Day After Day is an ambitious attempt to write about a song every day in 2024 (starting on Jan. 4).
Red Right Hand (1994)
Many artists have a signature song, but how many perfectly fit the artist like "Red Right Hand" does Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds? Cave has always written excellently malevolent songs about good and evil, love and hate, light and darkness, but this one is the perfect distillation of all that.
The Australian was already well known as the frontman for post-punk act the Birthday Party in the late '70s/early '80s before forming Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds in 1983. The band mined blues, gospel, rock and post-punk sounds to accompany Cave's dark explorations.
"Red Right Hand" shows up on the band's eighth album, Let Love In, which came out in April 1994. The title comes from a line in John Milton's poem Paradise Lost, which refers to it as the vengeful hand of God. But Cave's song makes it more unclear whether we're talking about God, the devil or something else altogether.
"Take a little walk to the edge of town/And go across the tracks/Where the viaduct looms/Like a bird of doom/As it shifts and cracks/Where secrets lie in the border fires/In the humming wires/Hey man, you know/You're never coming back/Past the square, past the bridge/Past the mills, past the stacks/On a gathering storm comes/A tall handsome man/In a dusty black coat with/A red right hand."
Cave has said the town described in the song is a version of Wangaratta, his hometown. As the sparse instrumentation draws the listener in, so does the man with the red right hand.
"He'll wrap you in his arms/Tell you that you've been a good boy/He'll rekindle all the dreams/It took you a lifetime to destroy/He'll reach deep into the hole/Heal your shrinking soul/But there won't be a single thing/That you can do/He's a god, he's a man/He's a ghost, he's a guru/They're whispering his name/Through this disappearing land/But hidden in his coat/Is a red right hand."
The song grabbed the attention of TV shows and movies looking for just the right creepy song to set the mood. It showed up in an early episode of The X-Files in 1994, was used in the six of the seven installments in the Scream franchise, and is also in Dumb and Dumber, Hellboy and is the main theme for the show Peaky Blinders, with different artists performing the song in different seasons. Artists who have covered the song include PJ Harvey, Iggy Pop, Arctic Monkeys, Fidlar, Giant Sand and Snoop Dogg. They're good but nobody can top the original.
"You'll see him in your nightmares/You'll see him in your dreams/He'll appear out of nowhere but/He ain't what he seems/You'll see him in your head/On the TV screen/And hey buddy, I'm warning/You to turn it off/He's a ghost, he's a god/He's a man, he's a guru/You're one microscopic cog/In his catastrophic plan/Designed and directed by/His red right hand."
Cave, of course, isn't defined by the song. He's got many memorable songs and albums. His 1996 album Murder Ballads is amazing and he's been productive over the years, both with the Bad Seeds and with his side project Grinderman, which is excellent. He also has composed the music for several movies, including The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and The Road, and has written novels and screenplays.
But "Red Right Hand" seems to have become a cultural phenomenon (albeit more in the U.K. than here), which isn't a bad thing, even if it's about a bad man (maybe).
No comments:
Post a Comment