The Mercy Seat

Cave wrote the lyrics and the music with Mick Harvey, and the song was released as a single in May 1988, with a longer version opening Tender Prey. Its narrator is a prisoner waiting to be executed in the electric chair. The title points to the chair and to the biblical mercy seat. The chorus comes round fifteen times with small changes, and the song ends on the line "I'm afraid I told a lie".

It grew out of Cave's work with the director John Hillcoat on the prison film Ghosts... of the Civil Dead, which he co-wrote and scored. He read widely on prisons and violence, and Blixa Bargeld recalled him reading about serial killers and the letters of Ned Kelly. Cave said it began as a distraction from his novel And the Ass Saw the Angel, with lyrics scribbled on scraps of paper. Harvey remembered it as assembled from several ideas. The rhythm began when Cave asked the band to imitate the fast drum machine of Suicide, Harvey made the bass figure by striking two strings with drumsticks, and Cave built a seven-chord cycle around it.

The recording took six months across six studios in West Berlin, London and Melbourne. It was built around a tape loop and grew to 48 tracks on two synchronised tape machines. The recorder and producer Tony Cohen called it "an incredibly hard recording to control" and said it "took a few years off my life".

Live and covers

It has been played at almost every concert since 1988, and setlist.fm logs 775 Bad Seeds performances, more than any other song. A loud live version opens Live Seeds (1993), an acoustic version was recorded for Keith Cameron's Xfm show The Carve Up in May 1998, and it is also on Live from KCRW (2013). NME, Sounds and Melody Maker all named it single of the year, and it reached 10 in John Peel's 1988 Festive Fifty. Mojo ranked it the greatest Nick Cave song in 2023. Johnny Cash covered it on American III: Solitary Man (2000), and Cave said of that version: "Johnny Cash recorded my song."