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

A$15,000 · Offered by Douglas Stewart Fine Books

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

• Binding: Hardcover

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