Artist: Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
Title: The Weeping Song
Format: 7" Single
Label: Mute
Catalogue Number: MUTE118
Year of Release: 1990
Tracklisting
A The Weeping Song
B Cocks 'n' Asses
As I have mentioned before, the Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds compilation The Videos (DVDSEEDS2) has little snippets of interview footage before most of the promo videos play.
For The Weeping Song, Nick recounts how the original plan was to shoot the video in Greece on a real boat, but the owner of the boat, presumably not liking the look of them, would not bring the boat to shore for them to get on. They drank an awful lot of retsina, and then came home. Which resulted in the video being shot in, "more controlled circumstances, hence the black plastic".
He doesn't explain why both himself and Blixa Bargeld are dressed as priests for half the video [I always assumed it was a biological father-son relationship in the song, not one based on the paternalism of a religious figure], but he does say that when they are in their suits, they dance like, "two old gay businessmen at a disco".
The Weeping Song still sounds great today, I think it was one of Nick Cave's first truly great songs. It still gets played live a lot, even though Blixa has left the Bad Seeds to concentrate on his band Einstürzende Neubauten.
The B-side is largely instrumental, some counting from Nick and one point, and the joke being the samples of cockerels and donkeys. In America, this was renamed The B-side Song, which is almost as funny.
