Here is Nick Cave serenading his wife Susie with words of love in Palaces Of Montezuma, in his late-2000s side project Grinderman.

I love Nick Cave best when he’s at his wordiest. Which is odd because I usually consider concision and brevity to be key components of a great song.

Nonetheless, I’ll always enjoy picking out my favourite lines from songs like Higgs Bosun Blues (“Hannah Montana does the African savannah”); they’re usually the funny ones.

Then there’s No Pussy Blues, the song Cave wrote after observing the reverse aphrodisiac effect of his new moustache: “I read her Eliot, I read her Yeats / I tried my best to stay up late / I fixed the hinges on her gate / And still she just never wanted to.”

This is another one. Palaces Of Montezuma is what you might call a list song, with Cave reciting a series of extravagantly romantic and vaguely preposterous promises of gifts he proposes to give his wife Susie.

My favourites: “A custard-coloured super-dream of Ali McGraw and Steve McQueen” and “The spinal cord of JFK / Wrapped in Marilyn Monroe’s negligee”. What girl wouldn’t want that?

Other famous figures get namechecked – “Psychedelic invocations / Of Mata Hari at the station”, “The hanging gardens of Babylon / Miles Davis, the black unicorn” – as well as historical figures like Akbar the Great and Gilgamesh.

The song is taken from the second album by Cave’s more experimental and noisier side project Grinderman, a bit of a throwback to The Birthday Party with its roots in blues and punk.

They made two albums in the second half of the 2000s, recorded with Cave – unusually – on electric guitar, Warren Ellis on violin and other string things, Martyn Casey on bass, and Jim Sclavunos on drums.