Nick Cave

Riverstage 08.03.13

I don’t believe in an interventionist god, but if I did I would have kneeled down and asked him why he couldn’t hold the rain back for two lousy hours while Nick Cave performed a sublime set at Brisbane’s river stage last Friday night.

Perhaps I’m being a bit harsh on the big guy; the showers did little to dampen the enthusiasm of the thousands packed into the gardens, nor did it much affect the intensity of the performance from the Bad Seeds, augmented here by both a string section and children’s choir. The simple staging of lights and cloth backdrop allowed full focus on the band and the music.

The first half of the show concentrated mostly on tracks from the new album Push the Sky Away, opening with a reproduction of the album’s plinking first track ‘We No Who U R’ so note-perfect the Shazam app recognised it.

Cave introduced the choir with a cheery, ‘Hi kids! I don’t know where you come from. I don’t even know how you got there,’ (‘Annerley!’ came the reply a few songs later) before launching into the night’s first highlight. While ‘Jubilee Street’s slow burning build from lumbering whisper to blistering screamer wasn’t entirely unexpected, the sheer scale of the song’s climax, with band, strings, choir, and Cave himself—‘I’m transforming/Look at me now!’—drew plenty of goosebumps and a split second of stunned silence at its conclusion.

Another highlight from the new album was Higgs Boson Blues. Conjuring the legend of Robert Johnson and the Devil, Cave stalked the stage with his projected shadow looming large on the brick walls to each side. Not even the song’s jarring references to Miley Cyrus took away from the powerful presence on stage.

On ‘Push the Sky Away’ the strings finally had a chance to provide more than an ethereal presence, with Warren Ellis taking he conductor’s stand and opting for fist pumping instead of the more traditional gestures. In a band that mostly remained stationary throughout, Ellis was an electric presence. His restless moves between flute, guitar, piano, percussion and of course violin, were punctuated with leaps and high kicks.

At the half way mark, Cave thanked the choir warmly (though still unsure of their origin) and sent the kids ‘to bed’. Then he unleashed the hounds.

The second half of the show delved deep into the Bad Seeds catalogue: the themes became decidedly more adult and the language more fruity. Ed Keupper, despite a brief technical glitch, distinguished himself on ‘Papa Won’t Leave You, Henry’. The QSO’s strings finally took centre stage on and especially tender ‘Love Letter’, and support artist Mark Lanegan joined Cave for a rousing ‘Weeping Song’, ably support by Ellis’s violin.

Cave is utterly convincing in performance. He inhabits the songs, filling them with venom or empathy in a way few artists can match. The spell was frequently broken though between songs, with each transition casual at best and sometimes shambolic: musicians called out titles to each other and a few false starts deflated the tension. While endearing to see the band refusing to take itself too seriously, it’s strange that Cave chooses not to make better use of his gifts as a storyteller to maintain the mood throughout the show.

But such criticism was forgotten in a transcendent performance of The Mercy Seat that closed the show, revisiting the ecstatic build of Jubilee Street if not quite matching the earlier song’s epic scale. By the time Cave launched into an extended ‘Stagger Lee’ for encore, the rain too had been forgotten, the man above be damned.

Simon Groth