One week at number one on 9th July 1988
As I got closer, and the noise of the other crows disappeared into the distance, he suddenly came back to life – clearly it was all a bluff. He discreetly limped and hopped away to God knows where. His wounds looked significant, and I have no idea whether he lived or died.
Corvids are rough birds, but they will very rarely turn on members of their own flocks without reason, and certainly not usually so viciously. If an attack of the nature I witnessed occurs, sanctioned by the flock as a whole, it normally means that a non-member has encroached on their territory and attempted something serious, or one of their own has been responsible for a major transgression and must be dispensed with for the good of the whole. For crow society to function effectively, the dangerous and the unruly must be destroyed. I realise that this sounds cliched, and as if I’m writing the opening paragraphs of some pulp Horror novel, but my excuse is that it was real and genuinely weird and unsettling to witness.
Human beings are more sophisticated than crows, but some societies around the world still function according to the same logic. Death row in America is one such place where people end up if society has decided that their behaviour is a dangerous and unsolvable problem. Rather than being dealt with immediately, though, the majority wait for years; making appeals, hoping against probable hope that their sentence will be downgraded. Humans are less swift or reactive than crows. Our heightened sense of fairness can accidentally result in a kind of cruelty which might be worse.
“The Mercy Seat” touches on the wait on the way to the executioner’s chair (“In a way I’m yearning to be done with all this weighing up of proof”) but is clearly about the end of the road – the nervous, racing panic ahead of the final moment. Its slow to start, with the narrator slowly growling a bit of unpromising background information, before the song really begins to get interesting as Cave mutters: “A ragged cup, a twisted mop/ The face of Jesus in my soup/ Those sinister dinner deals/ The meal trolley's wicked wheels/ A hooked bone rising from my food/ All things either good or un-good”.
Sometimes, the best rock and pop music uses its brief run-time, its narrow canvas, to communicate a sense of tension around one specific moment. In more traditional songs, its often romantic – can we kiss, should we kiss, now we’ve done it, what does it mean? – in alternative rock, however, we can be taken beyond those everyday human emotions and placed in extraordinary situations we are unlikely to personally experience. Cave here communicates the intensity, the warped realness of the everyday while someone waits to be killed; everything carries significance, and morphs almost cartoonishly into a threat, a hint or a judgement.
Or - even a joke. As the protagonist goes towards the electric chair, he compares his fate with that of Jesus, but can’t resist jumping on the irony of the fact that God came back to Earth as a carpenter, and was finally killed on a wooden cross. Everything, it seems, has a twisted pattern, not just the bones in his food.
“The Mercy Seat” pokes at bitter ironies and contradictions obsessively, in particular the idea that the Bible is filled with both New Testament forgiveness and Old Testament rage, and picks up speed like a rattling train. It’s one of the only songs I can think of which uses the ancient pop device of repeating the chorus to fade to artistic (rather than commercial) effect – whereas other tracks are marking time and hammering their hookiest ideas for radio play, it has a clear purpose here; to communicate the prisoner’s racing brain and panicked response to his situation. The more he sings “I’m not afraid to die”, the less you believe him; the Bad Seeds are contradicting the idea, piling more thunder behind the words.
Eventually he even contradicts himself. On the twelfth repeat of the chorus, the line “Anyway I told the truth/ and I’m not afraid to die” changes to “I’m not afraid to lie”. On the final repeat he sings “I’m afraid I told a lie”. Is the prisoner finally facing up to his own denial and giving up the pretence, or facing up to God? And is it an irony in itself that it takes staring in the face of death to admit that you were lying all along?
I was absolutely fascinated by “The Mercy Seat” as a teen. I had no lyric sheet for the song, and would rewind and replay segments of it, trying to grab some sort of sense of what was going on, then realising that ultimately it doesn’t much matter if you only grab the meaning of some of it – its not there to be savoured or understood as a whole immediately. If you were placed in front of the condemned man five minutes before his final moments, his rush of thoughts would beg questions; so when Cave scrambles through some dense, complicated lyrical ideas, the best thing to do is just accept them and grab at what you can. There are moments where he’s singing the next line before it even seems as if he’s quite finished the one before, all while the band constantly push forwards, push forwards… after all, what is there to stop and take a deep breath for? Relief? From what? There are no recorded incidents of anyone sighing in the electric chair (note – maybe I should check this before hitting “publish”).
While Cave is treasured as some kind of counter-cultural agony uncle these days, he’s not smug enough to grind the most interesting lyrics from “The Mercy Seat” into the ground. The end ranting is so simple and straightforward that it barely feels part of the same song, feeling closer lyrically to the most basic gangster rap. In the same song, the starkness of “I think my head is burning” co-exists with “interpret signs and catalogue/ A blackened tooth, a scarlet fog/ The walls are bad, black, bottom kind/ They are the sick breath at my hind”. The longer the song goes on for, the more obsessed, repetitive and simplistic it gets – nobody composes poetry in the seconds before their death either.
The author and artist Alasdair Gray once described one of his main characters getting the news of a terminal condition in a touchingly simplistic way, telling us he somehow always knew the moment would come - like feeling a policeman’s hand on his shoulder. That is the way many of us will have to digest the news of our death. “The Mercy Seat” instead explores one of the rarest, sharpest and least humane of ways, and does so with a focus which is both pinpoint sharp, restless, realistic but also sympathetic; we’re not told what the prisoner did. We’re not asked to take sides. We’re just, for five minutes only, placed in his shoes and pushed forwards with him.
I’m not a supporter of the death penalty, but I am grimly aware of my own hypocrisies. I admire the principles of pacifism without necessarily being able to wholly commit to them under all circumstances. Society can’t behave consistently either. While it takes a dim view of murder, it will happily kill innocent people in another country and applaud that if it achieves a national objective. “The Mercy Seat” could have been a pretentious mess. Instead, it scrambles through religion, society’s inconsistencies and our own denial and ends with the line “I’m afraid I told a lie”. You wouldn’t want to listen to it every week, but it achieves something unique in rock; its a dirge with constant tension and purpose, poetry one moment, simplistic but brilliantly decorated horror the next.
New Entries Elsewhere In The Charts
20. All Systems Go - Pop Muzik (Unique)
Peak position: 20
A strange attempt at covering M’s 1979 dancefloor classic. The sleeve cynically advertises it as being Acid House adjacent, while the contents actually sound more like Living In A Box being fronted by the voiceover artist from the Studio Line adverts. It failed to reach the Top 40 despite the dependability of its source material, which says everything you need to know.
21. The Heart Throbs - Too Many Shadows (Rough Trade)
Peak position: 17
The Heart Throbs emerged in 1987 and eventually began to climb higher and higher up critic’s “next big thing” lists. Curiosity was initially created by the fact that key members Rose Carlotti and Rachel DeFreitas were sisters of the Echo & The Bunnymen drummer Pete, but they owed very little debt to that group, initially sounding like a thorny indiepop band – a cuddly heart-shaped cushion stuffed with darning needles rather than foam.
“Too Many Shadows” highlights this spikiness well, but isn’t a patch on their later work; the group began to truly excel when their palette broadened.
26. Zoot and the Roots - Sweat and Tears (Honeybee)
Peak position: 24
Not a reggae group (as I initially suspected on seeing the rundown for the first time) but a jazz group from York who were apparently a bit of a draw on the late-eighties pub and club scene. However, “Sweat And Tears” has about as much of the latter genre in its blood as Johnny Hates Jazz – this is, broadly speaking, a typical piece of slick eighties pop which uses the brass section to punctuate rather than improvise, swing or deviate. Nothing you won’t have heard before, sadly.
27. They Might Be Giants - Don't Let's Start (Rough Trade)
Peak position: 20
“Don’t Let’s Start” was They Might Be Giants’ debut single, and its astonishing how out of sorts it sounds when played alongside just about anything else in this indie chart – its rigidity and angularity feels as if it belongs to an earlier part of the decade, where XTC and Devo were both pop and art, and Top of The Pops had time and space for anyone with a catchy chorus attached to a misshapen idea.
It’s a basic production, too, leaving a hollow centre atypical of their later work; clearly critics and the public alike saw their promise very early on, however, and caused this to peak inside the Indie Top 20.
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