How the Wild God tour reinvigorated Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
In a 20,000-capacity venue, Nick Cave had everyone in the palm of his hands. That’s a sentence written time and time again, in some phrasing or another, since the start of his career. Fear was his weapon when he first broke out as The Birthday Party terrified their crowds into awe. In recent years, as his music became softer and more sombre, his shows in beautiful halls have seen his audience stay seated, still and silent. But on the Wild God tour, every version of Cave is present and at its best, as Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds seem utterly reinvigorated by their latest creation.
There was something in the air long before the tour even started. When Wild God, the band’s eighth album, was released, it was instantly clear that these were songs made to be played live and made to be played by the whole band. Their previous releases, Ghosteen and Skeleton Tree, needed to change. In the wake of his son Arthur’s death, Cave’s music had to shift as his life and, therefore, his creativity was forever impacted. It seemed to make his process more solitary as Cave and Warren Ellis worked on the albums in comparative isolation and only invited the rest of the Bad Seeds in for a finishing sheen on the sparse yet stunning records.
However, as beautiful and necessary as those albums are, they didn’t foster the kind of wild live shows that older fans expected. It split his audience into two camps. On one side, half of the audience wanted to sit in opulent venues and hear these stunningly emotive songs, treating Nick more as a poet than a performer. But then you’d get the people interrupting any pause in those shows with a yell of “Play ‘Stagger Lee’” or some other call out trying to bring a different chapter of Cave into the space he’d made for this version.
But, on Wild God, all those versions sit together. From the start, the album was more collaborative and built with the band in mind. As guitarist George Vjestica told Far Out, “I could feel him trying to get back to that kind of raw approach,” he said as the band’s leader was returning to “more classic songwriting” with the vision of these shows in mind. For the first time since 2017, since his last shows at The O2, the Bad Seeds were touring the UK in a real way, in big indoor arenas rather than festival slots and in a way that would feel immersive and utterly theirs, allowing the band to go all out, the staging to be just right, the lights to work in cohesion and for Nick Cave, finally, to go full Nick Cave again.
And he did. From the second he bound onto the stage, he made it clear that these Wild God songs had found their home. The big gospel choruses of ‘Frogs’ and ‘Wild God’ sounded rightfully huge as Cave commanded the crowd like his procession, and the whole front row raised their hands, desperate for their leader, their guru or stand-in God, to touch it. Cave obliges, placing his palm on people’s heads or leaning his whole body weight into their waiting arms like a cult leader bolstered by the confidence his flock gives him but mostly high on the power of his own creativity and muses.
But on this tour, Cave’s messianic role is joined by the early punk power he used to hold. During ‘Jubilee Street’, he transforms from one to another as the slow, storytelling verses build towards a break as Cave suddenly pounds his stage, throwing not one, not two, but three microphones at the crowd. He’s bantering with his crowd again in a way that his other tours, dedicated to more emotive releases, haven’t quite made room for. Even though the guy at the front wearing an ugly Radiohead jumper that becomes the butt of the evening’s running joke probably wished he wasn’t, with Cave even changing the lyrics of ‘Red Right Hand’ to sing “You want another shitty T-shirt, he’ll get you one”.
At a nearly three-hour run time, the Wild God tour feels like Cave’s equivalent to Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour. While old-school punk fans will likely shiver at the comparison, it’s there.
During the set, Cave touches on every corner and facet of his creative life, able to tap into each with the same all-out power as he doesn’t just reunite with his old self but transforms into it. ‘From Her To Eternity’ is delivered with the same rage it always has as the whole arena leans in hypnotised. ‘Papa Won’t Leave You, Henry’ has the whole crowd moving, and ‘The Weeping Song’ has the whole crowd singing. A stripped-back take on ‘I Need You’ is as desperate as the song’s context caused it to be, ‘Bright Horses’ hushes all 20,000 into total silence, and a final piano rendition of ‘Into My Arms’ somehow makes an already stunning song absolutely breathtaking as thousands of voices rise to singalong. Even Wild God album tracks that might not have stood out upon release become truly special on this stage. Every era, every chapter, every version of the man on his evolution from then to now – it’s all on stage in this tour.
The Wild God tour is something special, and Cave feels it, too. “The shows are outstanding, feel deeply musical, and we are enjoying them immensely,” Cave wrote on his Red Hand Files when a fan asked, “How do you cope on tour?” It seems that this time round, he’s not having to simply cope, but that he’s thriving. He wrote, “I’ve been doing this for a long time now, and I thought I knew most forms of the touring experience intimately, from total chaos, debauchery and discord to a weird, unbelievably repetitious, OCD-like, sock-folding orderedness – but this tour feels different.”
Everyone in the crowd would attest to that as Cave delivers the “incontestable and explicit transcendent exchange” that he purpose built these new songs for and seems to have rediscovered the passion in his old ones along the way too.
