Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds
Thebarton Theatre
18 May

Murray Bramwell

I last saw Nick Cave perform in 1994. It was the time of Let Love In and a slew of songs of almost impossible density and menace. Loverman, Red Right Hand and (I found her on a night of fire and noise ) the fanged and tangled, jingle jangle of Do You Love Me ? – surely, one of the scariest questions ever posed in recent popular music. Cave and the Bad Seeds played at Thebarton. The show was in every sense extraordinary and, I thought, very probably unrepeatable.

But any hesitations at seeing Cave play again when he returned to Thebarton last month were cast aside even before he appeared on stage . The support set was from the Darling Downs, a crooning rockabilly duo who looked more like insurance salesmen or Jehovah’s Witnesses than musicians. Armed only with a guitar and a set of histrionic hand gestures they pitched a set which only became stranger and more beguiling with each number. More astute observers than I later identified the players as Kim Salmon and Ronald S. Peno – from the Scientists and Died Pretty respectively – but on the night they remained incognito.

Nick Cave himself has always worked with this kind of stealth and ambiguity. While he rose with his celebrated Birthday Party at the height of punk and the thrash avant garde, and established impeccable credentials by association with Einsturzende Neubauten and their guitarist Blixa Bargeld, his songs also have the mood and melancholy of Leonard Cohen, the ashcan lyricism of Tom Waits and the consumptive pallor of Hank Williams.

His newest album, the double feature Abattoir Blues and The Lyre of Orpheus , tells us all we need to know of the Nick Cave yin and yang – and many of these seventeen songs form the heart, and sometimes perfidious soul, of this latest concert. It is Abattoir Blues to open – and the engine that is the Bad Seeds is immediately apparent. Do you see what I see dear ? sings Cave with courtly gruffness while the Seeds, earthed by twin drummers Jim Sclavunos and Thomas Wydler and the thunder of Martyn Casey’s bass, begin. Each is integral to the intricate and relentless sound – Mick Harvey’s sparse guitar and the rhyming keyboards of Conway Savage and James Johnston who spend the night slumped like trolls, building those layers of repetition and terrible portent that makes the Nick Cave sound into a sort of Gothic carnival.

The set unfolds at ferocious pace with Get Ready for Love and a screamer version of Red Right Hand. Cave stalks and prowls the stage, every word audible, every phrase an accusation, a confession, an extortion. In his skinny black suit and winged white shirt he is matched by the band – they look like SP bookies from the fifties, or like they have just come back from Shelley’s funeral. They could be a scene from Schiller’s The Robbers. The music is a series of explosions, of crescendos rising and vanishing like a seizure, or dry lightning.

The new songs fit seamlessly with the standards. Hiding All Away, Supernaturally, and Breathless – concluding with the merest exhalation. But not before a majestic reading of The Weeping Song and a galvanising re-iteration of Do You Love Me ?. The Mercy Seat, surely lyrically and musically, Cave’s masterpiece, begins with Cohen-like understatement, before the wild rumpus begins – that rising sound like a huge, inexorable wheel, taking us exhilarated, into the hobs of hell, or that point of self-recognition that Artaud dreamed of in his Theatre of Cruelty.

The encores include new material – O Children, given gospel truth from the powerful quartet of back-up singers, There She Goes My Beautiful World, Cave’s splendidly elliptical Song to the Earth with bouzouki and wild violin from Dirty Three’s elvish Warren Ellis, now standing in for the Archangel Bargeld, and then the band goes sanctified with the mischievously deadpan God is in the House. The last word though, goes to Staggerlee. Mister Motherfucking Staggerlee, too mean for the world, too bad for the Devil. Cave’s performance is a revelation of narrative, of wit and celebration. This is the Coyote, and all the other Trickster myths – and a jump beyond Jack Flash and two bit rappers like Fifty Cents. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds are amazing – poets, shamans, sturm and drangers – and the best band that ever came out of Melbourne.

Commissioned June 2 , 2005 but not published by The Adelaide Review