It’d be easy to pigeon-hole Nick Cave as a sex-and-drugs-and-rock-and-roll cliché if his lyrics weren’t compiled with such deft eloquence and baroque morbidity, and his all-encompassing presence stuffed with sardonic cowboy caricature. With this year’s stunning ‘Dig, Lazarus, Dig!’ LP, the Australian master created a record that was as equally filled with instantaneous hooks and balls-to-the-wall rock as it was with murky, lustful paeans to illicit love and wanton partying, and the latest single from this writer’s Album of the Year strays little from that formula.

‘Midnight Man’’s helter-skelter intro becomes the bed for Cave’s toying vocals, the stanzas (he’s a poet, OK?) giving way to a drawled refrain that “Everyone’s coming round to my place”.

Quite why everyone is popping over to Chez Cave though is, as always, shrouded in a mysterious, literate cloak. It’s unlikely they’re doorstepping him for tea and biscuits: something all together more sinister appears to be on the menu as he instructs us to “hold that chrysalis in your hand”. Especially as said chrysalis then apparently leads him to beg, “Don’t disturb me as I sleep, treat me gently when I wake” following the hallucinogenic allegory that “your kids drip from their teeth”.

So, rock and roll? Check.
Drugs? Probably.

Sex?

“Even though your body aches to serve at his command / Between the wars she still adores her ever-loving man”

Sorted.

A few fiery guitars guide the song to its conclusion, tying it up and filing it alongside a pantheon of characteristically Cave tunes. Far be from it for us to suggest that Nick Cave fits a profile though: ‘Midnight Man’ is a typically excellent Bad Seeds track, and whilst it probably will work better in its original album context, it’s partly only because that album is such a delight to begin with.