“We’re very happy,” announces Nick Cave as the Bad Seeds arrive on stage. You think he’s going to say something standard about being back in London, but no. “Because it’s our last gig for fucking months,” he says. It’s also the first time Cave has performed in the UK with his most celebrated backing band in more than four years. Coronavirus is partly to blame, although Covid did nothing to stem Cave’s famously torrential work rate.
In the interim, he has produced two albums, two books and a handful of singles. There was a film soundtrack and a libretto for an opera. He toured the world with a solo show which interspersed songs with questions from the audience that ranged from his thoughts on the existence of God to more prosaic matters. “I live in your old flat in Hove – do you know where the stopcock is?” asked one punter in his adopted hometown of Brighton. There was also a striking lockdown livestream from Alexandra Palace, and gigs with Warren Ellis that centred around last year’s collaborative Carnage and its extraordinary predecessor Ghosteen.
Those albums saw Cave continue a process of unravelling his sound into something more abstract: he began picking at its threads on 2013’s Push the Sky Away and the subsequent Skeleton Tree, but here they arrived at a largely beat-less drift, songs that moved – as one track on Carnage put it – “like a raincloud that keeps circling overhead”. They could be impossibly beautiful, they could be strafed with dive-bombing noise, but they never sounded much like the Bad Seeds of old.
It’s a surprise how neatly they slot among the more straightforwardly muscular songs from Cave’s back catalogue, which are rendered weightier than ever by the addition of a trio of backing vocalists whose contributions include underlining the T-Rex-y qualities of Get Ready for Love, and providing a startling visual accompaniment during From Her to Eternity. As Cave prowls the front of the stage, screaming and snarling about sexual obsession – “the desire to possess her is a wound!” – they sway gently, performing synchronised dance moves in sequinned outfits. But fit they do.
There’s a certain bravery about playing Ghosteen’s Bright Horses in the middle of a headlining festival set – it abandons any standard verse-chorus structure amid a wash of floating electronics and high, keening backing vocals courtesy of Ellis – but it’s a song with such emotional heft that it feels entirely of a piece with The Mercy Seat, or an extended Tupelo that broods even more forcefully than the recorded version, or an amended take on Red Right Hand that suggests the titular villain’s dark skills include dealing with a fan in the front row’s choice of clothing: “You hate that shitty Wilco T-shirt you’re wearing, brother? He’ll get you a new one.”
Then again, on stage, Cave is a master of contrasts. His performances are compellingly intense, involving much plunging into the audience, grabbing their hands and singing lyrics directly into their faces. Between songs, he’s reliably hilarious: “What are you doing woman?” he demands of a particularly ardent female fan. “This is sexual harassment in the workplace!” His ability to go straight from something as potent and wrenching as his delivery of Skeleton Tree’s piano ballad I Need You to playing his performance for laughs is a hugely impressive skill: for an artist who’s talked about being beset by stage fright and insecurity, Cave does an extraordinarily good impression of being completely assured and at ease.
His band, meanwhile, are equally accomplished at juxtaposition: they can sound stately and majestic, or conjure up broiling masses of noise, often within the space of the same song. A lot of the broiling masses of noise are conjured up by Ellis, who has devised a way of creating a racket that sounds like the end of the world by frantically waving his violin in the air. He cuts almost as compelling a figure on stage as Cave, reflected in the fact that the audience start chanting his name.
It ends with an encore that pairs Into My Arms and The Weeping Song with the fragile, haunted Ghosteen Speaks. It’s a powerful ending to a show that highlights the remarkable position that Cave has carved out for himself over recent years. Forty-something years into his career, he could easily be coasting on his reputation and back catalogue: instead he keeps pushing forward, with startling results.
