IT seemed, on the face of it, a simple enough question. How, a fan asked of Nick Cave, do you cope on tour?

Cave and his band, the Bad Seeds, kicked off their ‘Wild God’ European tour at the Rudolf Weber-Arena in Oberhausen, Germany, on September 24. The UK leg gets underway in Leeds tomorrow (Nov 2) and continues in Glasgow on Sunday evening (tickets are still available as of Friday midday).

Anyone who has followed Cave’s dealings with his fans on the Red Hand Files section of his website is aware of the candour with which he replies to their questions. This query – “how do you cope on tour? – elicited a characteristic reply.

“Despite various viral events, sprains, assorted injuries and temporary disablements, the band is fit, happy, and in good shape”, Cave began. “The shows are outstanding, feel deeply musical, and we are enjoying them immensely. Those couple of hours on stage are intense and concentrated and there is a feeling of supreme metaphysical possibility where anything can happen, and frequently does”.

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He did not stop there: “When performing”, he continued, “I experience an aliveness where I feel close to the living and to the dead. It seems that the show affords both band and audience moments of acute spiritual intimacy and communion, unlike anything that can be found outside of our own particular cathedrals – sex, nature, religion, identity, whatever”.

Cave is not being fanciful here. Anyone who has seen him and the Bad Seeds in concert knows how much of a richly intense experience it can be. Check out, on YouTube, the video of their performance of their song, Jubilee Street, filmed in Copenhagen in 2018. The controlled tension of the song explodes into life at the 5.20 mark, and suddenly Cave, who has been pacing the stage, sprints towards a walkway running in front of the audience, touching their outstretched hands, communing with them, uttering the lines, over and over, “I am transforming/ I am vibrating/ Look at me now!”, and darting back to play his piano. It is a thrilling spectacle.

As Cave told O’Hagan in Faith, Hope and Carnage, their recent book of conversations: “I have to say, being on stage, performing to a crowd, and being swept up by the wanton power of the music, of the performance itself, of the audience’s own frenzy is something else.

“To think you can climb to the top of a f——— lighting rig and flail around, or crawl around the stage on your belly like a snake, walk across the hands of the crowd - it’s a kind of beautiful madness, a beautiful, dangerous madness …”

It all brings to mind something that Cave’s fellow Australian, the Warpaint drummer Stella Mozgawa, once said. Interviewed by the Guardian in 2016, she said: “Seeing him live in 2004, when I was about 18, changed the course of my life. It blew my mind how powerful and visceral he was on stage with the whole band, and especially with Warren Ellis. I’d never seen such commitment to performance that wasn’t contrived. It felt so natural, like they were really expressing the aggression and emotion in the music. I’d been playing in bands since I was 14, but that concert inspired me”.

“The music so powerful, passionate, emotional, involving and entrancing,” says Colin Greenwood, bass guitarist with Radiohead, who is deputising on the Wild God tour for Martyn Casey, who is unwell. In an NME interview Greenwood also spoke of the air of “euphoric intensity” at the gigs.

“It’s an awesome group of people to play music with. They’re brilliant and with ferociously loud drummers; what a team. For me, it’s a really fun thing to do because it’s not Radiohead. There are a lot of different colours in the music, so I’m having a blast.”

Being fortunate enough to watch Cave work and write with his long-term collaborator, Warren Ellis, he added, “has been a true privilege”.

Recent set-lists speak to a potent blend of songs from the new Wild God album and such Cave classics as Jubilee Street, Tupelo, From Her to Eternity, I Need You, Red Right Hand, The Mercy Seat and Into My Arms. As Cave himself put it in his reply to the fan’s enquiry on the Red Hand Files, “The new songs seem purpose-built for the live experience. Frogs, Wild God, Song of the Lake, Cinnamon Horses and Long Dark Night become massive, emotional gestures, reaching a dimension way beyond the album versions”.

The trajectory of Nick Cave’s career has been nothing short of remarkable, from his earliest days as the frontman of the confrontational post-punk outfit, The Birthday Party, to the extensive catalogue of Bad Seeds studio albums (18, currently), via his poetry and novels, and the soundtrack albums he has made with Ellis. Though he and the Bad Seeds have never enjoyed the headiest kind of chart success in this country they remain one of the most utterly compelling and adored bands – live and on record – in rock music.

Cave lost one son, Arthur, aged 15, in 2015, and another son, Jethro, in Melbourne in 2022. Arthur was a constant presence in Faith, Hope and Carnage, the bestselling and deeply moving record of conversations he had with O'Hagan.                                                                                                                                                                                                                

Somewhat to his surprise Cave is now seen as a kind of sage thanks to his considered responses to fans who email him on the Red Hand Files to ask all sorts of questions. One fan has asked, “Are songs from God?”. Another contacted Cave to observe that he had been swinging from terror to euphoria as he and his pregnant wife awaited the arrival of a son.

As the Daily Telegraph's Neil McCormick put it recently, reviewing the Cave and the Bad Seeds’ concert in Berlin: “Nick Cave’s journey from outlandish cult artist to household name arena star has been among the strangest in modern music. The tragedies of his personal life ...shifted both his approach to his art and the public’s response to it. His stoic wisdom in the face of grief has given him a profound philosophical and almost spiritual status, yet his fans also seem to identify a new fragility to the former firebrand, making them protective in their support. This was tangible in the give-and-take between singer and audience on a night of thunderous, raging rock spirit and intimate balladry"

Cave's loss, McCormick reflected, "has underpinned the past decade of his career and remains present in the soulfulness of his performance, but he seems determined to forge connections with the blazing spirit of earlier years, driving through wild anti-sermons from early Seeds albums and even a blast of old Grinderman [a previous Cave/Bad Seeds side-project].

"Nevertheless, the and-a-half-hour set was heavily structured around songs from their new album. "This could be a disaster," said Cave of the challenge of playing new songs. But when they ramp it up, few bands can match the incandescent power of the Bad Seeds. And when they dial it down for Cave's tortured ballads, they conjure atmospheres of magical intensity.

Commenting upon that same show for Uncut magazine, Michael Bonner wrote that after a series of albums [Skeleton Tree, Ghosteen, and Carnage] that explored loss and grief following the deaths of Arthur and Jethro, Wild God finds Cave and The Bad Seeds “seeking positive change from their experiences”.

“It’s not quite sunny uplands ahead”, Bonner wrote, “but it feels like they’re reasserting their faith in the transformative capabilities of music. The words “AMAZED OF LOVE” and “AMAZED OF PAIN”, from “Frogs”, are beamed onto giant screens behind the band, which pretty much sums up where we’re at with Nick Cave in 2024.

“While the Bad Seeds were slightly muted on Wild God, live they are an indomitable force. Anchored around Larry Mullins and Colin Greenwood’s expressive rhythm section, they follow Cave from fierce explosions of sound to sombre passages of near ambience and on into symphonic goth space-rock.For “Long Dark Night” they are almost motionless behind Cave’s piano; for “The Mercy Seat” they erupt into full-blooded Morricone-with-choir-and-orchestra. It’s impactful stuff and underscores that there are very few bands who can deliver musical and emotional power at this level”.

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Five stars: Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, SSE Hydro, Glasgow

Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds: An Art Book, by comic-book artist Reinhard Kleist

Also at that gig was Mojo magazine’s David Hutcheon. “This”, he wrote, “is a show that challenges your emotional vulnerability and dares you to falter; stay strong and we will get you to the other side, is the promise inherent in Conversion, Bright Horses, Joy and, especially, I Need You, which finds Cave alone onstage and struggling to keep his own tears in check as he stabs brutally at the piano. It’s a punishing sequence, release only coming with a gorgeous Final Rescue Attempt and its ‘I will always love you’ conclusion.

“As a 130-minute show, it’s emotionally draining yet beautiful and inspiring, even if not all of it is entirely successful tonight. Joy doesn’t quite take off as it does on the album, Carnage is not particularly exciting. And the main man ought to tell us what all those horses (cinnamon, bright, king’s, and kicking down the stables) represent in his mind. But if you are asking yourself if you really need a dose of Nick Cave’s duende in 2024, the answer is there in the darkness. He’s transforming, he’s vibrating. Just look at him now”.


*Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, OVO Hydro, Glasgow, Sunday November 3. nick cave.com