Original autograph first draft of the lyrics to the Grinderman song “Fire Boy”. London, July 2009.

Nick Cave’s own first draft of the lyrics to Fire Boy, written for Grinderman, his Bad Seeds side project. Fire Boy was recorded in London in late July 2009 and appeared as an iTunes bonus track on the album Grinderman 2, released in September 2010 on Mute Records in the United Kingdom and ANTI- in the United States.

Handwritten by Cave in black ballpoint on unruled white paper (A4 sheet, 297 x 211 mm), with Cave’s annotations in red felt-tip (these seem to refer to chords); verso blank. The lyrics are written without a title at head, and contain a number of minor textual variants from the recorded version, as well as several revisions and underlinings. Condition: clean and well preserved, with a faint original horizontal fold and some very light creasing.

With its sexually charged voice, the lyric might reasonably be described as a pyrophiliac’s vision.

‘… Take me down some petroleum

A rag and a box of matches

You better hide, you better hide, you better hide away

The fireboy is purging

You better hide, you better hide away

The cops they are surging …

I’m gonna wake up Mary,

& together we’ll get loaded

I’m gonna bite deep into her cherry

while the government houses exploded

Yeah I love the way she jumps the counter

in her miniskirt & her leather boots

I don’t know what I ever did without her

as we hide in alleyways & the garbage shoots [sic]’

Cave’s approach to song-writing has always been a methodical and idiosyncratic one, and he is acknowledged as a meticulous archivist of his own creative work. It is an extremely rare occurrence for the artist to part with any of his lyrics, from whatever stage of the creative process. (The notable exception to this rule, however, has been Cave’s release of handwritten song lyrics to charity auctions on a handful of occasions).

‘My process of lyric writing is as follows: For months, I write down ideas in a notebook with a Bic medium ballpoint pen in black. At some point, the songs begin to reveal themselves, to take some kind of form, which is when I type the new lyrics into my laptop. Here, I begin the long process of working on the words, adding verses, taking them away, and refining the language, until the song arrives at its destination. At this stage, I take one of the yellowing back pages I have cut from old second-hand books, and, on my Olympia typewriter, type out the lyrics. I then glue it into my bespoke notebook, number it, date-stamp it, and sticker it. The song is then ‘officially’ completed….’ (Interview Magazine, 16 December 2020).

Provenance:

Acquired from a private collection, The Netherlands, in 2024

According to the previous owner, these lyrics to Fire Boy were acquired by them from Mute Records audio engineer Kevin Paul, who was an assistant producer during the Grinderman 2 recording sessions in London in July 2009; the lyrics are accompanied by an autograph signed statement by Nick Cave that reads: ‘I give this stuff to Kevin’ (Cave also presented Paul with a group of 12 figurines he had made by hand during the sessions).