We can't afford to carry dead weight

I first heard this song back in 1993 as a live b-side to the ‘I Had A Dream Joe’ single.

Only just getting in to music at the time, I can honestly say I’d never heard anything quite like it before.

A deranged, semi spoken word nightmare of a song. A world away from the songs I’d heard as a child. This was not pop music. Not a song about love. No verse chorus verse. It was the very definition of the word creepy. An apocalyptic tale of travelling circus freaks left to wander aimlessly after the mysterious desertion of the titular figure. Built around a waltzing circular piano motif. A military beat that trudged like an army of feet. Nick Cave narrating their despair with demonic delight. The fiendish ringmaster to his band’s hellish orchestra. The music doomed like it’s protagonists to keep rolling without ever settling comfortably. Bringing to life in bleak detail the journey of this travelling carnival of curiosities as they slog on through a deluge of biblical proportions. The characters living vividly through grotesquely simple lyrical descriptions. Imagery that’s grim to the point of unpleasant. Dog Boy, Half Man, the Bird Girl flapping and squawking. The corpse of Sorrow the horse rising from it’s watery grave. The tone barely rises above despair and desolation. Hearing the live version for the first time was enlightening. So I can’t tell you how disappointed I was when I eventually heard the studio version.

It was flat. Lacked the vivid taste of repulsion that the version I’d become so familiar with was drenched in. It felt watered down. Sanitised. Like a bad Hollywood remake of a horror classic. Maybe the band hadn’t lived with the song long enough when they recorded it. Maybe the true spirit could only really be channelled through the live performance. Cave the conduit or medium to the Bad Seeds’ Ouija board.

This version is another version again. Recorded live in studio for a session way back in 1997, it manages to be the mid point between the two previous versions. There’s a couple of blips and distortions in the audio where the original source tape was a tad chewed but if you can get past them, I think you’ll agree that this song is far better performed live than it’s studio version. Having said all that, it’ll be interesting to hear the remastered version when the collector’s editions of the first four Bad Seeds albums are released next March. As Mick Harvey has been heavily involved in the remastering, maybe he’ll have managed to bring another side out of it.

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - the carny (live session version 1997) original version available on 'Your Funeral My Trial'

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