that would become a preoccupation for Cave, using all the brutality of Sam Peckinpah hand in hand with the romanticism of Sergio Leone, in song, script and film score. 

The record opens with a killer double-punch of quickfire anthems, ‘Papa Won’t Leave You Henry’ ostensibly begun as a melody Cave would sing over the cradle of his then-infant son, Luke, it becomes a monstrous nightmare following his experiences of living in Sao-Paulo, Brasil with visions of death squads, hit-squads and toxic sludge sewage outbreaks. Cave invites us into an apocalyptic nightmare.

‘Papa Won’t Leave You Henry’ features the determinedly anti-P.C. mention of the song’s protagonist waking up in a faceless bar, to be met by “a f*g in a whale-bone corset, with his dick draped across my cheek”, in itself harmless fun, it nonetheless displays Cave’s contrarian streak of old, and demanded a necessary censure from my publisher. Rather than an anti-gay slur, I believe Cave tosses it into the mix as a weird dash of queerness meant to hurl us into a debauched spiral which the album’s narratives takes us on in its alternative vision of the Wild West–a mythical place imagined by an antipodean ex-pat recorded in 1992, we are treated to a maelstrom of up-ended American cliches, necessarily sexy, violent and romantically shocking.

‘I Had A Dream, Joe’ ramps up the energy, ever more frantic, like a drunken nightmare, we see Cave chomping through the scenery of his shonky soundstage, mocking Joe’s “ridiculous seersucker suit” with vicious assonance. Backed by the Bad Seeds swooping choral voices, Cave hounds his subject, as a man on the run disappears into a derangement of the senses. Presumably, the framing of the album places Henry at its centre, and we are now trapped with him in the dream, following Joe as he (appears to) wander aimlessly. Certainly from the heavy imagery Cave presents of Joe struck with mystic experiences, we might wonder that ‘Joe’ is a stand-in for ‘Jesus’ and a new revelation is at hand, if only Henry knew whether it was for real…

Immediately after, Cave reins in the fury but still floods us with a vision of the rapture on ‘Straight To You’ cruel beaked birds, collapsing towers, the yearning organ and glistening guitar arpeggio follows him looking for his lover in the fresh apocalypse. The Bad Seeds were not supposed to be the band to offer earnest hymns to love and unity, but this song is unequivocally pretty, despite its somewhat bleak setting. Pierced but not yet bleeding from the arrows of love, ‘Straight To You’ stands in harsh contrast to the more complex and diffracted visions of romance that would emerge on Let Love In.

‘Brother My Cup Is Empty’ is hammering live smasher which bludgeons the audience with a relentless rhythm, bossa nova with a bad Elvis attitude and a guitar-slinger twang. Cave declares himself the captain of his own pain, begging for one more round. He presents the heavenly signs of rainbows and stars brought down to earth, dirty and dulled, the drinker of the song, begs kindness of his audience and then offers them to kiss his ass as he takes his leave. This presages the tawdry rain dog of his future albums, wandering from bar to bar, in an endless search for god knows what, such that alcohol and drug consumption became a running joke for the band, though they continued to make great records because or in spite of their restless pace.

The album takes a hard turn into the gospel testimonial of ‘Christina The Astonishing’ where Cave tells the story of a real saint. He sings in fine, full voice, throwing each syllable upwards towards the rafters where he sees the soon-to-be sainted (former) corpse looking down on him, judging all of humanity for its sinful stench, like smoke rising off the fires of hell. Some find the song too long, meandering even, but it shows that Cave did not need to yell at his audience to unsettle them and make a deeper point; he could do both, by turns. The whispering organ is the star here as Cave finds confessional exegesis in the shock of the holy miracle, the scripture reborn as action. Leaning into the frightful but empowering moment as coruscating fire, Cave again reaches towards a new-found subtlety and deeper religious mysticism of seeing God in the everyday that would come to the fore on The Boatman’s Call. 

Beginning as a humble tale ‘When I First Came Town’. It presents the melancholy drifter, a stranger once welcomed as a friend as people bought him drinks; now isolated and alone, they find their bottle has run dry. Almost a rewrite of Karen Dalton’s version of the traditional song “Katie Cruel” it is the wandering disquiet behind the townspeople’s eyes that will decide her fate. The song bursts into majestic elegance of massed strings and horns as Cave makes one of his earliest duets with a female backing singer. Interviewed for the 2020 documentary on Karen Dalton, In My Own Time, Cave speaks of her as a “fellow traveler,” perhaps noting a shared melancholy and sense of being born damned. Cave would mention the roots of the song originating from his time in São Paulo: “When I first came to Brazil I was treated as something like a hero. And having lived there for a while the tables turned, particularly in the press.” The song’s outro channels  the musical spirit of Ennio Morricone, as the stings soar higher to be be met with a lonesome harmonica coda fading into the far distance: “There is always another town/Further down the track”.

Witness the piratical glee behind ‘John Finn’s Wife’, the cuckolding glory of John Finn’s new wife, flirting and flaunting her way to seducing a new town which erupts into mass riot, like St Vitus gone cunt-struck (a compound adjective, as noted by English dramatist, Alan Bennett). Spurred on by propulsive acoustic guitar and snare rattles and bastardised flamenco throws us into the thick of the fray. Wretched John Finn is murdered as the final obstacle between his wife and the lustful followers. The song ends in a smooth chorus of voices lamenting the death of poor John, a victim to love, or trying to love the wrong woman who can never be tamed.

‘Loom Of The Land’ is a gorgeous slow waltz around two lovers travelling through the endless wastes and quiet lanes of America. Cave gives full voice to his romanticism with the line describing his hand covering his lover’s breast, connecting physical lust to the deeper resonance of love, as he feels her heartbeat shake in his palm. The whole song is lent a gorgeous lilt by the marimba hook and simmering organ, Cave righteously borrows a line from Nabokov which only emphasises the lyrical sweep of the song. The song is a rare moment of calm that shows the album’s controlled range of moods and tempos, and unfairly neglected in Bad Seeds shows.

Cave’s ‘Jack the Ripper’ is the rollicking ride that ends Henry’s Dream. Though it seems to have no real connection to the other songs on the album, it remains a powerful closer. Like so much of the Bad Seeds oeuvre, it can seem problematic by today’s more censorious standards. While Cave gets his teeth deep into the myth of real-life acts of horrific sexualized violence, he nonetheless presents a thwarted satire of a loveless marriage. He imagines another cuckolded man emotionally beaten and sexually frustrated as his partner continues to scold him with tongue and fist. With all of its gory garlands on show, it seemed to set the stage for Let Love In presenting brutal polaroids of a thwarted and twisted romance.

Witness the buccaneering swagger of the Bad Seeds’ performance in their 2013 KCRW live session which blows the album version away, confirming the band’s ability to turn on the energy at shows that we’re still seeing now in the tours bringing the Wild God album to life.

Adam Steiner is a writer, journalist and poetry film-maker. He has written a novel, Politics Of The Asylum, and three books of music criticism on Nine Inch Nails, David Bowie including Darker With The Dawn: Nick Cave’s Song of Love And Loss. He runs a quarterly poetry-film screening Living With Buildings and in 2017 completed the Disappear Here poetry-film project about Coventry Ringroad.

www.adamsteiner.uk

IG: @AdamSteinerAuthor