It doesn’t take long. Nick Cave strolls on stage in Dublin, sharp-suited like a Byronic bank teller, and by the second song ‘Wild God’, when his four-person backing choir erupt with the command to “Bring your spirit down!” and he leaps from behind the piano to press the flesh of the front row, he has every soul mesmerised.
August’s album of the same name is a glorious work of art where Cave emerges from family tragedy to find acceptance and even joy in carrying on. He plays very nearly all of it and each cut is hymnal, haunted by ghosts but redeemed by love even though “love costs everything.” Opening with ‘Frogs’ and ‘Wild God’ rather than holding them back seemed risky, but Cave is a master of dynamics.
The choir explode again in technicolour during ‘Song Of The Lake’, the pace builds through ‘Jubilee Street’ until the tempo doubles and Cave attacks the keys like the demented ghost of Jerry Lee Lewis.
‘Tupelo’ (“This is about Elvis, who I love”) is the malevolent rumble of a beast coming over the hill to lay waste to all before it. The Bad Seed Gang (with Radiohead’s Colin Greenwood deputising on bass) howl the birthplace of the king and Cave throws himself into the crowd because the stage cannot hold this animal back.
Warren Ellis, a visual foil in his own sound lab, offers screech and drag violin straight out of a Russian short story, then windmills like an even angrier Townshend, cavorting like an electrified peacock throughout. But the night belongs to Cave.
He wipes his sweat-soaked face with a fan’s shirt, cuddles another with a noticeable Cave tattoo (“That’s commitment”), and alters lyrics to mention Sinéad O’Connor (rather than Flannery), all the while exhorting us to further frenzies.
The main set’s closing songs – ‘Red Right Hand’ with Cave conducting our “Na-Nas” before the band gleefully descend to cacophony, a pounding ‘The Mercy Seat’, and a truly epiphanic ‘White Elephant’ which leaves the 3Arena horde speaking in tongues as the choir join Cave at the front – are as magnificent a 15 minutes of live music as I can remember. And I haven’t even mentioned the encore where we wept and embraced to the strains of ‘Into My Arms’.
It’s clichéd to say Cave is a shamanic, hypnotic, spiritually uplifting, and deeply moving performer, but that doesn’t make it untrue. An incredible experience.
