“Fucking London!” bellows Nick Cave with affectionate gusto, surveying the vast crowd who have come to pay homage in the city where he first made his name. “It seems like we’ve been on tour forever, but now we’re here.” Cave is a pretty good showman these days, so it’s possible he says this kind of thing wherever he plays. But there must be a part of him that thinks back to those famously confrontational Birthday Party shows at West Hampstead’s Moonlight Club almost 45 years ago and wonders exactly how he ended up headlining two nights at the O2.
It’s been a long and sometimes troubled journey, but Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds are defiantly an arena band now. 2024’s Wild God is the first album they’ve written specifically to fill venues of this magnitude, and an awesome opening one-two punch of “Frogs” and “Wild God” demonstrates how well they’ve judged the situation.
With a bank of four gospel singers offering an omnipotent wall of sound, Cave immediately assumes the mantle of a crazed TV evangelist, lyrics from the new songs flashing up on the big screen like subliminal messages imploring us to submit to the power of whatever religion this might be: “Bring your spirit down!”
It’s an undeniably stunning spectacle, though potentially for seasoned Bad Seeds watchers it lacks a little bite. For the first few numbers it could be anyone up there playing those songs, the band deliberately hanging back to allow Cave to seize the stage. But gradually their individual personalities begin to affect proceedings.
There’s the irrepressible Warren Ellis with a jaw-dropping violin solo on “O Children”, not to mention his haunting falsetto refrain on a devastating “Bright Horses”. Guitarist George Vjestica is a glowering presence stage-left, while Big Jim Sclavunos stands directly behind Cave, silhouetted by the gospel singers’ glittering robes, bashing away at his tubular bells like bones against a rock. And then there’s stand-in bassist Colin Greenwood, grinning nervously while Cave gleefully insults a fan in the front row for wearing a Radiohead T-shirt.
“Jubilee Street”, from the transitional 2013 album Push The Sky Away, is a great showcase for this band of Bad Seeds old and new. It retains a pleasingly raw and combustible edge, exploding into life on the all-consuming coda (“I’m transforming! I’m vibrating!”), when the stage glows orange as if it’s on fire.
How to successfully incorporate elements of the old, belligerent Nick Cave has clearly been a conundrum. There’s understandably no sign of former live staple “Stagger Lee”, its morally ambivalent tale of a psychotic rampage proving hard to square with the hard-won euphoria of a new song like “Joy”.
However, “Red Right Hand” survives and thrives in this new context. It’s always been a little bit cabaret, and here Cave amplifies those elements, turning its organ motif into a terrace chant to be sung by the “balcony people” all the way up in the second tier. “The Mercy Seat” is a harder sell, though “Papa Won’t Leave You, Henry” proves to be an invigorating encore stomp. Most impressively, the band somehow turn the carnage of “White Elephant” – key lyric: “I’ll shoot you in the fucking face” – into a wildly celebratory set-closer, with the gospel singers leaving their perch to jive with Cave at the lip of the stage.
Even amid the old fire and brimstone, his piano ballads always offered solace, and here they slot seamlessly into Cave’s new era of emotional availability. “I Need You”, from the grief-wracked Skeleton Key, is a moment of heart-stopping vulnerability in the midst of a grand spectacle. And finally, after an unfeasibly rousing rendition of “The Weeping Song”, Cave heartily thanks each individual Bad Seed before returning alone to the piano for his evergreen love song “Into Your Arms”.
With the big screen camera now trained intently on his face, it looks like Cave’s eyes are moistening along with ours. After all, these are songs in which to weep. But we won’t be weeping long – catharsis has been triumphantly achieved.
SETLIST
Frogs
Wild God
Song Of The Lake
O Children
Jubilee Street
From Her To Eternity
Long Dark Night
Cinnamon Horses
Tupelo
Conversion
Bright Horses
Joy
I Need You
Carnage
Final Rescue Attempt
Red Right Hand
The Mercy Seat
White Elephant
ENCORE
O Wow O Wow (How Wonderful She Is)
Papa Won’t Leave You, Henry
The Weeping Song
Into My Arms
Read much more about Nick Cave in the new issue of Uncut, on sale now – order your copy by clicking here
