Golden Oldies
NICK CAVE, ALEXANDRA PALACE
Despite the ongoing turmoil in my inky trade, a crack cadre of rock and pop critics still clings on to leaky hulls like barnacles until our various ships go down.
We've been cooling our heels for months in the annus horribilis of 2020. No live music. No concerts. No more trying to make out a tiny Mick Jagger on a huge screen. No more lusty, dusty, mass gatherings in the gloaming, wondering when to find the long and winding road to the stinking dyke of Portaloos.
What if our like will never hear live music again? No more Glasto, Latitude or Port Eliot? The thought makes me miss it all already – even that Freddie Mercury tribute act in the O2.
All I have to bring to the table, then – and it really is the best of a bad job, for the reasons I don't need to enumerate here – is Nick Cave's solo gig at Alexandra Palace – called Idiot Prayer – which wasn't a gig at all.
The set-up was simple. It was 21 songs, one after the other, in the hangar-like space, with a funereal and lanky Nick Cave accompanying himself on a Fazioli grand piano. No band. No light show. No girls in summer dresses. It was streamed by the excellent Dice app, and I shelled out £16 to watch it on my laptop.
It was strangely hypnotic and beautiful. ‘This is the last song,' I'd tell myself, as the sombre baritone rumbled away for hours. ‘Then I'll watch the Murdoch doc.' But, somehow, I didn't.
Cave occasionally shuffled a page of lyrics onto the artful pile on the floor, fanned around the Fazioli. I waited for him to sing Into My Arms, the elegy he wrote after the death of his son, and it was worth the wait. He held me.
Of course, I wanted my money's worth but, in any case, it repaid watching in full. The entire exercise bore out my theory that the mark of an artist's worth is to sustain a book, film, concert or album that has been months or years in the making for consumption in one sitting, without feeling the joins or seeing the working. For 90 minutes, I watched a man in black, alone, called Cave.
It was the very definition of 2020, and I hope never to see its like again. I would frankly prefer to die or move to somewhere sensible like Sweden than carry on like this. But, as a surviving colleague on the Independent, Fiona Sturges, judged stoutly, ‘If this is the gig of the future, Cave is the man to show us how it's done.'
Definitely music to slit your wrists to!