'It's OK to embarrass yourself' – Nick Cave and the return of Grinderman

You would be hard-pushed to call the video for Grinderman's new single Heathen Child anything other than striking. On one level, that's far from surprising. The director is John Hillcoat, best known for his harrowing adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel The Road. His most recent collaboration with Nick Cave was the multiple award-winning 2005 film The Proposition, and that was pretty striking, too: the kind of film you watch through your fingers, a feast of blood and brutality set in 19th-century Australia. Then there's the racket Cave makes with Grinderman, which seems to have more in common with the nihilistic violence of his early 80s band the Birthday Party than the stately, beautifully wrought ballads that populate his most recent albums with the Bad Seeds. Like Grinderman's previous singles, Get It On and No Pussy Blues, Heathen Child is a scouring, ferocious din built around Cave's rudimentary explorations of the guitar, an instrument he only took up a couple of months before the band recorded their 2007 debut album ("What do you mean, have I become more adept?" he deadpans. "What, you're saying I wasn't adept before? Would you ask Jimi Hendrix that question on his second album?"). Under the circumstances, it seems fairly easy to predict the kind of visual accompaniment Cave and Hillcoat might have dreamed up.

But, as swiftly becomes apparent when Cave calls up the video on his laptop, striking comes in many forms. It opens with a beautiful girl submerged in a bath of milk, before Cave and his fellow Grindermen – Jim Sclavunos, Martyn Casey and Warren Ellis, Bad Seeds all – appear. They seem to be dressed as Roman centurions, their plumed galeae and thigh-length tunics accessorised, in Cave's case at least, with a pair of leopardskin underpants.

"We're actually sort of Olympian deities, loosely modelled on the God of War," corrects Sclavunos. "He was an aggressively, arbitrarily violent god."

"There was a miscommunication with the costume department," nods Cave, a little ruefully. "And we ended up looking like gay Roman footsoldiers." He brightens a bit. "Still, we've got the legs for it."

"I think if you keep watching the video, and you witness the supernatural powers we exhibit, then it will become clear how godlike we truly are," suggest Sclavunos, as the kind of very low-rent death-ray special effect you used to get on Tom Baker-era Doctor Who episodes shoots from the eyes of his onscreen counterpart. Later he does a slow-motion hip-swinging dance that reveals Cave drew the long straw when it came to underwear in the video: beneath his tunic, Sclavunos appears to be wearing some kind of posing pouch. As his buttocks fill the screen, the pair dissolve into laughter.

The video is, they claim, all part of the concept surrounding the second Grinderman album, the prosaically titled Grinderman 2, which arrives complete with an accompanying book of illustrations by a German artist who contacted Cave after making a video for the Bad Seeds song Moonland as part of her finals: "I got her to illustrate the whole record, so that we could work out a kind of overarching narrative that ran from one song to the next." What exactly that overarching narrative might be remains a moot point, at least today: "You have to buy the fuckin' record and work it out," snaps Cave, when the subject is broached.

Grinderman's debut served up the sound of what Cave described as "a mammoth midlife crisis" in a sleeve that featured a photograph of a monkey apparently masturbating ("Just for the record," Cave clarifies, "it's not wanking, it's holding on to its genital area, terrified"). The songs were fixated on sex and ageing and masculinity in crisis: Cave depicted himself sucking his gut in and offering to do DIY in doomed attempts to attract female attention: this from a man who in his youth was wont to write songs in which he dealt with recalcitrant females by stabbing them in the head. There's some more of the same on Grinderman 2: "My baby calls me the Loch Ness monster," growls Cave, "two humps and then I'm gone." He says Grinderman's method of songwriting – improvising everything, including lyrics – tends to bring out his lower self: "You can't write that stuff down on a piece of paper. I can't sit in my office and write it down, because when you're writing, you're working from the mind and your mind is telling you: 'Don't write that down, don't go there, it's not a good idea, it's not worth the grief.'" But like the sound of the album, the lyrics also seem more dense and strange, less prosaic than its predecessor. "From the get-go, there were images cropping up in the ad-lib lyrics that Nick was coming up with," says Sclavunos. "There were various hairy beasts. Wolfmen. There were threads. There is a consistent atmosphere of oppressive, hallucinatory evil, an anxious undercurrent. It's got its peaks and valleys, but it permeates everything."

Cave chuckles. "This is Jim's third day of interviews," he shrugs.

In person, Cave and Sclavunos make a great double act. Cave speaks with that rising Australian inflection that makes every statement sound like a question, which shouldn't be surprising, but somehow is. Sclavunos's voice is a low, dolorous rumble that emerges from within a beard you would describe as vast if it wasn't next to that of Warren Ellis, a man whose tonsorial arrangements beggar belief. Similarly, Sclavunos's sharp brown suit pales a little when placed next to Cave, who today sports a scarlet shirt open to mid-chest and a spectacular variety of medallions. They are both infectiously enthusiastic about Grinderman, whose existence Cave credits with revitalising the Bad Seeds. "It just had a kind of cataclysmic effect, you know? It just turned things upside down. For me, sonically, there was just too much going on in the Bad Seeds. There's a sound that's really unique to them, this kind of monstrous sound, and there's nothing I like more than going onstage with them and having this monstrous kind of thing about me, but something had happened where it felt really difficult to make a record like The Boatman's Call again, where you could go in and say, all right, this is basically piano and drums and bass, everybody sit back. It felt like every time I took a song into the Bad Seeds, everyone piled in on it. In the Bad Seeds," he smiles, "you play a song, and everyone's grabbing a fuckin' maraca, y'know?"

Both are extremely funny, which comes as a relief. Cave, in particular, trails a reputation for prickly relations with the press that's perhaps a little out of date – yes, he did once write a song called Scum in which he colourfully decried Mat Snow, then of the NME, as "a miserable shitwringing turd who reminded me of some evil gnome" and yes, he did once punch a journalist in the middle of an interview, but that stuff all happened decades ago, at the height of his heroin-sozzled dissolution. Judging by his more recent cuttings, Cave takes umbrage at journalists depicting him as a former hellraiser now living a life of domestic contentment with his family in Hove, but there's no doubt his life is more settled than it once was. You could argue that it's virtually impossible to imagine how Cave's life could be any less settled than it once was, but, nevertheless, his current arrangement seems to suit him. At 52, his productivity is torrential: by contrast, even Sclavunos – who balances the Bad Seeds and Grinderman with his own band, the Vanity Set, and a burgeoning career as a producer for, among others, the Horrors and the Jim Jones Revue – is taking it easy.

When, in the wake of The Proposition's success, Variety magazine named Cave one of 10 screenwriters to watch, he claimed: "The last thing I ever wanted to get involved with is Hollywood … It's a waste of fucking time and I have a lot to do." Indeed, last year alone, as well as working on another film with Hillcoat, the Brighton-set Death of a Ladies' Man, he produced two film scores, a second novel, The Death of Bunny Munro – which garnered both good reviews and a nomination for the Literary Review's Bad Sex in Fiction awards – and narrated an animated film called The Cat Piano. And 26 years after they formed, the Bad Seeds are in the midst of a startling artistic purple patch: their last two albums, the double Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus and 2008's astonishing Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! are probably the best Cave has ever put his name to. He says he produces records so quickly his label doesn't know what to do with them: "Daniel Miller from Mute had a quiet talk to me to say, 'Pull your fuckin' head in and stop doing so much stuff. You've become a marketing nightmare.' I took some time off." He laughs. "Well, a weekend. It becomes a problem, how to pace all the stuff."

The critical acclaim that seems to come as standard with the latterday Bad Seeds' career is a long way from the polarising effect both Cave and Sclavunos's early bands had on listeners: while Cave seemed to spend as much time with the Birthday Party punching the front row as he did singing, Sclavunos was doggedly thumping a solitary snare drum in Lydia Lunch's screeching no wave band Teenage Jesus and the Jerks. You get the feeling that both of them miss at least some of the chaos they once provoked, hence Grinderman. "There's a comfortability with the Bad Seeds that Grinderman disrupts," says Cave. "That's what's chaotic about Grinderman. I get very different responses to it from my very close friends, from my colleagues, people I work with. Some love it, some are baffled by it. Some are like flat-out, 'What the fuck are you doing?' which is exciting to me. There's a pressure with the Bad Seeds that I don't feel in Grinderman. Within the Bad Seeds there is a sense of duty for me to the band's legacy. I don't want to put out a whole load of shitty records with the Bad Seeds. There's a kind of open rule within Grinderman that it's OK to embarrass yourself, to go to places that could be potentially disastrous."

"We've tried flute solos," interjects Sclavunos. "Drum solos. All sorts of dubious territory."

"No one's going to come down on you for it," Cave says. "It's out there in those regions that interesting things are found, but it's creatively dangerous to go there. We go into the studio with nothing at all. No lyrics, none of that, no chord charts. The only thing I had for the first record was an empty notebook with the words No Pussy Blues written on one page. This time I didn't even have that. We play for five days, then we listen to this morass of … bullshit that we've played, and suddenly these great bits of music emerge."

"There's no disrespect to the Bad Seeds," Sclavunos says. "It's more like we want the disruption. I think sometimes the public starts thinking along the lines of, 'Oh, we've got their number,' and they start compartmentalising you. We do make an effort with every Bad Seeds record to do something new, to challenge ourselves. Grinderman helps that along. We want the public to be as on the edge of their seats as we put ourselves."

"People seem to be more concerned about what the Bad Seeds is and what Grinderman is than we are," Cave sighs. "We understand it's confusing. We don't understand what's going on with it all. Life's too short to worry about it." There's a pause. "There was definitely a feeling on this record that we wanted to get back to something that had a really malign feel to it, and take great pleasure in it."

Why?

"It's just more natural," he says, and returns his attentions to his laptop screen, where Jim Sclavunos's buttocks have been replaced by the diverting sight of Nick Cave, middle-aged man of letters, recent recipient of an honorary doctorate from Dundee University for his "visionary songs, stories, books films and poetry", dressed as a Roman centurion, firing an unconvincing death-ray special effect out of his bum.

Grinderman 2 is released on Mute on 13 September. They play the Garage, London, on 23 September, then touring.