For all Nick Cave and his audience appear outwardly to have changed little in the past 15 years, there is evidence from the restrained yet still powerful opener, As I Sat Sadly By Her Side, that Cave is now a considerably deeper - if that were possible - character than the sporadically brilliant showman who defined the peak of his substance abusing powers in the late 1980s.

By all accounts Cave now treats his songwriting like a 9-5 office job, and though his attire is that of a smartly dressed pen-pusher (he is one of the few people in rock who could rightly claim such a title), his demeanour is still that of a creature

possessed. Cave can take the

tenderest musical arrangements and still deliver in the style of the Nation of Islam.

His is a great soulful voice as well as being one of the few

literary, let alone literate, rock stars. A song like Oh My Lord contains more words than your average chart topper's entire vocabulary - words like ''totalitarianism'' appear only in Cave's rhyming dictionary.

The Bad Seeds are another reason for Cave's enduring appeal as a live act: the dexterity evident on their many solo albums and side projects is unleashed in the most sparing manner, and even during the show's more epic moments there is a distinct feeling that less is definitely more.

Love Letter and God Is In The House are reduced to minimal instrumentation, and old favourites such as Ship Song and The Mercy Seats sound undiminished by the passing of time. But the most encouraging aspect of the show is that it represents a triumph of present rather than past greatness.