Tag: nick cave and the bad seeds

Tuesday 5th November 2024

Manchester Arena, Manchester, England

“Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus. Outside the Church there is no salvation.”

Catholic doctrine, from the writings of saint cyprian

“Cave stalks the stage… While he evokes a tent preacher, he is also sexual, gothic, and his message, unlike an Old Testament preacher, damns no one.”

Darcey Steinke, in ‘Stranger Than Kindness’, 2020

In the concert reviews I have written over the last couple of years, mostly covering the exciting emergence of quality in the country and roots scene, I have occasionally made reference to a line by Walter Pater that all art aspires to the condition of music. This I have cited as my caveat that writing about music often ends up destroying the magic in it, turning the experience of sung gold into mute and lumpen lead.

Nevertheless, I have persisted in writing reviews for all of the concerts I have attended since. There are many reasons for this, but one reason I have always found valuable is that the writing allows me to explore something I have not yet worked out, some truth or quality that I experienced in the performance which I can only identify when reviewing afterwards.

So what to do, then, when the music you have heard live is so potent, the performance itself so perfect an expression, or representation, of those intangible truths, that a written record is both necessary but also doomed to failure? Tonight brings forth a condition of music that all other art not only aspires to but cannot hope to reproduce. Powerful and yet tender, strutting and yet fragile, profane and profound, epic and cinematic, intimate and full of energy, possessing of both joy and pain, and succeeding in creating an experience that is impossible for this review to give even a bare facsimile of. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds provide a musical epiphany on the Manchester stage tonight. At times it feels like glory in its purest form.

No doubt this will seem like hyperbole to some, but there is something in great music that stirs us on a deeper level, and I have never heard it brought forth as vividly as it has been tonight. After the engrossing experimental soundscape provided by the opening act Black Country, New Road (lead vocalist Georgia Ellery and bassist Tyler Hyde look iconic on the large black-and-white screens of the Arena), the audience is well-primed for the main act of transcendence which is to follow.

When they do take the stage to roars and applause, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds do not so much blossom as burst into flower, as immediate and exuberant as if it were the First Day of Creation. I confess now, with some shame, that the new Wild God album didn’t completely win me over when I first listened to it on release day, but in a live setting its songs are beyond intoxicating. The first three songs tonight – ‘Frogs’, ‘Wild God’ and ‘Song of the Lake’ – are all from that record and (as Nick Cave is on record as suggesting) they are indescribably epic live. A large screen behind the band flashes up with occasional lyrics, emphatic punctuation to the grandest moments. “Bring your spirit down!” it flashes during ‘Wild God’, with Nick pumping his fist. The audience is already captured by the exhilarating sensory wave. They stun animals for the slaughter with less force than Cave and the band have come out with tonight.

The Bad Seeds seem to be brimming with energy. They have been rampaging across Britain and Europe since September and will land on American shores in April next year. Our cup runneth over; alongside the usual figures of bassist and guitarist and keyboardist there are two percussionists (Larry Mullins looks to be having the time of his life) and four gospel singers in shining robes. There is also the long-bearded Warren Ellis, wild and free, the epitome of a crazy genius. Tonight he will be leaping and reclining and playing a thrilling distorted violin sound like a Hendrix of the homeless classes.

And at the front, rushing throughout the night from the piano to the catwalk, reaching out into the crowd to grasp at hands that reach out like Joshua trees, is Cave himself. He is in complete command of the legion of men and women in the arena tonight. He is vulnerable and seeking and compelling in his art, but also matchlessly confident. At one point in the night he leans into the audience, propped up by the hands, and gives his microphone to one outstretched hand, secure in the knowledge that when he is finished with his gestures the mike will still be there to seize. He dances and yells, sings and whispers, stalks and struts and sinks to his knees. So complete is his connection with the crowd that it reminds us that this Renaissance man – composer, author, poet, artist, screenwriter, compassionate conductor of the Red Hand Files – is first and foremost a rock star, in the finest meaning of the word. He is an icon and a conduit.

Could anything be gained if I were to write a blow-by-blow account of the night, as I have for other concerts? Others have done so, and done so well, but for me in recollection of the night, every moment seems to press upon one another. Time seems to collapse in on itself like a glorious star. There is the rollicking rhythm of songs like ‘From Her to Eternity’ and the doom-laden ‘Tupelo’, which seems to almost summon up a thunderstorm beneath the dome of the arena. There is the resonance of the lyrics (“a ten tonne catastrophe on a sixty-pound chain” rolls off Nick’s tongue emphatically on ‘Jubilee Street’) and the warm humour with which Nick addresses the audience between songs.

There is the emotional, hard-won lament of ‘O Children’, about Cave’s realisation that “we cannot protect our children” from the world, a message that is poignant not only for the well-known tragedies his family suffered in the years after penning those lyrics, but because it is sung here, in the Manchester Arena, a place where children were once murdered by a man who saw himself in service of a far wilder god. “Lift up your voice,” the gospel choir sing, and it is as though the song recognises that horror will always come and that to acknowledge this is enough. (“There’s either a remedy or there is none, and if there is none, never mind”, Nick sang in ‘Song of the Lake’). Wisdom comes when you realise that armour does not work, after a lifetime spent forging it. Only then can you make peace with things, recognising that wounds will come but trusting in your ability to heal.

There is also the tenderness of ‘Long Dark Night’ and ‘Carnage’, and the unnerving malevolence of ‘White Elephant’, sounding as stark and real as the earlier vibrant chants of “You’re beautiful!” from ‘Conversion’, a refrain which is repeated by Cave at the end of the show. There are the high, pure vocals of Warren Ellis, like a castrato with balls, on ‘Bright Horses’, and the basking in the familiarity of old favourites ‘The Mercy Seat’, ‘Papa Won’t Leave You, Henry’ and ‘The Weeping Song’, the latter two in the night’s impressive encore.

There is the distinctive chiming of ‘Red Right Hand’, a gloriously dark crowd-pleaser, into which Cave inserts one of his many implorations for fans to get off their phones (“he’s in your stupid little screen”, he sings, gesturing to one concert-goer). These calls to live in the moment, not through the screen, are all delivered charmingly from the stage, and for my part I only take enough photos to colour my review. Cave’s flattering yet insistent, good-cop, bad-cop approach seems to me better than Bob Dylan’s approach in Liverpool a couple of nights earlier, when phones were required to be locked away in pouches. Cave persuades the majority of us; his show is so astonishing that to seek to capture the night seems like sacrilege.

The night also manages to hold the vulnerability of ‘I Need You’, played solo by Nick Cave at the piano. The song seems to age this energetic figure in the blink of an eye; its prescient, pleading lyrics of “Just breathe” as raw as they must have been when recorded amidst the family tragedy of Skeleton Tree, “that night we wrecked like a train”.

But above all there is, remarkably, the passion and revelation of the new songs from the Wild God album; the ferociously loving and transcendent music of ‘Cinnamon Horses’, ‘Final Rescue Attempt’ (“oh, the rain, oh, the rain”) and the appropriately-named ‘Joy’. If you delve into the religious and spiritual writings of which Nick Cave is himself deeply invested, you may come across the terror of angels; the idea that the full love of God is impossible to bear, that real joy is a flame impossible to behold. All art aspires to the condition of music because music is the one that brings us closest to beholding this eternal joy; it touches us more simply and profoundly and overwhelmingly than anything else can.

It is this which Nick Cave has managed to harness, delivered most assuredly through his newer songs but also embracing his older catalogue, with well-known songs that are decades old, written with other motives, brought into the host and shown to belong to this eternal quest for joy and release that underpins all artistic expression. In my review of Faith, Hope and Carnage, Nick Cave’s latest book, I wrote that in his art Cave is not so much stumbling around in the dark as stumbling around in the overwhelming light, and that light is on full show tonight.

It is an intensity felt by everyone; by those of us in the crowd and by those on stage and by Cave himself. The final song of the encore sees Nick Cave alone at the piano under a solitary spotlight, singing ‘Into My Arms’ from The Boatman’s Call. Our dark pilot through hidden waters gestures towards the audience, trusting us to finish off his song. The final verse is sung touchingly by the crowd, converted now into the church invisible. Accompanied by Nick on the piano, the final note is a perfect rest, proving that, contrary to Catholic doctrine, extra Ecclesiam omnis salus – outside the Church, there is every salvation. Even, perhaps, for those who remain on their phones.

That salvation is to be found in art that seeks. It is to be found in music like tonight’s, music of the purest expression.

Setlist:

(all songs from the album Wild God and written by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, unless noted)

1. Frogs
2. Wild God
3. Song of the Lake
4. O Children (Cave) (from Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus)
5. Jubilee Street (from Push the Sky Away)
6. From Her to Eternity (Cave/Anita Lane/Blixa Bargeld/Hugo Race/Barry Adamson/Mick Harvey) (from From Her to Eternity)
7. Long Dark Night
8. Cinnamon Horses
9. Tupelo (Cave/Adamson/Harvey) (from The Firstborn is Dead)
10. Conversion
11. Bright Horses (from Ghosteen)
12. Joy
13. I Need You (from Skeleton Tree)
14. Carnage (from Carnage)
15. Final Rescue Attempt
16. Red Right Hand (Cave/Harvey/Thomas Wydler) (from Let Love In)
17. The Mercy Seat (Cave/Harvey) (from Tender Prey)
18. White Elephant (from Carnage)
19. Encore: Papa Won’t Leave You, Henry (Cave) (from Henry’s Dream)
20. Encore: The Weeping Song (Cave) (from The Good Son)
21. Encore: Into My Arms (Cave) (from The Boatman’s Call)

My other concert reviews can be found here.

My review of Faith, Hope and Carnage, cited in the review above, can be found here.