Kicking_Against_the_Pricks
Kicking Against the Pricks
1986 studio album by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
Kicking Against the Pricks is the third album released by the rock music group Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. First released in 1986, the album is a collection of Cave's interpretations of songs by other artists. The title is a reference to a biblical quote from the King James version of the Bible, Acts 26, verse 14.
The album marked the Bad Seeds debut of drummer Thomas Wydler, expanding the Bad Seeds line-up to Cave (vocals and keyboards), Wydler, bassist Barry Adamson, and guitarists Mick Harvey and Blixa Bargeld.
Cave would later downplay the importance of the record, but said it helped the band develop musically:
It allowed us to discover different elements, to actually make and perform a variety of different sorts of music successfully. I think that helped subsequent records tremendously.[10]
Remarking on the song selection, Cave said:
They were all done for different reasons. Basically a list of songs were made and we tried to play them. We tried songs by the Loved Ones and the Saints and all sorts of people that never got on the record. Some songs were tributes, like the Tom Jones song; other songs we didn't think the song was ever done particularly well in the first place. Some songs had just kind of haunted my childhood, like "The Carnival Is Over", which I always loved.[11]
The strings were arranged by Harvey and played by the Berliner Kaffeehausmusik Ensemble. "The Hammer Song" is not to be confused with the song of the same name from the 1990 Bad Seeds album The Good Son.
The album was remastered and reissued on 27 April 2009 as a collector's edition CD/DVD set. The CD features the original 12-song vinyl LP's track listing, while "Black Betty" and "Running Scared" are featured as bonus audio tracks on the accompanying DVD.
Recordings of seven of these songs, performed by the original artists, were later issued on the Original Seeds compilation CDs.