Impressions on seminal albums by Lou Reed and Nick Cave’s Bad Seeds. By JOE SHEPPARD.

ONE EXCITED woman clearly couldn’t contain her enthusiasm as the lights dimmed for Great Australian Albums: Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ Murder Ballads, ejaculating abruptly: “Go Nick Cave!” No stranger to celluloid, Cave last hit festival screens at the World Cinema Showcase a couple of years back, penning the bleak and hardnosed Western The Proposition. Since his music videos and concerts have been reasonably well collected on DVD, the premise of Great Australian Albums..., a retrospective look at 1996’s album Murder Ballads song by gory song, promised an interesting window onto a breakthrough moment in Cave’s eclectic career. The film ultimately failed to come together as a fully coherent and focussed making-of story, but the more general interviews, largely with former collaborators and music journalists, proved to be nonetheless revealing for Cave fans.

With Murder Ballads Cave managed to be both innovative and old-fashioned at once, and paradoxically reached new heights of grisliness in an album that the band regarded as their most hilarious. Along with ‘chief researcher and guru’ Mick Geyer, Cave thoroughly investigated this long-forgotten subgenre he had only adumbrated on previous albums, and transformed the scratchy old songs and paper clippings of the early twentieth century into one big ‘blood-soaked shaggy dog story’.

Cave clearly loves a good yarn, and is every bit the eccentric and incorrigible raconteur you might imagine. At his most droll he had the audience in stitches as he recounted waking up with the mother of all hangovers, murderous designs and a new song inside his head. He freely confessed to entertaining such fantasies regularly before bedtime.

One strong theme throughout was Cave’s magnanimous deference to the collaborators he clearly relishes working with. He is portrayed as a symbiotic artist, needing a foil, counterbalance, mirror, or sidekick to get the best results – including PJ Harvey and Kylie Minogue most famously, his muses on ‘Henry Lee’ and ‘Where the Wild Roses Grow’, but no less successfully ex-Birthday Party acolytes like multi-instrumentalist Mick Harvey or wunderkind Rowland Howard at various stages of his career. In this respect The Bad Seeds were recognised as a true ensemble band with Cave their inspiration and ringmaster.

But while Kylie Minogue was effusive in her praise for Cave’s ‘depth’, the interviews rarely scratched beneath the surface of the complex man. There seemed to be some untold dirt to be dished – certainly about then-guitarist Blixa Bargeld, whose absence was conspicuous throughout the film, but perhaps also about the nature of Cave’s relationship with PJ Harvey during the record. The Murder Ballads is the genuine article – every bit the Australian ‘national treasure’ that Kylie Minogue is – but the real Nick Cave is more elusive and must remain obscured behind the laughter and oddball persona. Only when he admitted letting go of the ‘horrible disappointment’ at never being able to make that elusive perfect record did the perfectionist come close to dropping the swaggering persona.

Lou Reed had a similarly vicious shtick down pat forty years ago, and his 1973 opus Berlin documented subject matter that was no less macabre and shocking than Cave’s. The big difference though is Reed’s painful earnestness and self-importance. Julian Schnabel (Basquiat, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) filmed Reed and his massive band performing the moody, theatrical and burlesque Berlin from start to finish in New York last year. The communist-era decadence and revolution that the original record connoted might be lacking in a contemporary American setting, but in reviving Berlin Reed has redeemed the obscure follow-up to the smash hit Transformer after thirty-five years in the wilderness, unveiling an epic experience to match the complex concept and narrative that the album was founded on.

Whereas Great Australian Albums… came in under an hour and was clearly planned around the lunchtime rush, Festival organisers wisely scheduled Lou Reed’s Berlin no earlier than nine o’clock, as if summoning the derelict old-timers and vagabonds to come out of the woodwork, get loaded and renovate fond memories.

Reed was never the strongest singer or guitarist, so he strikes his best messianic performance poet-slash-actor pose and leaves the real melodies to the backing vocalists and the session musicians, all of whom are quite frankly brilliant. With vocal harmonies and string and horn arrangements to move Brian Wilson to tears, the sweeping and dynamic orchestrations combine with the choir to lift into the realms of the sublime many songs that never really reached their full potential on the original studio cut.

There are some surrealist touches, such as inflatable props and an orchestra conductor with ‘Berlin’ written in capitals on the back of what looks like a lab coat. But Schnabel’s simple tactic of projecting short films against the backdrop, like the washed-out palette for the drugged-up ‘Caroline Says’, provides a key visual context and aesthetic that take the performance to the next level. It’s no wonder that the album was a commercial flop, a critical failure and hitherto never performed – because it clearly works better as a grand multimedia stage show. The only deficit – namely the lack of any real crowd-pleasing single on Berlin – is made up for in the encore, with Antony Hegarty (of the Johnsons) updating ‘Candy Says’ and lending it a modern twist, and the classic ‘Sweet Jane’ playing behind the final credits.