Good seeds
MONUMENTAL is the only word to describe Nick Cave and Warren Ellis’s return to Nottingham.
For two hours they quietly – and occasionally, very loudly – confronted their audience by channelling pure emotion.
Cave’s recent music is older, wiser and sadder, and with good reason. Since the death of his 15-year-old son in 2015, the tragedy has been hovering in the background of all his work.
Acclaimed 2016 album Skeleton Tree was followed by arena gigs, which seemed at first quite wrong for its intimate music. But his astonishing 2017 performance with the mighty Bad Seeds at the Motorpoint Arena was one of the best gigs I’ve ever seen, its controlled ferocity seemingly an attempt to exorcise his grief.
In 2019 his Royal Concert Hall solo performance featured him fielding questions from the audience between the songs, His answers – to uberfans and grieving parents alike – were witty and wise.
This show was based around the music he’s released since then – from 2019’s Ghosteen, a Bad Seeds album on which all the band bar Warren Ellis are virtually invisible, and this year’s even more impressive Carnage, credited to just Cave and Ellis.
It wasn’t for the fainthearted – Ghosteen’s lyrics refer obliquely to his son’s death and its impact on himself and wife Susie Bick. The music was searingly emotional, disturbingly powerful, with Cave on piano, Ellis on synthesiser, violin and flute and Johnny Hostile on electronics, bass guitar and drums plus backing singers Wendi Rose, T Jae Cole and Janet Ramus.
This brooding, almost ambient, style probably wouldn’t have been to the taste of some long-standing fans, especially those brought up with Cave’s old Gothic fire – although, for sure, there were plentiful flashes of fury.
It started with Spinning Song, first of an opening trio of Ghosteen tunes, before the title track from Carnage really set things moving.
The 12-minute title track from Ghosteen is one of Cave’s best compositions. Played in full, it took on even deeper dimensions, shifting from its opening abstract, poetic words backed by Ellis’s almost symphonic synth, to a heart-rending conclusion with its mournful description of a mother still washing her dead son’s clothes.
It wasn’t all doom and gloom, mind. Earlier songs crept in – a beautiful, piano-led I Need You, T Rex’s Cosmic Dancer, with Ellis’s soaring violin complementing the melody, and the old Bad Seeds corker God Is In The House.
After that, an explosive Hand Of God started a final sequence of recent songs, all far outstripping the recorded versions. A reorganised Balcony Man, starting with Cave unaccompanied, ended the main set.
A long encore kicked off with the 14-minute Buddhist parable Hollywood and went on to include deep cut Darker With The Day, the classic Breathless and Grinderman’s Palaces Of Montezuma.
It still wasn’t enough. The crowd wouldn’t budge until they came back on with the elegiac Ghosteen Speaks. Cave called it “a prayer”. Perhaps the entire show had been.
Whatever it was, it was a magnificent first post-lockdown show for me, the first gig I’ve seen at the RCH since March last year.
And the Bad Seeds and Grinderman are apparently on their way back as well. See you all next time.