Nick Cave, the Australian enigma known for his emotional and madly engaging stage presence, and wild-man Warren Ellis, long-time member of Cave’s bands the Bad Seeds and Grinderman, recently brought their emotional show to Sheffield City Hall. Fans who were anticipating the same stage swagger as Cave’s arena tours may not get quite what they bargained for, but they nonetheless will have walked away having been stirred by Cave’s displays.
Cave and Ellis are touring the albums Ghosteen, a meditation on grief after the tragic death of Cave’s son at the age of just 15, and Carnage, a dark affair with brooding lyrics that was recorded over 2020’s lockdown. Owning both of these albums, I knew this was going to be unlike any show I had been to before, but I didn’t know how deep into the emotional depths Cave could plunder.
To fully immerse myself in the experience, I hung around the back of City Hall before the show, talking to a fan who had travelled from sunny Athens to Sheffield to see Cave perform. He told me that he used Ghosteen, the joint highest-ranked album of the 2010s on Metacritic, for hypnotism. That this fan has repurposed Cave’s reflections on loss into a calming force fascinated me, and it was midway through this thought that Cave appeared and signed my copy of the album. Considering Cave has been a star for over forty years and had celebrated his 64th birthday the night before the show, it shows the deep connection he has to his fans that he still chooses to take the time to come and chat to them when he can.
The show started slowly, and I felt uneasy for the first three tracks, unsure how to feel or behave at a gig that was so deeply rooted in the personal trauma that Cave was spilling across the stage. For the fifth song, ‘White Elephant’, Cave had transformed himself into a murderer, issuing warnings and political statements throughout:
“A protester kneels on the neck of a statue
The statue says “I can’t breathe”
The protester says “Now you know how it feels”
And he kicks it into the sea”
Some have called this a brilliant lyrical masterclass, though I would suggest that this is a clumsy attempt to engage with contemporary events that unfortunately mars what is otherwise a good track. It’s second half, turns much more uplifting with chants of a “kingdom in the sky”, and threw a shard of light into what was set to be a gloomy evening.
I was amazed throughout by Cave’s ability to control his emotions, bantering with the audience about licking a man’s face one moment, and the next, his voice cracking as he cycles through love to anger to sadness to remorse and eventually only to short sounds, intoning “just breathe” as he mimics a slowing heartbeat. He demonstrates this again in the switch between vintage track ‘God is in the House’, a gentle, piano-led satirical take on small-town Christianity, and ‘Hand of God’, a Carnage track that refers back to that kingdom in the sky, this time with a much darker hue. The stage bathed in red light, with Cave screaming the title, Ellis furiously screeching the violin and the backing singers who had created such harmony dropping their voices into the chaotic fray. This is the Cave that many fans would have been waiting to emerge.
Cave returned for two encores, ‘Hollywood’, with his delicate, rasping delivery of the Buddhist story of Kisa opining that “everybody is always losing someone”, and the classic Cave murder ballad ‘Henry Lee’, which is worth the price of admission alone for his stunning duet with Wendi Rose.
His second encore featured one of the greatest love songs of all time, ‘Into My Arms.’ After some playful audience suggestions (including to play Wonderwall), the song was performed even better than the recorded version, with the backing singers T Jae Cole, Wendi Rose and Janet Rasmus elevating the track to new heights, and Cave’s voice showing no sign of degradation since it was released a quarter of a century ago.
The show ended with what Cave called a prayer, the track ‘Ghosteen Speaks’, written from the perspective of his son. A touching moment that led to Cave’s third standing ovation of the night.
I briefly spoke with Cave and some fans after the show; the fans called it the best show of the tour so far, describing an invigorated Cave engaging with the audience and wrenching out their hearts, while Cave himself felt the audience hadn’t seemed overly animated at his show, he was grateful that people had turned up at all.
For a former punk who thrives on interaction, just watch his performance of ‘Stagger Lee’ at Glastonbury 2013 to see how deeply he involves himself in the audience, the seated hall environment didn’t quite offer back the same energy as his stage presence normally commands.. While Cave may have been disappointed by his audience, they were certainly enchanted by him. I think the tender moments throughout the show are in fact suited to smaller venues where you can see his pain and experience his emotions filling up the hall. While definitely unlike any show I have seen before, this was without doubt one of the most soul-wrenching I have ever experienced. If you get a chance to see Cave on this tour or the next, do. I can promise you it is much, much more than hypnotism.
Rating: 4.5/5
