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SYDNEY - Nick Cave has many ways of describing his new band Grinderman.
In typical Cave fashion, most of his descriptions are unlikely to ever appear in any marketing material for the four-piece, or his other group The Bad Seeds.
"Grinderman are kind of herpes simplex and Bad Seeds are like herpes complex," he says with a smirk.
After almost three decades of unconventional music, and with an induction into Australia's ARIA Hall of Fame this weekend, Cave knows he can play by his own rules.
Cave and his Grinderman cohorts, Warren Ellis, Martyn P Casey and Jim Sclavunos, are slightly the worse for wear as they sit down for an interview at 10 o'clock in the morning.
Casey is drinking a beer, Ellis is downing his fourth black coffee and Cave surveys the ornate lounge at Sydney's Sir Stamford Hotel from behind dark glasses.
The hirsute foursome are all part of the outfit known as Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds, but they unleashed a new beast and formed Grinderman when they changed the way they played together.
"Just at sound checks and stuff like that we started doing strange things," Casey says.
"And we thought this sounds good, why don't we try and make a record out of it.
"It's half the Bad Seeds but it's totally different to their sound."
Cave expounds: "It was a sound that you couldn't get with all of the Bad Seeds or we would have done that.
"So with the four of us we could experiment a little more I guess.
"Now we're in this really fortunate position actually of having the mother ship, which is the Bad Seeds, which has a long history behind it, and with the Grinderman thing we can go off to other places and sort of report back in a way."
Casey warms to the theme: "If The Bad Seeds is like a space shuttle we're at the side repairing shit, fixing the windscreen."
"Whoa," says Cave, "the mushrooms are kicking in."
Dressed like lounge singers turned outlaws, the band are a formidable group.
They offer withering assessments of some of Australia's most popular bands - and then order they be struck from the record.
Cave is also brutally dismissive of the ARIA awards, calling them "f***ing tedious".
But he isn't all negative about the country of his birth.
In 1980, the Warracknabeal-born and Melbourne-raised Cave up and left Australia and now lives in seaside Brighton, in England.
He says he loves coming back, but doesn't know whether he could call Australia home again.
"I love Melbourne. I absolutely love coming back to Melbourne," he says.
"Every time I come here I'm amazed how beautiful this country is, how beautiful the cities are.
"For the first two weeks I always think, 'right I'm going to come back and live here', but something happens by the third week and by the fourth I'm happy to get on the plane."
Perhaps Cave finds there's a little too much history in his home town to want to live there again.
"There's much higher pressure in Melbourne because it's your home town and every conceivable family member is there," Cave says.
Ellis adds: "Lots of skeletons from the closet."
"Yeah, rattling, rattling around," Cave agrees.
"Everything's out there, all the old girls," Ellis says.
"You look out into a sea of faces and think, 'oh my god'," Cave adds.
"Girls that hate your guts," Ellis nods.
"Girls with children under their arms saying meet daddy," Cave laughs.
At 50, Cave says he is having more fun with music than ever before, and it's evident on the Grinderman album.
On No Pussy Blues, he sings of trying to bed a groupie, without luck: "I sent her every type of flower, I played her guitar by the hour, I patted her revolting little chihuahua, but still she just didn't want to".
Cave explains: "I think there's a general shift in attitude towards making music that's happened in the last few years.
"It's not that I'm not serious about it, I'm very serious and spend an enormous amount of time over things.
"It's just that when we actually go in to record a record the agonising over things has been done and we just go in and we really enjoy making the record."
The band also put the shift in attitude down to their advancing years.
"That's one of the benefits of getting older too," Ellis says.
"It's fantastic getting older, and it's great making music when you're older."
Shaking things up with the invention of Grinderman has also had an effect on the more sedate sound of The Bad Seeds, who have a new album coming out next year.
"It kind of infected the way we work in the Bad Seeds now so things are different in the Bad Seeds as well," Sclavunos says.
Ellis agrees: "There's an exploration there that wouldn't have happened without Grinderman, because Grinderman was really about exploring things, and it's inevitable it spews into the next thing that we do."
Sclavunos extends the metaphor: "It's an infectious disease," he says.
"Viral," Cave concurs.
- AAP
