This diary finds me nearly a third of the way through a two-month tour of Europe, playing bass guitar for Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Last year I’d recorded some parts on their new album, the ferociously euphoric Wild God, and have stepped in temporarily while their bassist, Martyn Casey, who has been ill, gets better at home in Australia. We have driven through, stopped, and played arenas in Oberhausen, Berlin, Oslo, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Hamburg; now we’re heading to eastern Europe towards Łódź and Kraków. Tonight we’re playing in Budapest. Most of the shows are sold out, averaging around 13,000 very excited fans of all ages.
I’ve been doing this for years with Radiohead, and have just made a book of photographs documenting similar experiences on the road across America and Europe. I’m still struck by the sheer size and scale of the enterprise, of what it takes to put such a big show on the road. Arriving backstage at these enormodomes, you’re faced by a phalanx of shiny black and silver articulated lorries, ferrying tonnes of black boxes that throw out all that weightless sound and light into an arena stacked up to the gods with people who speak and dream in other languages, cultures and lives. But for me, it’s become a home, the stage a safe place to stand just above Nick at the piano, keeping time with his keyboard and drummer Larry Mullins’ windmilling arms as he rolls between his solid steel drum kit and a pair of timpani for those moments of orchestral longing in the songs. I’d recently got back together with Radiohead for a couple of days’ rehearsals in London, to check in with everyone, and playing with the Bad Seeds has that same feeling: the reconvening of a fellowship, old friends who treat each other with courtesy and humour.
In with the smart set
Perhaps the biggest difference between touring with Radiohead and Nick Cave is the sartorial formality of the Bad Seeds. Every evening in our dressing room, we are presented with a rack of steamed and pressed suits, and starched and ironed shirts. I think if my mother was alive, she would finally approve of me, playing for the Bad Seeds, looking smart in a navy suit and black brogues after years of double denim in Radiohead.
Elevated behind the Bad Seeds on stage, the singers Mica, Wendy, Janet and T Jae shimmer and sway in silver sequinned stage clothes designed by Nick’s wife, Susie. And I’m just stunned every night by Nick’s raging intensity on stage, how he can draw thousands of people into a kind of communion and make these impersonal arenas feel intimate and small.
The automotive life
Other striking changes include how the follow spotlights track band members. In the Nineties, riggers scrambled up into the scaffolding and sat in tiny bucket seats to direct the beams. Now they are all remotely controlled backstage by techs sitting on Peloton-style bikes, steering the lights by handles with crosshairs on a screen, a spinning club for men clad in black.
There are at least half a dozen tour buses too, with bunks and lounges and TVs and kitchens, soft plastics and soft, neon lighting. The crew drive overnight and sleep on their buses, and we stay in hotels and use ours for long drives the morning after the show. There are about ten souls on our bus, and for privacy I retreat into my bunk, top-left at the back, and watch the forests and farm-studded hills of eastern Europe flicker past from a small iPad-shaped window that’s cut into the side of my bunk. It’s like travelling business class, but at 75mph and 12 feet above ground. In each leg of the journey there are usually two breaks for the drivers. During these stops we spill out of the side door (with a silver mirror in the shape of a guitar to check our appearances) and marvel at the strange sameness of the Slovakian service stations, truckers and families staring back at us in our track suits, mirror shades and baseball caps.
Europe united
This tour has been a chance to see some old friends. In Berlin, I met up with Sebastian Szary from the electronic duo Modeselektor. He had done a show in Kyiv last year, and described the protracted logistics of it to me: the only way to get in was to travel for 11 hours overland from Poland. At the time, it was Ukraine’s biggest concert since the war started, and the authorities calculated the audience of over a thousand based on the bomb shelters available to take in the crowd if needed. Szary said that the show felt as if it could have been in Berlin, apart from the free entry for servicepeople, and the strict 11pm curfew to cover the citywide lockdown at midnight. I would love to go and play there. I hope one day that we can be in the EU with Ukraine too.
“How to Disappear: A Portrait of Radiohead” by Colin Greenwood is published by John Murray. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ UK tour begins on 2 November
[See also: PJ Harvey’s songs of England]
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This article appears in the 16 Oct 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Make or Break