When Nick Cave fronted the Birthday Party in small clubs, he would sing or scream lyrics at the audience, and yell “Wake up! Express yourself!” only inches from some startled innocent in the front row. More than 40 years later, the besuited 67-year old still skips around the stage with the improbable energy of his younger self, and sings entire passages clutching the outstretched hand of some lucky fan. As the music has evolved from avant noise to piano balladry to emotional transcendence, the Bad Seeds have found themselves performing in ever vaster spaces – but that has simply become another means to dial every instrument and feeling up to the max.
This incredible concert lasts two-and-a-half hours, includes 21 songs and spans every possible corner of the human experience, gradually increasing in intensity. Cave’s personal tragedies – the deaths of two sons – seem to have deepened his music’s power and the empathy between performer and audience, but amid much profundity there is humour. “I seem to be surrounded by a lot of extraordinary gentlemen … forgive me, extraordinary, ageing gentlemen,” he deadpans as fans touch his billowing flares. “I bring something out in them.”
Behind him, a Bad Seeds lineup that includes Radiohead’s Colin Greenwood and a four-member gospel choir impeccably deliver 40 years’ of music. From Her to Eternity, from 1984, is furious and raging. The Mercy Seat has surely never sounded better. The sudden shrieking noise in Jubilee Street is genuinely startling. Cave’s introduction of 2004’s O Children as a song “about our inability to protect our children” is hugely moving, given the context, while the uplifting Joy, one of eight songs from recent album Wild God, finds a way through grief into love and even cathartic celebration.
White Elephant’s “kingdom in the sky” gospel coda seems to uncork a mass spiritual outpouring not always palpable in a city Cave amusingly calls “fuckin’ Leeds”. A beautifully hushed voice/piano encore of Into My Arms is the cherry on a perfect cake. The bigger the stage, the greater this man and his band’s powers.
• At the OVO Hydro, Glasgow on 3 November. Then touring
