1995
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
Thebarton Theatre, December 1994.
Reviewed by Murray Bramwell
More first feature than support act, Dave Graney and the Coral Snakes are having one of their lives. Most of the full-house crowd at Thebarton are inside to see them. The hypnotic sound of the Confessions of Gainsbourg surges into the Graney signature, You’re Too Hip For Me Baby. Dave is the usual triumph of man-made fibre, doing his tai-chic workout while the band goes about its reliable business. Under blood-red lights Graney sings You Wanna Be There But You Don’t Wanna Travel. Robin Casinader’s keyboards chime above a murky sound mix. The foldback is obviously fine- Graney is gliding confidently, oblivious to the fact that bassist Gordy Blair is trapped inside a forty gallon drum.
The band work through the list- Warren Oates, Won’t You Ride With Me, and the enticing repetitions of There Was a Time. Then Dave starts his attenuated Australian Doors joke. The ironists get it but this is a mixed crowd and you wonder whether maybe some of the Cave people think that even a channeling tribute band is better than no Jim at all. Just to add to the ambiguity, Dave curls his lip around It’s Your Crowd I Hate before opening into the final cluster- You Wanna Be Loved, his classic Beat lyric, Night of the Wolverine, The Stars, Baby, The Stars and I’m Gonna Release Your Soul. The crowd roars, and the Coral Snakes look pleased even though we missed out on most of Rod Hayward’s guitar. It has been good Graney all the same. There are no encores. The order of service is tight.
It’s time for Saint Nick. And where else but Thebarton Theatre on an Adelaide Sunday evening would you look for the laying on of tongues, for the snake-handling pentecost of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. This is the Night of the Hunter, rock and roll Apochrypha. This, as the Ass said to the Angel, is Revelation. The backcloth announces the band’s name- in blotchy blown-up type. I’m told that this favoured graphic of the underground press is currently available as a computer font. Smudgy Remington is now known as American Typewriter.
Through the reds and blues of the dim stage the band take their places. Thomas Wydler in back on the drums, Martyn Casey on bass, Conway Savage ready at the keyboard to transmit through hair and fingertips. Group linchpin, Mick Harvey, on guitar and synth, surveys the crowd from the OP side while guest Seed Jim Sclavunos gets ready to do some Roland Wolf.
Through the metallic, rippling keyboard chords- reminiscent of Barry Reynolds’ arrangements for Marianne Faithfull’s Broken English– comes Nick Cave, a stovepipe Rimbaud in a stovepipe suit. Cave swings his hank of dark hair. A lot has happened since we were last in Adelaide, he gruffly observes while the crowd goes palpable at the sheer idea of seeing the living ledge. A guy near me, stripped to the waist, is about to give himself an aneurysm bellowing his approval. One lung has punctured and the other one is flickering. His thorax and voice box unequal to the level of homage he has in mind, he switches from bellowing to a tinnitus-inducing whistle.
We are all enveloped- the old, the young, the halt, the lame, the lupine whistlers. Between the slicing piano and the hypnotic synth chords, between the essence and the descent comes – “I found her on a night of fire and noise/ wild bells rang in a wild sky…” The portentous opening lines of what may yet be Cave’s greatest song- Do You Love Me. Like the rest of Let Love In, Nick Cave’s current album, it is galvanising proof that the singer is, to coin a phrase, at the height of his powers. He is certainly at the height of something- his audacity, his mythology as a post-punk, post-Berlin cult fave, his triumph over chemistry. Here is the man who survived his own birthday party.
It is hardly new to say that Nick Cave is a confluence of the Romantic Gothic. But it is worth noting yet again how well he does it. His imagery is derived from the Old Testament and the mad bits from Blake. The devotion to dark ladies is Petrarchan, with all the gallantry of Nosferatu. We have heard these hoarse, erotically languid vocals before. Leonard Cohen’s S-and-M Sisters of Mercy for one, and James James Morrison Morrison- before The End said it all so prematurely. But neither Cohen nor the Doors at their overblown, legendary best could work a crowd with Cave’s atavism. Like Flannery O’Connor’s preacher from the Church with no Christ, Nick Cave has wise blood.
The Bad Seeds need no time to get bedded in. From the opening salvos they are in full cry, creating the hurricane of sound needed for the still centre of Cave’s demonic intimacies- “Do you love me, do you love me, do you love me ?” And then, insinuating the unspeakable – “Do you love me- LIKE I LOVE YOU…” The playlist is well-rehearsed with no frigging around between numbers. There’s the quirkily Appalachian-sounding, Papa Won’t Leave You Henry, then the shunting rhythm and sudden eruptions of Red Right Hand. And, from the classic repertoire, The Good Son. One more man is … gone. Certainly, next to me, Whistler is near dementia with adulation. Fingers sprouting from his mouth he is surely summoning every dog from here to Semaphore. Asked by the now hearing-challenged around him if all this is entirely necessary, he explains that he wants to hear himself on the live recording. Now who will be the witness/When the fog’s too thick to see ?
Let Love In is well represented- the flesh tearing cadences of Loverman and, the title track itself, Cave’s croony baritone somewhere between Johnny Cash and Graham Parker. Then the slow march chords of The Ship Song have the audience spellbound as Cave offers rest to the weary and the Bad Seeds crank up every available keyboard. Chorus vocals come from Mick Harvey, Sclavunos and Blixa Bargeld, former engine of the German avant garde band Einsturzende Neubauten. But any state of grace is temporary. City of Refuge and Jack the Ripper are taken to new intensities, the crowd to perilous levels of arousal.
And then lamentation. Go son , go down to the water. This is a weeping song, a song in which to weep. Again the drums and voices of the Bad Seeds create mass hypnosis. The solemnity of the song verges on the parodic. A flake like Jim Morrison couldn’t have carried this one. Nick Cave knows the drama of the liturgy, the pathos of repetition. Skinny gremlin that he is, he drapes his arm around the melancholy statue of Blixa Bargeld, pale valkyrie, punk child of Schiller.
Jangling Jack gets the treatment but despite its catchy hook it is rather B grade stuff. Unlike The Mercy Seat. The band play in such alchemic unison they are like a great steel drum. The ringing hammers of the younger Blixa are reintegrated into a rock sound of ego-melting proportions. The Periodic Table of Elements is acquiring a new entry.
The sinuous ironies and cowboy strains of Nobody’s Baby Now serve as first encore leaving us unguarded against the finale. From Her to Eternity. A six minute blitzkrieg, shades of David Byrne but with many more ergs. Atop Casey’s pulsing bass and Wydler’s kettledrum, Cave croaks his circling lyrics while Blixa punctuates with shrieks, Conway Savage chops at the keyboard and various guitars angle-grind into perfect chaos.
After seventy one minutes Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds leave the stage and don’t return. They play with such precision and intelligence you wonder what it would be like if they ambled a bit, Nick doing some talking, reading some poems – that kind of thing. There is something arm’s length about this, American Typewriter, over-calibrated. Although not for the Whistler, who is, as far as I can tell, now nearly unconscious, his eyeballs have rolled back, his whistle fingers limp at his sides. He’s either just been exorcised or he needs one. As for me, seventy-one minutes is just fine. I feel like my brains have been arc-welded. Any more and things could get Faustian.
“Wise Blood” The Adelaide Review, No.135, January 1995.