In 2020, on the second anniversary of Conway Savage’s death, Nick Cave shared a shaggy dog story about the former piano player in the Bad Seeds, as a pungent example of his anarchic spirit. It recalled the time Savage first met his future bandmate Warren Ellis after a Dirty Three show in Melbourne. “Good show, mate,” Savage told Ellis, “but if I see you play that flute again I’ll ram it up your arse.” Decades later, having undergone emergency surgery to remove a brain tumour, Savage took the time to send Ellis a letter: “Warren, I was wrong about the flute. Conway.”
“Conway would never tour with the Bad Seeds again,” wrote Cave, “and a year later… Conway passed away taking the ramshackle soul of the Bad Seeds with him. People often ask me if I miss past members of the Bad Seeds and the answer is, ‘Well, not really.’ But I miss Conway. We all miss Conway. We miss him a lot. Things are not the same without him.”
Savage joined the Bad Seeds in 1990 during the dates promoting The Good Son, having previously played with Happy Orphans, Feral Dinosaurs, Scrap Museum, Dust On The Bible and Dave Last & The Legendary Boy Kings. “Being pianist in the Bad Seeds is very difficult,” says Mick Harvey, “because Nick wrote the songs on piano and there was a particular way that they were played. This was always a problem, because a pianist comes in, they’ve got their own personality in their playing. Unfortunately, what it requires is someone who’s willing to dispense with that.”
Savage may have experienced frustration, as the title of his 2004 solo album Wrong Man’s Hands suggests, but he suffered quietly. “Conway was a man of few words,” says Harvey, “a lot of them mumbled and some of them quite caustic. He could be pretty tough, but he found it difficult. He was also given a lot of positive feedback.” Savage gave few indications that he might have more personal ambitions, though a new retrospective, Too Dark To See: Solo & Collaborative Recordings 1992-2010, reveals a performer with a mordant wit rooted in honky-tonk balladry. “Conway was very into country music. A big lover of Willie Nelson.”
His first EP was a happy accident. The Bad Seeds were waiting (in vain) for producer David Briggs at Dreamland studio in upstate New York. As Harvey relates, “This huge weatherboard church sounded amazing, and [Briggs] just kept not turning up. We had four days booked with nothing to do, so I just said to Conway, ‘Why don’t you record some of your stuff?’ The first recordings were amazing. He was very open, like he wasn’t expecting that to be happening. He was very excited to be doing it.”
Six years later, Savage returned to the studio for debut solo album Nothing Broken, though his approach had evolved. He now assumed the role of “some sort of Phil Spector guy” while giving no indication that he was ready to participate. “He wouldn’t sing anything,” reveals Harvey. “We had no idea what he was going to sing. It was a very unusual way to approach a record, but great. Conway was in a good mood because he was hitting the booze and the coke and he didn’t care. I was thinking, ‘How on earth is he going to finish this record? He’s completely off his tits.’”
Happily, the anthology cements Savage’s reputation as an Australian original who just about overcame his musical reticence. “He was very much not a person that would want to promote himself,” says Harvey. “He was happy to just sit in his living room playing his piano. But I also remember when I left the Bad Seeds and I went round to visit him. He didn’t give a lot away, but when something had an impact on him or upset him, he’d show it in a very authentic, un-histrionic way. He was very genuine. I always understood where he was coming from, and I loved that about him.”
Too Dark To See: Solo & Collaborative Recordings 1992-2010 is released by Impressed Recordings on July 17