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Nick Cave
State Theatre, 29 April
Reviewed by SHAMIM RAZAVI
★★★★
That a name as big as Radiohead bassist Colin Greenwood doesn’t even get a billing as Nick Cave’s accompanist in this “solo” tour tells you something of Cave’s status as national treasure. The fact the show would have been improved without the gifted Greenwood tells you everything else you need to know.
Greenwood is more effect than cause, but it is no coincidence that the occasions when he steps back and leaves Cave and piano to themselves are the moments that truly transcend. Tellingly, it is the material best suited to this stripped-back format – The Mercy Seat, The Weeping Song, Into My Arms – on which Cave has the confidence to truly fly solo.
Nick Cave lived up to his status as a national living treasure.Credit: Edwina Pickles
Ever the generous collaborator, the solo billing becomes ever more inaccurate in the encores as Beth Orton joins the boys for a surprise spine-tingling take on The Ship Song, which – together with his heartbreaking endless repetition of the exhortation to “just breathe” in the dark at the end of I Need You – is the bereaved father at his most exposed.
Cave’s recent live appearances have spanned from chat show, via lockdown intensity to revivalist religiosity, and tonight we get a bit of all three. For the chat, he lingers on the stories revealed by his songs.
We learn that Cave himself is the narcissistic protagonist in Stranger than Kindness, which he acknowledges as “the jewel in the Bad Seeds’ crown”, even if it was penned by his ex-wife Anita Lane. That he is doomed by its brilliance to keep performing it makes her revenge all the more sweet.
Likewise, devotees may already know the conception of Papa Won’t Leave You, Henry, but it is shocking to be reminded that the macabre tale of “warm arterial spray” and babies born without a brain was originally a lullaby for Cave’s own newborn.
Perhaps he couldn’t handle two hours of full dark intensity. Perhaps we couldn’t. What we get instead is a stroll through a flâneur’s songbook. Implausibly, brilliantly, late period Cave is all love and levity – and that we certainly can handle.
Nick Cave plays the State Theatre on April 30 and May 5–7, and the ICC Sydney Theatre May 3