Cave grabs the souls of his ‘congregation’
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, TSB Bank Arena, Wellington, January 17.
If you’ve ever been to a revivalist, gospel-style gathering, Nick Cave live is a familiar sight.
There’s a jet-haired, suit-clad preacher, angular and frantic, storming up and down the stage calling the faithful to repent, or at least succumb, to the mesmeric timbre of his voice; preaching his brand of the archly miraculous set in endless deserts, peopled with drug-addled saints.
He opens with a song about the beginning of the end of the world, Anth roce ne, and rolls on from there through moral corruption, spiritual ecstasy and the wonderful, grotty, entirely Earthly sins of the flesh. Meanwhile, the faithful respond with rapture, all worldly thoughts drowned out by a raucous choir (aka, The Bad Seeds).
That was the scene in the TSB Arena on Tuesday night, less like a plain old concert and more like one of those giant, terrifying American barn churches: reverent, ecstatic, packed to the rafters and filled with the spirit.
Cave is on form too, grabbing the audience by the soul and not letting go for one of the longest sets I’ve ever experienced – about 20 songs, spanning his career from From Her To Eternity to Skeleton Tree.
His voice – so much better and affecting than any recording could have prepared me for – is disconcerting, shocking even.
It’s so deep and beguiling during the weirdly spiky opener, he makes even this cavernous venue feel intimate.
Then, it’s as if each song is a line he’s casting out, this fisher of men – sinking tiny hooks behind your solar plexus and just ... reeling you in.
If it sounds a little hysterical, that’s because it is: When he climbs down into the crowd it looks exactly like a laying on of hands. Exactly like it. Not even some unpleasantness with a crackling mic can mar the experience.
I feel like I’ve been reborn – from casual fan into LP thumping evangelist. Look for me on Lambton Quay, waving a copy of The Good Son asking anyone who’ll listen if they’ve accepted Nick Cave into their lives.
It was all there on Tuesday night, a retrospective of Cave’s obsessions: Religious imagery, angelic forces of nature that look exactly like the ghosts of girlfriends past, every single one of his sins confessed for the sake of his audience.
Jesus Alone, Tupelo, Jubilee Street, the riotous Higgs Boson Blues, which is so raucous it must land on the heads of the front row true believers like a tonne of brimstone.
Peppered among them are the hits, praise Jesus. The opening chords of From Her To Eternity sends the congregation into a frenzy.
(And it’s just as aggressively desperate, unhinged and demanding as the first time I heard it, buried in the middle of Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire. I mean, how does Cave do that when he must have played it ...100,000 times; when it’s been 30 years, and some of the worst experiences a man can have, since a girl not giving you the time of day was worth writing a song about? That’s legitimately miraculous that is.)
The Ship Song rolls in at about the mid-point to tone things down a little, since they’re getting out of hand.
There are just enough songs from his last album, Skeleton Tree, to avoid it being a nostalgia trip, but not so many that it leaves the devoted wanting. And if the new songs sit a little uncomfortably next to the classics, the feel of them so much less ‘‘Old Testament terrors’’ than gospel truth in tone poem form, they’re no less dark and brooding, nor comically ironic. Girl In Amber, elegiac and authentic, lands like a graveyard raven next to the fantasy barn-stomp of Red Right Hand and The Mercy Seat.
But it’s all righteous, all good. Better than good, even: It’s a revival. – Kylie Klein Nixon