Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds at Accor Arena in Paris (yes, obviously, all garbage photos by me)
At some point in the middle of “Tupelo” on the second night of Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds’ two-nights-only stint in London for their Wild God Europe and UK tour, I thought Elvis Presley would rise from the dead, jumpsuit and all, to appear onstage at the cavernous O2 arena. Quite a feat given any hip-gyrating, lip-curling, black-jelly-haired spirit had to break through an indoor outlet mall, past the Shake Shack and Nike store, to find the entrance to the arena. As a fellow Presley fanatic, “Tupelo” has always been one of my favorite Bad Seeds tracks, a Biblical storm of Southern Gothic “lookee, lookee yonder” language heralding the holy birth of the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll and his dead twin in that clapboard shack in Mississippi—and the song I was most excited to hear again after six years sans Seeds shows. I didn’t expect, however, that its fresh rendition would make me reconsider the song entirely. What always seemed like a cracked myth shouted by a blues-loving street preacher now felt like Dr. John-esque necromancy. A lot of factors combined to transform “Tupelo” into a spellbinding incantation: the extra groove Radiohead’s borrowed (or stolen, as Nick said) Colin Greenwood put on the bassline, the hammering fury of the Bad Seeds’ current percussion lineup with Larry Mullins and Jim Sclavunos, and the addition of a quartet of phenomenal backup singers, Janet Ramus, Wendi Rose, Mica Townsend, and T Jae Cole (three of whom—Ramus, Rose, and Cole—I saw previously on Nick and Warren Ellis’s Carnage tour). Most of all it had to do with us, the audience, who Nick continually urged to participate whether raising our hands to the heavens at the first thundercrack or yelling back at him in a call and repeat. No bird can fly! No fish can swim! Yeah, yeah, yeah!!
After attending three Bad Seeds shows in London and Paris, I’ve been wracking my brain in a desperate attempt to pinpoint exactly what made these marathon two-and-a-half-hour Wild God concerts feel different. Special. Before you complain about the band being at its peak in 1994 or something, I’m not the only one, given a Reddit thread in the Nick Cave sub asking the same question. Of course, part of it is the years absent the sheer volume and velocity of the full band. Even as someone who listens to them regularly—ok, almost daily, it’s hard to fully recall the physical assault of Warren Ellis’s shrieking string slashes tearing through the jangling cacophony of the love-sick upstairs neighbor fixation “From Her to Eternity.” The years off the road or in various alternative iterations like Nick Cave’s “solo” tour with Colin Greenwood (so not solo at all) have not rendered the band more subdued or rusty. The band seems at the height of its prowess, the steadfast immovable wall of sound to Nick Cave’s unstoppable force lurching and leaping at the audience in his Gucci shoes.
Those amazed “Frogs” opening Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds’ at the O2 in London
Some of the newfound thrills came from the adaptations of nearly all the songs from the recently released album, Wild God, a few of which were spruced up from their studio recordings. Both the St. John of the Cross-inspired country ballad “Long Dark Night” and the Dolly Parton-influenced (Don’t ask me why it took Nick singing “I will always love you” to the audience, with the audience repeating it in turn, for me to realize the intrinsic Dolly adoration here), George Vjestica’s acoustic guitar-driven “Final Rescue Attempt” earned a chills-inducing Warren Ellis violin break. UH…where is this on the album?!. “Long Dark Night” also gained an improved set of lyrics with Nick switching out the repetition of “Maybe a long dark night is coming down” with the grim “Maybe the sun don’t shine on everyone.” Those that weren’t subject to late line edits too came to life onstage like “Cinnamon Horses,” which was probably my least favorite on the album. Live, though, the backup vocalists singing the “You said that…” sections became an accusatory chorus, shouting down Nick’s sappy assertions to his friends that life is sweet and that love would endure if it could. Granted, it wasn’t just the new songs. Some Bad Seeds standards benefitted from a revamp like the insertion of an alarming wailing choral judgment in the defiant electric chair confessional “The Mercy Seat” or, more subtle but no less emotionally resonant, the pregnant pause as Nick and Carly Paradis switched seats on the piano mid-“Bright Horses.” Others took on new meaning, from the aforementioned “Tupelo” to The Lyre of Orpheus’s “O Children,” which, with Nick’s pre-song introduction describing its inspiration as parents’ inability to protect their children, became devastating in the context of the loss of his two sons.
Yet in the realm of weeping songs, none jumped from the album through a staggering live interpretation more than “Joy.” And don’t just take my word for it. Listen to my fellow Paris partier Bob Dylan who tweeted days after the show (without apparently even telling the band he was there):
That’s about right, Bob!
Wedged between Ghosteen‘s “Bright Horses” and a stark Nick-on-piano solo “I Need You” from Skeleton Tree, a section of predetermined tearjerkers, “Joy” viscerally portrayed that collapsing desperate reach for joy. After weaving imagery of a flaming boy with laughing stars above his head at the piano, Nick moved in front of the crowd, as the lights went down on the rest of the band onstage and Warren’s falsetto “Aaahs” quieted, and sang in a slowed, drawn-out acapella: “I jumped up like a rabbit and fell down to my knees. I called all around me, have mercy on me please.” Then, the light got in. The stage illuminated in a warm glow and the music swelled back up in time as Nick returned to the piano to repeat, “For joy, for joy. I’m jumping for joy.” Whew, it got me every time.
As seen in “Joy,” theatrical lighting design, as well as the visuals projected on three screens, two flanking the stage and a larger central one that would flare up in near strobe light blinkers at instances of particular intensity, did some heavy lifting. Though I’ve seen the Bad Seeds with screens previously, much more thought was put into how these could work in tandem with the songs rather than simply projecting the show for the balcony people sitting in the nosebleeders. For instance, the roaring spoken word first half of Carnage‘s hallucinatory and deeply American “White Elephant,” with its great grey cloud of wrath embodied in the figures of a hunter sitting on his front porch threatening to “Shoot you in the fucking face if you even think about coming around here” and the President (heyooo, Donnie!) calling the Feds, is poetically nefarious on its own. But with a closeup of Nick’s face in black and white on the central screen and in profile on the sides, as he pointed to the crowd with finger guns like some sort of homicidal Wizard of Oz, the narration became even more menacing.
Saint Anita, Our Lady of the Bad Seeds
Beyond dramatic shots of the band, the visuals also included texts on colored backgrounds in what I’ll call the “Wild God” font used on the album’s cover and lyric videos. These phrases flashed at notable periods of manic joy or frenzy, of which there are many on the new album, such as the gutter-jumping amphibians “Amazed of love” and the heaven-pleading “Kill me!” in “Frogs” and the hysterical gospel choir breaking shouts of “You’re beautiful! Stop! Stop!” on “Conversion.” It was somehow both stark and over the top, kind of like the sparklies that introduced the gleefully goofy, Anita Lane-devoted “O Wow O Wow (How Wonderful She Is),” the performance of which went a long way to educating the concert-going masses about Anita if clicks from various European countries on my essay on Our Lady of the Bad Seeds are any indication. “O Wow” rightfully earned the most poignant visual moment as Lane herself flickered on screen in cuts from “The World’s a Girl” music video during the latter part of the song when Lane’s recorded scratchy baby doll voice cuts through the music. As Lane danced, Nick looked up and danced with her, a moving communion with a late friend and collaborator that felt almost too private to be watching.
Yet, I don’t even think all of this accounts for what made these shows stand apart. After much consideration (probably too much), I’ve concluded that it relates to the centering of the audience, which made the ginormous, typically alienating arena venues feel intimate. So much so that I just may be converted to no longer grudgingly seeing the band again in an arena setting, something I thought I’d never say (Good thing because I have tickets to Barclays in April). Though the camera angle pointed directly at the awed faces of the front row was a hint that the crowd held a greater role than usual, most of this relationship with the audience was forged through copious crowd participation. Now, crowd participation is a risky endeavor, a tightwire act between near religious transportive communal experience and stadium rock schmaltz. A fact I’m certain the Bad Seeds are aware of as they leaned into both sides of this dicey divide. Hard. Starting with the former, the encouraged collectivity kicked off early with the second song, “Wild God,” which already seemed designed for a participatory live experience on the album with its repeated exuberant yells of “Bring your spirit down!” The same cannot be said for “Song of the Lake” yet that didn’t stop Nick from imploring the audience to shout along, “Never mind, Never mind!” as he wove a tale of an old man wrestling with heaven and hell while watching a woman bathe. Like hollering a call-and-repeat “Stop!” against the backup vocalists’ relentless “Touched by the spirit, Touched by the flame!” in “Conversion,” there was an unmistakable churchy bent. Though I’ve previously yammered on about this aspect of Cave and co.’s live performance in the context of the Carnage tour, this was a tad adjacent. Whereas that tour felt like an apocalyptic tent revival with the pared-down band and periods of berserk “Hand of God” fire and brimstone, the Wild God tour reminded me of an evangelical mega-church, or at least my fantasy one without awful contemporary Christian rock. This is, in part, due to the size of the venues, but also Cave’s actions as a guide through these stories of conversion and transformation. Admittedly, it also could be that I’m newly fixated on evangelism through the figure of scammer-saint Aimee Semple McPherson.
Giant Nick reaches towards his followers over the Bad Seeds in Paris
For the latter, the arena rock schlock, there was a wry wink toward the reality that a band like the Bad Seeds was probably never supposed to be playing these enormous popstar venues. (For the record, I don’t think the evangelist schtick is without a dash of knowing humor either). This was most obvious when Nick’s audience interaction turned so overblown that it had to be purposeful like making the crowd sing the organ melody in “Red Right Hand,” a song both the band and I would probably be fine with them never playing again. As absurd as singing, “Naaaaaah, nah, nah, NAH, nah, nah, NAH”…you get it…was, it worked; it was fun. Silly, even, as it veered precariously toward Steam territory. I’m not saying it always worked. “The Weeping Song” is still a clapping disaster. Maybe even worse than previous tours as there is now an entire clapping interlude in which the audience struggles to find the right rhythm. Still. That song has been such a mess for years, a duet with former member Blixa Bargeld that the Bad Seeds stubbornly refuse to retire from the setlist even more than twenty years after he left the band, that I feel a kind of heartwarming nostalgia for all the times I’ve disliked the performance of that song.
Like “The Weeping Song,” crowd interaction isn’t exactly new territory for the Bad Seeds. From yanking a woman onstage during “Stagger Lee” during the Push the Sky Away tours (sometimes to catastrophic effect as in a memorable Beacon gig) to the encore stage invasions and worshipful arm raises of the Skeleton Tree tour—of course, with many hand grabs along the way, there has been a growing affinity with the audience that I’ve witnessed personally. While this relationship developed naturally, it’s also not without conscious thought. From a notably grandiose Red Hand file to his collaborative book with Seán O’Hagan, Nick has written frequently about the mutual reciprocity between the audience and performer. “We come together around a shared objective, not just with the band but the audience as well, something that unites and raises the collective soul. There is also a loss of self, a sense of being swept up by something larger. Where can we access this feeling these days, you know, outside of a church?” he says to O’Hagan in Faith, Hope and Carnage.
Which would be an unbearably pretentious thing to say if the Bad Seeds weren’t able to pull it off. But they are and they did. As should be obvious since I barf out selections of my inner monologue just about every week on this website, I have trouble getting out of my own head and tamping down my typical concert annoyance with the people around me to, as Nick writes in the Red Hand Files, “fucking lose ourselves.” Not that it was easy either at these shows, especially with a Parisian eating a fucking jambon beurre baguette sandwich right before the Bad Seeds came onstage (somehow less obnoxious than the widespread post-show Parisian habit of whistling “Into My Arms” on the way to the train. Vraiment horrible! Bring the guillotine back!). Yet, even I was able to give myself over, praise hands and all, so that when we got to the potentially corny calamity of a group singalong finale of “Into My Arms,” it felt like a hymn at the end of a service.