In a West Berlin studio, Mick Harvey walked in carrying the skeleton of an old piano: just strings stretched over a metal frame, no body, no keys. Harvey, the multi-instrumentalist of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, tuned individual notes and plucked them with a guitar pick. That bare, unsettling sound became the backbone of 'The Carny', and it set the tone for the band's fourth album before anyone knew what the record would be. The album, Your Funeral... My Trial, was released on November 3, 1986.
Recording sessions and release details
Your Funeral... My Trial, the fourth studio album by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, came out on November 3, 1986, on Mute Records. It arrived as a double EP, not a conventional LP, and it was recorded that summer in two very different places: Hansa Tonstudio in West Berlin and Strongroom in London. The sessions were produced by Flood and Tony Cohen. During that time, Nick Cave was struggling with heroin addiction, and the music sounds like it: tense, dreamlike, full of long shadows. The CD edition rearranged the track order and added 'Scum', a song that had previously been released as a standalone single. In 2009 the album was remastered and reissued as a CD/DVD collector's edition, with the CD restoring the original eight-song vinyl sequence and 'Scum' appearing as a DVD bonus track.
The first day of work produced 'The Carny', and that one song gave the whole project its identity. Harvey's stripped piano, played like a strange percussion instrument, created an atmosphere that felt less like rock music and more like a dark carnival at the edge of sleep. Cave later said that 'The Carny', along with 'Your Funeral, My Trial' and 'Stranger Than Kindness', struck him as almost perfect songs. In 1993, he went further and named the album his favourite among everything the band had recorded.
In 1993, he went further and named the album his favourite among everything the band had recorded.
Lineup changes and writing credits
The record also marked the end of an era for the group's lineup. It was the last Bad Seeds album with bassist Barry Adamson until he returned for Push the Sky Away in 2013. Around Cave, the core players shifted between instruments constantly: Harvey handled guitar, bass, drums, piano, organ, glockenspiel and xylophone, while Blixa Bargeld played guitar and shared lead vocals. Thomas Wydler played drums, and on one song, 'She Fell Away', he played a fire extinguisher. Cave himself sang and played piano, Hammond organ and harmonica. The writing credits were mostly his, though 'Stranger Than Kindness' came from Anita Lane and Blixa Bargeld, 'Jack's Shadow' was written with Mick Harvey, and 'Long Time Man' was a cover of Tim Rose.
Commercially, the album did something no previous Bad Seeds record had managed. It became the band's first release to enter the ARIA Top 100 Albums Chart, where it reached number 98 in their native Australia. At the same time, it climbed to the top of the UK Independent Albums Chart. For a group whose music was often described as difficult or theatrical, that independent chart success proved there was a devoted audience waiting for exactly this kind of record.
The album's strange power spilled beyond music. In 1987, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds performed 'The Carny' and 'From Her to Eternity' in Wim Wenders' film Wings of Desire, set in divided Berlin. Years later, 'The Carny' inspired a twelve-minute animated film called Jo Jo in the Stars, directed by Marc Craste. That film won a BAFTA for best animated short in 2003, twenty-three years after the song first appeared on a double EP.
Mick Harvey, looking back in 2020, said the album gave the band a template for moving forward. The material felt organised rather than disconnected, and it sounded unmistakably like the Bad Seeds. For a group that had often thrived on chaos, Your Funeral... My Trial showed that discipline and atmosphere could be just as powerful. The broken piano from that first day in Berlin had done more than anchor one song; it had shown the band a new way to build a whole world.