Delilah by Sir Tom Jones "just sort of sucks", says Nick Cave. The Australian singer-songwriter weighed into the controversy surrounding the WRU's banning of the song at Wales' home internationals. The popular track from 1967 - which tells of a jealous man stabbing his cheating lover to death - was axed earlier this month from choir playlists at Cardiff's Principality Stadium fixtures over concerns it trivialised the issue of domestic violence.
But acclaimed singer-songwriter Cave said that the only murderous impulse the tune had ever provoked in him was towards the male voice choir singing it. The 65-year-old, who's famed for his own songs of blood, death and betrayal with his band The Bad Seeds, was asked what he thought of the song's cancellation during a session of The Red Hand Files, an ongoing online Q&A between the musician and his fans.
'Do you think these sort of songs turn people into murderers?" asked one follower from Swansea called Dylan.
"I just went online and found a Welsh male choir singing their rendition of Delilah," replied Cave. "I’m sorry to report that listening to this version of the song did make me feel like murdering someone, primarily the Welsh male choir. Or maybe it wasn’t the choir, but the song itself that disturbed me - I just don’t like it.
"I mean, I like Tom Jones. I sang a duet with him at a charity event a few years ago," he said, adding that he considered The Green, Green Grass of Home "a far superior murder ballad".
Best known to many for his track Red Right Hand being used as the theme to the hit BBC series Peaky Blinders, Cave explained that, despite being awarded an Ivor Novello award in 1968, Delilah "just sort of sucks." He added, "As someone who knows a thing or two about murder ballads, for my taste, it’s all too waltzy and strident and hammy and mariachi and triumphant. And the words are ugly – 'I felt the knife in my hand and she laughed no more'. Really?" That said, Cave admitted to having plenty of admiration for The Voice of the Valleys himself.
He said he liked Jones' version of the 1967 track Weeping Annaleah - which The Bad Seeds covered 20 years later - and added that "his blistering version of Venus was playing at a party during my first teenage kiss. But I can’t get too animated by the fact that Delilah has been banned. I understand there is a principle here, but on some level I like the fact that some songs are controversial enough to be outlawed. It fills me with a kind of professional pride to be a part of the sometimes contentious business of songwriting. It’s cool. I just wish it was a more worthy song to be awarded that greatest of honours, indeed that supreme privilege, of being banned."
Cave has his own world-famous murder ballad, Where the Wild Roses Grow, which he sings with Kylie Minogue, which is about a man who murders a woman. It features the opening line: "From the first day I saw her I knew she was the one" and the story ends with "On the third day he took me to the river, he showed me the roses and we kissed, and the last thing I heard was a muttered word as he knelt above me with a rock in his fist."
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