The (second) Mellowing of Nick Cave, Angus Colwell

I was stood in a field in Werchter, a small village near Leuven in Belgium, July 2018. Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds had just played for an hour, and Arctic Monkeys were closing the festival. In between there was an act I only half-knew called Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. “Oh yeah, they did the Peaky Blinders theme”, I said to my friend, a snivelling mess by this point of the festival, “that one should be good at least”. To say that Cave’s performance reduced the field to a standstill implies that Belgian crowds are big on moving anyway, but the fact that the subsequent Arctic Monkeys’ set felt like a chore to be endured in comparison. No one can follow Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. His set moved us to tears with our ears straining to hear his broken whispers for ‘Girl in Amber’, and the next moment made the eardrums bleed in ‘Jubilee Street’. People stopped coughing and noses stopped running. The cacophony of noise from the Bad Seeds, led by the ragged Captain-Birdseye-but-with-meth Warren Ellis, is more than a foil to Cave — it is mesmerising in itself. Cave captivates an audience like no other. It should be said that my friends and I didn’t know more than one Nick Cave song (and it seemed like neither did the audience), but our eyes never left him even during the tenminute epics we had never heard before. His vampirish look is well cultivated — impeccably tailored black suits and Chel

“I wake up in mad panics about death approaching”

sea boots — and self- acknowledged (“what’s all this light doing?”). Despite the well-documented tragedy of Cave’s last few years (the death of his son Arthur in 2015 from falling off a cliff after taking LSD), on stage this is a man having fun.

Whether laborious touring and musicmaking is (in fact) Cave’s therapy, it seems an easy conclusion to jump to - he has all but admitted it is. But the trilogy of albums he has released, 2013’s Push The Sky Away, 2016’s Skeleton Tree, and 2019’s Ghosteen represent three of the most remarkable albums released this decade. The breadth of his career should not be underestimated.

In May 2001, the author Nick Hornby wrote an article entitled “The mellowing of Nick Cave” in The New Yorker. At the turn of the millennium, he documented Cave’s transformation from the chaotic, shocking, violent frontman of The Birthday Party, to the whimsical, melancholy agnostic ruminating about faith on The Boatman’s Call. Since 2001, he has undergone another mellowing, this time of a more eschatological sort. The most famous song of Cave’s early career, The Mercy Seat, now reads quite differently - the rebel yell has become a plea to God. It’s hard to recommend a seven-minute long documentation of a man about to be executed by the electric chair featuring the same chorus 15 times in a row without sounding like a prick (yet I try). But Cave’s reflection on the focal line of the song points to his change of outlook: “before I was able to write things like, ‘I’m not afraid to die’. I don’t feel that way anymore. I don't feel as 7

its wake, these spirits are ideas...create your spirits, call to them, will them alive, speak to them”). At times Cave’s thoughts are painfully clear (“my baby’s coming back now on the next train”), and at others hard to grasp — what are we to make of the album’s opener about Elvis and Priscilla Presley tending to a castle forest? The answer is to enjoy the atmosphere. The swirling, vulnerable synthesisers of Warren Ellis and the Bad Seeds are truly cinematic and the crux of enjoying Nick Cave. Look up the lyrics after, if you want to, and you will find rich poetry, but Cave is a musician, not a poet. It is the music in itself that captivates. Nick Cave is one of those big daunting artists. Like Leonard Cohen, Radiohead, Tom Waits and Aphex Twin — those who are yet to listen are often convinced not just that they will not like , but that they won’t get it. While this may be because of intimidatingly devoted fanbases, their enthusiasm comes out of obsession, not pretension. There is an assumption that to enjoy artists like Nick Cave, the whole discography must be devoured, the canon analysed. I got into Nick Cave after seeing him live, and through the recent albums. If you enjoy most moody alt-rock, you will like Push the Sky Away. It is an excellent, yet prototypical, rock album. Skeleton Tree, the most accomplished of the trilogy, cocky about death as I used to. I wake up in mad panics about death approaching.” This, combined with personal tragedy might hint to an increasing introversion on Cave’s part, but if he has been anything over the course of his long career then it is confrontative. In the 1980s, this meant punching journalists in the head and attacking them with spatulas, but in the 2010s confrontation has taken a gentler form. He has spent the last few months setting up a website (Red Hand Files) where fans can write in and ask him anything, and in 2019 he went on an audience Q&A tour without a moderator. On both the tour and the website, Cave has answered the trivial of course (“do you smoke?”), but his answers to the more profound are delivered with the grace of a preacher, the authority of a loving parent, and the non-pretension of a friend. His response to a fan on the topic of grief made the homepage of the BBC News website, and was circulated widely (“if we love, we grieve”). On his new album Ghosteen, Cave has abandoned narrative and committed himself to atmosphere. All in the name of grief. 2016’s Skeleton Tree, released a year after Arthur's death, was not a response album — the lyrics were mostly completed by the point of his death. If it is difficult to hear Skeleton Tree without thinking of Arthur, then it is impossible not to hear Ghosteen in these terms as well. Arthur, as the “ghosteen dancing” follows Cave, similarly to the presence Cave felt in his letter to the fan (“dead grief trails bright phantoms in “NICK CAVE IS ONE OF THOSE BIG DAUNTING ARTISTS” 8

only requires empathy, not a grounding in the complete works. Similarly, Ghosteen, the last instalment, resembles more of a cinematic experience - the ambient soundscapes evoke M83, but with the gentleness of a late-career Johnny Cash. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds are playing at the O2 this May — if you can see them, do go. All other gigs will seem dry in comparison. Paradoxically enough, I’d encourage you to not listen to any Nick Cave before going. Why? Because I think it was that sense of shock, that otherworldliness and the unpredictability was what captivated me when I first saw him. I’m looking forward to seeing him in May immensely - if he injected that much life into a Belgian crowd who tutted when we danced, I can’t wait to see him in London.