Two tragedies loomed large in the conscience of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’s show at the Manchester Arena on a crisp night at the end of September. Firstly, the abhorrent terrorist attack earlier in the year at an Ariana Grande concert which killed twenty-three people. The place and time was not random. The attack was on culture, enjoyment, childhood. Secondly, a more personal tragedy, the death of Nick Cave’s son, Arthur. Everyone there, in the face of sadness, braved tragedy by coming to the arena.
Despite the cavernous, vertigo-inducing arena (twenty-one thousand capacity), Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds made it feel almost intimate. They delivered two hours of beautiful, awe-inspiring rock and roll. Music has always been cathartic/catharsis but when tragedy strikes and people are bitten to the quick by the things mentioned, it can help come to terms with it. This is why, perhaps, something that struck me was the relative light-heartedness of the set (bar the music, of course). When they walked onstage to resounding applause and before they’d played a note, someone shouted ‘I fucking love you’, Nick laughed and said ‘glad we got that out of the way’. He’s not too much of an artiste to interact with his audience, or give a punter a sock for instance (that genuinely happened). He wasn’t pretentious, there was no air of ‘I’m here and you should all be grateful’. It was a reciprocal night. Cave even said at one point what a privilege it was to be playing Manchester. This tour has seen Cave interacting with his audience far more, it’s less confrontational than in the past, less cold. Cave held hands with audience members and for the last two songs invited about fifty people onstage to just dance, or sit, or whatever. Having said that, this did obscure my view of Warren so it wasn’t all great. Hippie.
Nick Cave’s voice has mellowed and aged like a fine cliché, and now is sounding the best he’s ever sounded. He can go from strident desert-blues preacher on ‘Stagger Lee’ and ‘Tupelo’ to wistful balladry on a version of ‘Into My Arms’ that hushed twenty thousand people into silence, to a half-broken, half-defiant moan on ‘I Need You’ that rises in a beautiful plangent. At the end of this track, he turned away from the audience and wiped his face with his hands, seemingly in grief. This could have been performance or genuine or a little of both, but nothing detracts from the sadness and poignancy of this song.
You can’t mention Nick Cave without mentioning the Bad Seeds. They were all sublime, from Martyn Casey’s stony-faced, juddering, perfectly delivered basslines, to Thomas Wydler’s drumming which looked more like tai chi, to Jim Sclavunos who delivers the sucker punch of that ringing graveyard knell during a ridiculously good rendition of ‘Red Right Hand’. As I said, you can’t mention Nick Cave without mentioning the Bad Seeds, but you certainly can’t mention the Bad Seeds without mentioning one Warren Bloody Ellis. Ellis scraped and plucked and hammered and clattered his way through the set, creating wondrous sound after wondrous sound. Cave asked/stated at one point before a song, ‘God isn’t Warren gorgeous?’ – he certainly, certainly is. The albums that Warren Ellis was a driving force on such as ‘Skeleton Tree’ and ‘Push the Sky Away’ all have a sparse, worn beauty that’s separate from Cave’s other, more boisterous albums. That’s not to say there isn’t aggression on these songs, however. One of the most powerful songs of the night was Push the Sky Away’s centrepiece, ‘Jubilee Street’, which crescendo’d into a scuzzy, speeding, majestic thing of beauty like a bird taking flight. The band played a wide selection of stuff including an unexpected ‘Weeping Song’ which they started their three-song encore with. They played a lot from their most recent album, ‘Skeleton Tree’, which was great to hear. They’re still pushing, still desperate for the new, past success be damned. It wasn’t a greatest hits set but it wasn’t a B-sides and rarities set either, it struck a beautiful, chiming chord in between.
It’s been said again and it’s been said before, but all credit to the MEN Arena for reopening so quickly and allowing brilliant gigs like this to go ahead. Again, this seems a little trite but it’s needs to be restated: it’s the act of going to these shows and experiencing incredible art that is bravery in the face of terrorism. Just remember what Gandalf says in The Hobbit, ‘Some believe it is only great power that can hold evil in check, but that is not what I have found. It is the small everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keep the darkness at bay. Small acts of kindness and love.’ Though the words are filled with darkness, murder, anxiety, and violence, Nick and the Bad Seeds’s music is a music of love.
Photo by Lewis Evans