Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds at the O2

I went to see Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds at the O2 last night. These are my thoughts.

I was last at this venue four years ago to see Leonard Cohen. What a night that was. Cavernous and soulless it may initially appear, but I must say I’ve never been let down by a gig at the O2. For a venue that size, the sound and sightlines are great.

Cave shares a lot with Cohen as a songwriter, perhaps more than anyone else. Both are literary men who spent their career balancing and battling the sacred and profane, both capable of writing the most perfectly stately songs, songs you’d hear in a church, at a wedding, at a funeral. Cave is embedded in the Christian tradition, Cohen, right until the end, the Jewish tradition.

With due respect to Lenny, though, Cave is more of a rock god than one can imagine Cohen ever was even in his prime. Cave, just past his 60^th birthday, is still a shamanic rock’n’roll wild man. Amongst many, many other things.

He has written some of the greatest songs about faith that I have ever heard, but this gig was not about faith. Faith has gone. It was all together, in the most astonishingly moving way possible, about love.

I’ve not seen love expressed before so profoundly in the artifice of a rock’n’roll concert. Great tragedy hangs over Nick Cave, it is inescapable, and he does not want us to escape it. The accidental death of his son Arthur two years ago is present in every song, every move, every word. Love and grief, most explicitly in the songs from his latest album, Skeleton Tree. Love for his wife, again, with no attempt to hide it embellish it.

Love is all, faith has gone. Cave, for whom the world has already ended, is singing songs to prepare the rest of us for the end of the world. He remains an imposing, powerful figure, but he is not distant from us, the audience. He is communicating, engaging with us in a quite unexpected way. This in itself is strangely moving.

As a final point of comparison to Leonard Cohen, that gig in 2013 was comfortably one of the three finest I’ve ever been to. Sometimes I try to boringly anatomize what makes a great rock concert. One thought I’ve had is that there are an optimum number of an act’s songs you can love going into the night. When I saw Cohen, I loved about 25 of his songs, and he played about 20 of those. It was as if the gig was performed just for me. With Cave, I love about 50 of his songs, if not more, so there were always going to be reservoirs of personal favourites I wouldn’t hear. But this gig was about more than the song selection, more than hearing the hits.

As it happened, there was just one song from Murder Ballads, one from the Boatman’s Call, none from No More Shall We Part, Nocturama, Abbatoir Blues/Lyre of Orpheus which is basically my favourite stretch of Cave, but it mattered very little.

The set was dominated by the tracks from ‘Skeleton Tree’, as well as the album before it, ‘Push the Sky Away’. Cave and the Bad Seeds have boldly developed a whole new sound and a whole new lyrical style on those two recent albums. It is looser, more atmospheric, there are fewer of those perfect hymns, also fewer of those classic rock’n’roll peaks and troughs.

The Bad Seeds are an magnificant band – this bunch of louche and dangerous 50-something extras from ‘Boardwalk Empire’, led by Cave’s closest collaborator, the wildest man on the planet, Warren Ellis – his violin is one of the great instrumental sounds (and looks) in all popular music. He harnesses the wind, both with Cave and with his own band, the Dirty Three. The Bad Seeds create the kind of controlled maelstrom I’ve very rarely heard elsewhere, perhaps in the recordings of Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue, perhaps from Wilco in their prime, though Wilco’s storm is more electrical. And at the centre of it all, Nick Cave himself, belying his 60 years, wearing the same black suit and white open-necked shirt as always, mesmerizing with his unique s-shaped exhortations. First, he sings to the front rows, then sometimes to his wife, then sometimes to all of us, then sometimes to somewhere else in his own head.

When ‘Push the Sky Away’ came out in 2013, I wasn’t immediately sold on it, but ‘Higgs Boson Blues’ from that album is an early highlight. Also early in the set are a couple of the more apocalyptic (but, for me, less heartrending) songs from ‘Skeleton Tree’, as well as two fearsome older favourites, ‘Tupelo’ and ‘From Her to Eternity’.

After half an hour, I was digging it but I was still very much in my skin. This was a commanding and witty Cave, but he was not yet shattering the earths and the heavens. The thought came into my head “At a Nick Cave gig, whatever the onslaught of raucous noise at that time, you’re only ever one song away from ‘Into My Arms’”. Well, turns out, at that point, we were two songs away from ‘Into My Arms’.

The gig took off. A heavy, stunning sequence of events. First of all, ‘Jubilee Street’, building, building, the closing lyrics “I am transforming, I am vibrating, I am glowing, I am flying, Look at me now” and suddenly the audience too was possessed, enraptured. He left the stage briefly and came back to the piano to play ‘Ship Song’, and, gee whizz, suddenly I was close to tears. This is not a common occurrence for me, not in any context, certainly not at a gig. Perhaps it was the memory of the song’s glorious and incongruous appearance on ‘Home and Away’ in the mid-90s … or perhaps not.

This was the first appearance of one of Cave’s “hymns”, hewn from the rock of music (the Stone of Song?). And then, wouldn’t you know it, ‘Into My Arms’. And he asked us to sing along! Nick Cave asked me to sing, how can I turn him down? And as the song takes its timeless, stately course, I’m actually crying. At the end, he stops singing and us brave souls sing the chorus unaccompanied one last time. I’ve sung the song before, I’ve sung it as a lullaby in the last year. Any song one’s every sung as lullaby, I imagine, has a particular personal poignancy (apart from There were 10 in the Bed, which has yet to stir such strong emotion in me …).

At that point, surely he could take us no further, but then came ‘Girl in Amber’, the song from ‘Skeleton Tree’ which above all, made me catch my breath in shock when I first heard it. These songs, on record but even more so now, are dealing with rarefied emotion almost never heard before in popular song – I really mean that. I may talk things up a lot, and I’ve listened to a lot of supposed heartbreak albums, even grief albums, but I’ve heard almost nothing as raw yet articulate as the songs on ‘Skeleton Tree’. It was painful to be part of this. I had worried about going to this concert, just because of this, this intrusion on private grief. But this is what he’s wanted. The album, the accompanying film, the gigs, this is how Nick Cave, the craftsman, the meticulous office worker/reformed rock demon, is doing this.

Phew. ‘Red Right Hand’ - you know the one from Peaky Blinders - came almost as a relief, a release of some of the intensity. Then ‘The Mercy Seat’. This, light years better than his recorded version, better than the Johnny Cash version, worth the price of the admission alone.

But these songs of crime and punishment, of villains and murder, they weren’t the end of it.

‘Distant Sky’ and ‘Skeleton Tree’ are the two last songs of his latest album – ‘Distant Sky’ with its devastating line “They told us our gods would outlive us, They told us our dreams would outlive us, They told us our gods would outlive us, But they lied”. Well, isn’t that all of it right there …

And, a few minutes later, as he tore through an indescribable ‘Stagger Lee’ during the encore, the most gloriously obscene song you’ll ever hear, surrounded by audience members on stage (one of whom, a gym bunny jesus, was trying rather too hard to take a bit of limelight), after a few elegant stage dives, it struck me as he sung its last line. “Those were the last words that the Devil said, cause Stag put four holes in his motherfucking head”, that in a very different way, both the line from ‘Distant Line’ and the line from ‘Stagger Lee’ were saying exactly the same thing.

He seemed a little short of composure at the end, said “thank you” more than we deserved, found Bobby Gillespie in the front row (pretty certain by chance) to sing a line of Push the Sky Away with him, which briefly reduced him to just another rock’n’roll survivor bumping into an old buddy.

This may be the largest headline gig Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds have ever done. I have rarely seen any band better suited to playing to this many people, though, and losing nothing of their power in the process.