With last year’s Wild God, Nick Cave continued his remarkable run over the past decade of highly praised Top 10 hit records. Alongside the soundtrack work and other endeavours, as well as his public grace in deep grief, it’s a streak that has smoothed out and consolidated the older Cave’s reputation, positioning him as a vaulted mainstream-adjacent icon. Cave is now in what you might call his ‘establishment figure era’. A Cave who shows up at Royal events. In the early 1990s, it would’ve been plain impossible to imagine him ‘beloved’ like this, but here we are and, despite some pronouncements and opinions that make me very uncomfortable, he wears it well.
This subsequent Wild God tour, vividly captured here from Paris, has been a sprawling, multi-year affair – and it’s ongoing. Next summer, among the big European outdoor shows, they’ll even bring it to my back garden, Preston Park, in Cave’s (both of our) long-adopted home town of Brighton. If I don’t go, I’ll still hear his declamatory echoes from my house.
Because of all that, this show is big and dominant and rollicking. This iteration of the Bad Seeds is a seven-piece band, with Radiohead’s Colin Greenwood onboard, as well as Warren Ellis firmly in place as lead foil on guitar, and the crucial addition of four backing singers.
Of course, Wild God songs dominate proceedings. We kick off with ‘Frogs’ and the title track, with the album providing eight of eighteen tracks in total. Dotted through them are a handful of classics and one song each from two previous ‘establishment era Cave’ albums, Ghosteen (‘Bright Horses’) and Skeleton Tree (‘I Need You’).
The bombast side of things is immensely powerful from the off. It’s the glue. Indeed, more than any other aspect of this live music, it is the choir – a triumphant icing of richly layered, though regularly in unison, often enormous, high quality backing vocals – that lends this concert both its sepulchral juggernaut energy and its sheer ‘open space’ rolling vastness. Like Merry Clayton did with the Rolling Stones that one time, there is a sound underpinning everything here that’s not quite truly ‘of the band’ – though that’s not to say it doesn’t fit, or sticks out in the wrong way. The ‘Gimme Shelter’ reference comes to mind quite early on, when they sing the chorus line from ‘O Children’, album closer of 2004’s Abattoir Blues companion piece The Lyre of Orpheus.Back in those old days, when the Bad Seeds themselves sang backing, it was squonkier and less focused. More male, too. Now, these potent singers go a long way towards universalising Cave’s sound.
Spikier than the opening three songs, at this scale ’From Her To Eternity’ has a sense of mechanical, apocalyptic music theatre about it. The preacher’s declaimed versification. The piano pinpointing the riff. This stuff will recur throughout.
Comparing the sheer weighty perfection of the choral singing to the general looseness (some occasionally iffy fiddle playing, for example, on ‘Long Dark Night’) offers a clue to how this show as a whole works so powerfully. The shadow-world grimy grind of the earlier Bad Seeds is still very much present, sitting within its more professionalised modern facade. Well, more than a facade, but you see what I’m getting at: early single ‘Tupelo’ is a good example, where the simple relentless chug of the backing track remains loose, human, yet the voices pile in with the drums, supplying the lion’s share of dynamic shift, lifting everything to that new dimension. This band is a crumbling old market place that’s been gentrified with a shiny new frontispiece and a major paint job, yet the shops are the same, as are the punters. That’s not a criticism. They’re still here.
For me, the quietest moments work least well. Cave’s overwrought melodrama requires the back alley impoverished, addicted, outsider energy of his earlier eras, rather than this comfortable, even imperious, audience conducting showman. ‘Conversion’ gives me the ick at the start, but minutes later in the same song, when everything kicks off, a hurricane around him, and he goes full pelt, it is wholly transcendent. The carrying on of call-and-response after the song ends is powerful rather than cringe. But then, ‘Bright Horses’ – and suddenly he’s the narrator of an off-West-End show that I’d run hard away from.
A beautiful odd exception is ‘O Wow O Wow’, written and introduced for Melbourne songwriter, some time Bad Seeds member Anita Lane (“do you know who she is?”) who died in 2021. This one sidesteps my issue with fromage via wobbliness and quirky sounds, an extended gentle groove (feels like a backing loop) and a lengthy sample of Lane herself chatting to close. He gives her her voice. It’s great.
Another exception is ‘Into My Arms’, perhaps Cave’s most universally praised moment. It’s performed on solo piano, yet still heralded as a singalong with an “alright, Paris…” into the first chorus. Even with the artifice of encouragement, it’s affecting and effective.
I wonder if perhaps – nowadays – sexy, romantic Cave, while capable of yuck, is pure believable in a way that – nowadays – violent, threatening Cave is not quite so much. He’s working on too grand a scale, with too orchestrated a process, too much support. It risks falling into cartoon territory. ‘Papa Won’t Leave You Henry’, one of the big favourites, typifies this: again the chorus and bluster and chanting of the choir all work hard to tidy up and bring focus to the whole, after the melodramatic verses flirt with silliness.
So here’s a sum of it: the big stuff is phenomenal, with rare anthemic heft and non-lyrical melodic chanting shared with the audience, gathering everyone up in its power. This is an unchecked rolling freight train of humane music from an older time. Meanwhile, one only needs to be a touch more credulous (forgiving? familiar?) than me to allow those quieter moments to feel intimate and moving, instead of resisting, my pushing away to arm’s length, for them to operate perfectly as in-betweens and intakes of breath, a concert’s natural ebb and flow, with their own deep emotional value. I’d be churlish to deny it.
After the heady sensual victory of ‘Into My Arms’, the closing track seems to acknowledge the backing singers’ outsized contribution: a short, piano-accompanied ‘As The Waters Cover The Sea’ handing everything over to their voices.
