Artist: Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
Title: Deanna
Format: 12" Single
Label: Mute
Catalogue Number: 12MUTE86
Year of Release: 1988
Tracklisting
A Deanna
B The Girl at the Bottom of My Glass
Taken from 1988's Tender Prey LP, Deanna has several things in common with the other great tune from that album, the more famous Mercy Seat.
1) A excellent acoustic version exists
2) The original 1988 recording isn't that good
3) It's still a live favourite, clearly of both the band and audience.
Mercy Seat and Deanna were the opening numbers on 1993's Live Seeds album, a record released, in part, because of Nick Cave's dissatisfaction with recording Henry's Dream the year before.
If I had the time or the energy, I'd try and work out, from somewhere like Nick Cave Hell, how many times since 1988 the band have played Deanna, but I'm going to guess about 800. Which makes a performance like this one, from a 2009 BBC4 session, all the more astonishing:
In the live performance these days the focus of the song stops being about a Bonnie & Clyde-style couple on a murder spree, nor does it really linger on the sometimes bizarre lines in the verses, ("I cum a death's head in your frock", for one, "Ku Klux furniture", for two) that are delivered in anticipation of what is really the main event, Nick Cave shouting at the audience:
I ain't down here for your money
I ain't down here for your love
I don't want your love or your money
I'm down here for your soul
And him meaning it, and you, in the audience, wanting him to take it.
The Girl in the Bottom of My Glass is a stranger bouilloire de poissons. Not one I've heard live, but still well known enough to have its own teatowel.
The phrase "love it comes a-knocking, with my toolbox and my stocking" recurs from Deanna, but instead of the homely togetherness of a couple's love-fuelled killing-spree you have here a drunken loner lamenting that he, "can't raise his glass, without seeing her ass". Murder does rear its head again though, because, "If you want to see what's inside of Sally/You'll find that doll in a hole out in the alley".
I get the impression some lyrics are only there because they rhyme. It's kind of a half-formed song, and a throwaway B-side, with a perfunctory backing from the rest of the band (who were, at this point, Blixa Bargeld, Mick Harvey, Kid Congo Powers, Roland Wolf and Thomas Wydler).
