Tension, despair, doom, lunacy and death – not new concepts to the oeuvre of Nick Cave and violinist Warren Ellis. These moods run rich through the Australian musicians’ monumental catalogue of work, whether together in the Bad Seeds or in Ellis’s elemental The Dirty Three.
But Friday night’s world premiere of selections from their 15 years of collaborative film scores, part of the Melbourne International Film festival and backed by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, proved a fresh angle – how when masterfully conjuring humanity’s grim interior, you can also have a bit of a laugh.
This is heavy music. Not the thundering clang recognisable in their bands at full tilt, but a solemnity that inks across barren landscapes, built from low drones, Cave’s skeletal piano, and the uneasy whump of an orchestra stirring under the tug of Ellis’s raw bow. So light relief is the privilege of watching two friends – local country boys from Warracknabeal and Ballarat respectively – returning home to muck around with an orchestra for a bit.
Sauntering on stage in their customary mafioso-by-the-pool finery – black suits, gold rings, starched collars – the pair spent much of the night pointing and grinning at each other. Perhaps this was partly at having to cede alpha male status to conductor Benjamin Northey, who ran the operation at centre stage. With the grey-haired Ellis planted on the hip of the string section, Cave flitted between grand piano and a mic at lip of the stage – just enough room to arch, mince and make finger pistols.
This came in especially handy for the night’s first suite from The Proposition, John Hillcoat’s violent 2005 Australian-Western. Hinging on the score’s The Rider #1-#3, Cave breathlessly opened with an existential Q&A: “When?’ said the moon to the stars in the sky, ‘Soon’ said the wind that followed them all,” as footage of blazing red sand and outback chaos saturated three screens above the orchestra.
The set was broken into six sections, each flagged with a title card and snippets from the corresponding movie – an effective signposting of the subtle tonal shifts in the pair’s signature violin and piano framework. The strut and country strings of The Proposition gave way to the sombre beauty of 2013’s West of Memphis. Led by Ellis and Northey, the melancholic Eyewitness came soothed by the former’s unmistakeable boxy rake; the Elizabethan-like lilt of West Memphis 3, featuring Cave on piano, its graceful lyrical counterpoint.
Dissonant squalls announced The Road, John Hillcoat’s fearsome 2009 adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s bleak dystopian 2006 novel. As scenes of a haggard Viggo Mortensen prodding his son through an apocalyptic landscape grew more desperate, the nostalgic title track was shunted aside for the clattering The House, Cave hopping up to gleefully huff and puff into the mic and amplify the suddenly menacing orchestra’s distended lope. Their work lends itself well to these moments – spare beauty and shuddering horror bookending all the demons of man (and the protagonists on the night were all men).
Airier passages from Hell or High Water, the 2016 US neo-Western, introduce more propulsion, with menacing bass and gloomy “oohs” of a now rising choir on From My Dead Hands suggesting the discovery of further wells of doom here in the recesses of Hamer Hall. Cave departs and returns with operatic soprano Antoinette Halloran on wordless trills to mark the segue into 2017’s Wind River. It’s the least effective collection of the night, thematically bound by a persistent pulse that nails tension, but never entirely distracts from the slight labour of watching Jeremy Renner race over snow-covered Wyoming on a Ski-Doo.
There’s no footage shown from the final film, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. I don’t know if that’s a shame or stroke of luck – it’s the most stirring of the night. Featuring some of their strongest motifs in Rather Lovely Thing, the pizzicato thrum of Moving On – which has Cave and Ellis trading smirks and theatrical spins in call and response – and colossal closer Song for Bob, the set erupts in a thundering swoon. Cue goosebumps.
For an encore we get a snippet of Cave’s own Push the Sky Away, audience participation included. But the takeaway is clear – even without footage to hang it on, their music alone is powerful enough for us to project on it our own celestial wastelands. The privilege of watching them create it at least means for a moment we’re not so alone.
