The first time I saw Nick Cave in concert was in my first week at Leeds University, at the campus refectory. My father had bought me two tickets, but I couldn’t persuade a single one of my nonplussed fellow freshers to join me. Fourteen years later, it is hard to imagine that anyone doesn’t know the name Nick Cave. Now in his mid-sixties, Cave is as prolific, mesmeric and original as he was when the Bad Seeds formed in the Eighties. Over the decades, their music has progressed from gnarly, gothic rock to something more generous and reflective, intensified in recent years by the deaths of two of Cave’s sons. The darkness remains but it is suffused by joy, a happiness only possible because of intimacy with pain.
At this sublime, two-and-a-half-hour show – the first of the UK leg of the Wild God tour – Cave spanned the full breadth of his back catalogue: snarling and raging through “From Her to Eternity” (1982) and “Jubilee Street” (2013), then sitting down at the piano to lead his audience to tears with the ballad “Into My Arms” and his current single, “Joy”. Introducing “O Children” (“We’re all weeping now, weeping because/There ain’t nothing we can do to protect you”), he lamented that the song hasn’t become redundant in the 20 years since he wrote it. Here was an artist in total control, conducting his audience’s inner worlds with an enigmatic flick of a wrist. He was joined on stage by the Bad Seeds – in Cave’s words, “extraordinary, ageing gentlemen” – including long-time collaborator Warren Ellis (playing electric violin while standing on a chair, the only person with enough magnetism to draw eyes from Cave) and bassist Colin Greenwood, on loan from Radiohead, plus four gospel-eqsue backing singers.
Throughout, Cave paced the front of the stage, reaching down to clasp the hands of fans who clutched at the air as his feet, like the bleeding woman hoping for healing at the touch of Jesus’s cloak. It has become a cliché to describe Cave’s work as “transcendental”, but wading through plastic cups as the lights went up, it was hard not to feel a little closer to God.
[See also: How Kraftwerk’s Autobahn remade pop]
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This article appears in the 07 Nov 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Trump takes America