As the hailstorm of gospel rock hellfire that is “Get Ready For Love” subsided like a seraphim stealing off with your soul, Nick Cave gazed out across a packed Preston Park, held a hand to the breast of his pallbearer’s suit and caught his breath a little. “This is – ”. He paused. “Deeply overwhelming”. And then he set about making his beloved former hometown of Brighton feel exactly the same way.
From Darkness to Redemption
What, then, if the Satan myth could be reversed? If the devil can ascend to an angel? It’s certainly the direction of travel for Cave. Having spent the first grainy chunk of his career descending into the Stygian depths of hell and humanity, he’s spent several decades now seeking a kind of redemptive transcendence. His music has matured to find its power in gentle, swelling empathies rather than brash Southern gothic bluster.
Following the death of two sons and the start of his open-hearted Red Hand Files project - answering fan questions online with depth, warmth and wisdom - his relationship with his fanbase has become a deep and sympathetic communion, Cave often held up on the reaching hands of his disciples as he sings, as if fusing audience and artist. He’s even softened enough in tone to be supported at this Pride weekend all-dayer by The Flaming Lips, with their hip-thrusting pink robots, massive dancing eyeballs and songs of psychedelic joy sung beneath an inflatable rainbow.
A Set of Unity and Uplift
And it’s worked. Even on early songs “From Her to Eternity” and “Tupelo”, as his band let out the wails of the damned and summoned something diabolical with the slaughterhouse percussion of Larry Mullins and Jim Sclavunos, the stalking bass of Radiohead’s Colin Greenwood and band wildman Warren Ellis thrashing guitar-like at his fiddle – all sounding like the most malevolent kind of seeds – Cave roamed the front row like a hands-laying preacher, a figure of unity and uplift at the eye of the storm.
Much of the mid-section was given over to more recent songs where Cave would sit at his grand piano and let the Bad Seeds’ thunder swirl around his more subtle and sensitive core. “Wild God”, the title track to his latest album, had an almost Laurel Canyon feel until the gospel fire rose. “Rings of Saturn” and “O Children” were things of grace and glower, and “Carnage” a rich and sonorous ballad drawn from a 2021 Cave and Ellis collaboration album when, according to Nick, “we tried for a short period of time to be Simon and Garfunkel…I was Garfunkel”. And “Joy”, sunrise soft, was the very antidote to the blues; Nick visited by the ghost of a “flaming boy” and told “we’ve all had too much sorrow, now is the time for joy”.
Kylie and the A-List Love-In
That Cave has rehabilitated himself into music’s highest echelons was clearest with the arrival of Kylie Minogue, wrapped sweetly in his arms during “Where the Wild Roses Grow” and declaring her “undying, unwavering love” for him as he finished singing of bludgeoning her to death with a rock. What had looked like a pop abduction by dark forces in 1995 was now an A-list love-in, with the likes of Eddie Redmayne and Chris Martin swaying along in VIP.
When Cave then gradually turned up the voltage on “The Mercy Seat” until it scorched Brighton’s skull, walked across the crowd like churning waters during demon shanty “Papa Won’t Leave You, Henry” and introduced the dark man Himself beneath a fittingly blood red sky on “Red Right Hand”, it was in celebration of the scaremonger he used to be rather than the stirrer of souls he is today.
A Tight Communion
There was perhaps a little overkill in the lengthy glowers of “Jubilee Street” and “Hollywood”, accelerating towards glory for ten minutes or more, but it all ended in tight communion again, the entire park pin-drop silent and whispering along to a stunning solo “Into My Arms”, Cave crooning the purest sort of love from his piano seat. And up rose the angel.
