119. Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - The Mercy Seat (Mute)

One week at number one on 9th July 1988

On one of the first warm days of Spring in 2014, I left my flat in Streatham to witness a commotion. A vortex of crows was cawing angrily overhead, and the subject of the fury seemed to be one of their own kind – he (or she) was sprawled on the road like a sack flapping in the breeze while two others gouged and grabbed at his neck. As I approached, the attackers flitted nervously away, and their victim flopped upside down, legs in the air, blood dripping from its wings, apparently dead.

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?