Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds
3Arena, Dublin
★★★★★
The last time Nick Cave played Ireland, he did so at the funeral, in December 2023, of his friend Shane MacGowan, singing the late Pogues singer’s A Rainy Night in Soho from the altar of St Mary’s of the Rosary Church in Nenagh. The setting is very different as Cave’s huge Wild God tour rolls into Dublin for the first of two nights, but the performances share a profound sense of the divine and a deep-cutting tenderness.
Yet while the show orbits themes of mortality, it is thrillingly, pulsatingly alive. That energy is a reflection of this year’s Wild God album – a stormy, open-hearted reckoning by Cave with the life he must now live following the loss of two sons, 15-year-old Arthur, in 2015, and 31-year-old Jethro, in 2022.
The theme of the opening track, Frogs, is that a time of unimaginable pain can also contain the possibility of happiness. Accompanied by an orchestral swell of emotion from his band, Cave summons a vision of animals “amazed of love / amazed of pain”. Cave’s message is that even a life steeped in tragedy has moments of grace and beauty.
Wild God also wrestles with Cave’s latter-day incarnation as an elder statement of tasteful piano pop. It is a role that fits him like the crisp suit he wears, but, again and again, he rips it up and reels backwards into the gory, tumultuous rock of his early days fronting the Bad Seeds.
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He is accompanied by a sort of expanded-box-set edition of the Bad Seeds – led by his old foil Warren Ellis, a mad monk with a maniacal violin, and supplemented by gospel singers and by Radiohead’s Colin Greenwood on bass. The racket they make is spectacular and occasionally demented – the latter being the speciality of Ellis, who bashes his instruments as though called upon to conduct an unscheduled exorcism.
The interplay between Cave and Ellis – the dark flame that drives the performance – reaches hurricane-like ferocity during the Elvis origin story Tupelo, which imagines the King born in an Old Testament-style deluge. As Cave howls the chorus of “The beast it cometh, cometh down”, Ellis climbs up on his seat and manipulates his violin with gusto. To make hopping on a chair feel like a harbinger of the apocalypse is quite a feat – but one Ellis makes look easy.
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The singer cuts a restless prowling figure, a prince of gloom with a whippet-like frame and a sense of humour as sharp as a rusty knife. Standing on a walkway set along the front, he is tickled and slightly unsettled when a devotee whips off his top to reveal disturbingly lifelike chest tattoos of Cave and Ellis. He also has fun with a punter who permits Cave to use his striped top as a towel. Having mopped his brow, Cave chucks the clothing back into the pit, and so the shirt hits the fan.
Cave tweaks the lyric to his gnarled ballad Carnage to conjure an image of “sitting on the balcony / listening to Sinéad O’Connor” (in the recorded version he is “reading Flannery O’Connor”). MacGowan is not mentioned, but then this gig is not a wake or a memorial but a celebration of Cave, an artist who has had to wait until his early 60s before coming into his kingdom as an arena-filling megastar. (A decade ago it would have been unthinkable that he could play two evenings at 3Arena.)
He encores with The Weeping Song, a biblical singalong half Book of Job, half laconic terrace chant. Finally there comes Into My Arms, one of the greatest love songs ever written and a tune for which Cave, the stomping bogeyman of unhinged art rock, sits alone at the piano and reveals that he is just as vulnerable and human as the rest of us. It’s a powerful conclusion to a stunning night.
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds play 3Arena Dublin again on Wednesday, November 13th
