LET LOVE IN
(Mute, 1994)
A highly produced, accessible work. Cave ponders life, love and reputation with his tongue sometimes in cheek.
Harvey: “There’s a bit of a feeling that we’d got back on course. We took the things we’d learned from Briggs. He pushed us to do really good takes: we’d normally just back off and go, ‘Oh, it’s good enough…’ That was a learning experience; to push ourselves to get the right takes.”
Cave: “It’s a weird one. There were influences which prevented certain people from standing back and letting the song be – you know, amphetamines. I prefer something a little more natural-sounding, I’ve got to say. It was Tony Cohen at his most obsessive, or monomaniacal, or something.”
Harvey: “We went back to a studio with the right ambience: Townhouse III, which used to be owned by The Who… a converted church.”
Cave: “It’s an album of really powerful songs – we knew we had a good record before we actually recorded them. A comic element comes out in that record – there was a time when people couldn’t work out whether I was being serious or not. That’s very much an Australian thing. That’s what our sense of humour is: no-one really knows whether you’re being funny or not. That record I spent most of my time doing the artwork for the inner sleeve, and a long time doing the oscillator solo – terrible oscillator solo, I might say – on ‘Red Right Hand’.”