the Bad Seeds

More than 40 years, two dozen albums, and just as many fiction and non-fiction books, screenplays, and exhibitions in, anyone would be tired and likely worn out. Nick Cave, however, is not just anyone and I’ll be damned if the 17,000 folks (and another 12,000 on the second night) in the sold-out Uber Arena in Berlin don’t know this well. Better yet, they revere the enormity of Cave’s presence, his scorching breath and all-embracing vision in yet another thematic pivot of his primary cohorts, the Bad Seeds, which they deliver with calamitous ecstasy in celebration of their 18th album together, Wild God. 

It’s Monday, a chilly, windy night at the end of September in the German capital, and Uber Square (it used to be Mercedes Square, but Germans are now losing corporate foothold even in their own territories) is gloomier than usual, with only small groups of mostly 40+ folks scrambling to find the entrance. The Bad Seeds played the night before to a sold-out crowd; for this second date, the upper seating area is closed and there is no awkward swarming around the doors, just some (upper) middle-class folks looking to release their seething emotions after an overlong day at work.

A couple of beers here, a pretzel there, and by 8:30 PopMatters | , the sense of anticipation is hot. The suited-up Nick Cave runs onto the stage with his shoulder-length black hair slicked back, trailed by a typically unkempt Warren Ellis, Jim Sclavunos, George Vještica, Carly Paradis, and four backing singers. Bassist Martyn P. Casey is absent due to ill health and replaced by Radiohead’s Colin Greenwood, who played on Wild God and said he was ecstatic to perform with the Bad Seeds because of their “euphoric intensity”. Otherwise, it’s business as usual. The Cheshire Cat grin and the virtuoso setup are ready. The communion can begin. 

In purely technical terms, there are no surprises at the Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds shows. The audience, many of whom have undoubtedly been following Cave’s career for decades, likely watch him live every couple of years or so – these folks can afford concert tickets and Cave can afford the time to preach. The packed show at the Waldbühne in 2022 was my definitive take on what it feels like to be a part of Cave’s flock: a transformative experience bursting with emotion and danger, a blindfolded balancing act on the edge of a knife, a leap of faith seldom encountered even in religious rituals. You know precisely what you’re signing up for, and you shall be served. There’s little new I or anyone else could tell you about these shows.

Formally speaking, Cave’s and the Bad Seeds’ tabernacle delivers as mightily as ever. The suits, the gospel, the literal preaching with finger-pointing, the pats on the heads of the faithful, and even Ellis’ classical violin are all part of the shtick. Much of it also historically tended to be tongue-in-cheek; Cave’s many colorful characters, ranging from scoundrels and beggars to grifters and murderers, had to be morally treated with caution, so a whiff of satire always came in handy. Tonight and for this tour, however, things are looking somewhat different.

It’s no secret that Cave is a mature man with a wealth of worldly experience and a keen interest in the otherworldly possibilities of scripture. Most of his musings and doubts have been charted in his lyrics, which meander from wrathful and deranged to consoling and hopeful. A combination of all this, slightly skewed toward a specific interpretation of the biblical texts, could customarily be found in his works and live performances. It is a good mix of anger and yearning, so to speak. 

All this started to morph more considerably just over a decade ago, first as a result of middle age and security found within one’s home, then as a result of grief and the ineffable task of reconciling loss with existence itself. Plenty has been said about Skeleton Tree and Ghosteen, albums both thematically and melodically different from the Bad Seeds’ erratic opus, revered but also feared for their immense sadness. Nevertheless, whatever had been going on with Cave, the live performances were always a mix of all these enormous feelings and ponderings. Typically, no album would be represented with more than three songs or so.

Wild God, a sweeping, opulent celebration of acceptance and endurance, is an exception. On each of the tour nights, the LP is performed (nearly) in its entirety, taking up close to half of the setlist. Cave is making a point, and its meaning will not be lost on us – we are not here to tremble anymore, but to heal. 

The set kicks off with “Frogs”, in Cave’s own words, an “epigrammatic paean to the cosmos as we sometimes find it, a cosmos tilting towards love and reveling in its own insistent beauty”, and one of Wild God‘s leading singles. Gigantic inscriptions with bits of lyrics, such as AMAZED OF LOVE, AMAZED OF PAIN, or KILL ME! flicker around the stage, amplifying Cave’s howling through the psychedelic bluesy ballad. As in the rest of the album, the peace and joy are complicated, brought about not by an abundance, but loss, the loss of loved ones and even the loss of Cave in his extraordinary alt-rock band.

Not since the country-gothic grinding of Dig, Lazarus, Dig! have the Bad Seeds been so whole and playful in their layers, drawing from diverse musical influences. Cave understands this; it’s no coincidence that the inscriptions you will see throughout the show are mostly ones of forceful command and astonishment, such as BRING YOUR SPIRIT DOWN or WHITE VAMPIRES. Rewarding as the catharsis is, its haunted undertones will linger with you long after you’ve left the venue. 

“Wild God” is the first true spectacle of the night, an ever-escalating choral hymn in which Cave questions the purpose of God himself, followed by the gentle tremor of “Song of the Lake”, a seemingly straightforward tune that suddenly pulls the rug from under you by referencing a nursery rhyme. “All the King’s horses and all the King’s men couldn’t put us back together again”, taken from the “Humpty Dumpty” nursery rhyme, transformed into an omen of caution consistent with the record’s tone. “Ah, never mind, never mind,” muses Cave at the end of most of the song’s verses, allowing the tortured to settle into the quotidian. 

An intermission with old favorites, namely an especially tender “O Children” – an especially bombastic, steroid-induced “Jubilee Street”, and “From Her to Eternity” (Cave’s ode to Berlin, where he wrote the song before the Berlin Wall fell) – are a welcome breather from the imposing openness of Wild God and the band is careful to alternate between old and new tunes. “Long Dark Night” and “Cinnamon Horses” are slightly more quiet triumphs, but the pounding in “Tupelo” (dedicated to Kris Kristofferson, who passed away the day before) and the blazing choir in “Conversion”, one of Wild God’s centerpieces, strengthen Cave’s pythonic grip on us.

“Bright Horses”, the only song of the night from 2019’s Ghosteen, an album dedicated to Cave’s grief over the death of his teenage son Arthur, is too much to bear, especially after more than an hour of intense purging. “Horses are just horses and their manes aren’t full of fire, the fields are just fields, and there ain’t no Lord”, a couple of rare heretic, matter-of-fact verses from Cave have me collapsing in sobs.

“Sat on a narrow bed, this flaming boy
Who sat on a narrow bed, this flaming boy
He said, ‘We’ve all had too much sorrow, now is the time for joy’”

Cave holds back his tears throughout. One can hardly imagine what he has gone through since losing two of his children (son Jethro died in 2022), and I would not even dare speculate, but Cave has been remarkably insistent on sharing his many thoughts and feelings on the subject with the public, culminating in Andrew Dominick’s 2016 documentary One More Time with Feeling and 2022 non-fiction book Faith, Hope and Carnage. 

The second half of the set is populated with the rest of Wild God (save for “Final Rescue Attempt”, for which I felt snubbed), a few more classics and several covers from Cave’s other projects. “Oh Wow Oh Wow (How Wonderful She Is)” is the simplest love song of the evening, an homage to Cave’s former partner and collaborator, Anita Lane, who passed away in 2021. This is accompanied by videos of Lane in Essaouira, Morocco, where she lived in the mid-1990s. “Carnage”, the title track from Cave and Ellis’ 2021 album, is a deceptively simple tribute to love, another one of Cave’s longing, ambiguous compositions that peak at the heart of a relationship through minutiae. “White Elephant”, the raw nerve of Cave’s recent opus, a calamitous, dichotomous track that starts off as a looming, threatening sermon (“I’ll shoot you all for free if you so much as look at me”, he hisses), then swerves into a psychedelic choir homily so pure and exalted it borders on the parodic (I’d say this is by design), is a fantastic, unexpected closer. 

The two encores dive into Grinderman’s softer moments with “Palaces of Montezuma”, immediately offset by the epic classic, “Papa Won’t Leave You, Henry”. “I wrote this song here in Berlin as I was putting my little child to sleep. There’s this tsunami of horror, but also a comforting rocking motion,” Cave half-jokes before he launches into this most beloved of the Bad Seeds tunes. “Henry Lee”, a tour debut with back vocals by Janet Ramus, is made all the more powerful by her thunderous alto, a burning antithesis to the quiet morbidity PJ Harvey imbued the song with in 1996.

“The Weeping Song” and “Into My Arms” are two more mellower crowd favorites, with the final song of the night again from Wild God, its closer and another one of its cautiously optimistic love letters to love itself, “As the Waters Cover the Sea”. And as the waters cover the sea, and as you wake and turn to me, peace and good tidings He will bring, good tidings to all things” rejoices Cave with the choir. It’s a fitting, heartfelt farewell, in line with night’s mood. Nearly two and a half hours in, there is a sense of exuberance but also of exhaustion, except Cave and his sidekicks look like they could easily go for much longer.

It’s redundant to say there are very few, if any, continuously working doyens of music whose output has been as praised and flat-out worshiped as Nick Cave’s. From his noisy punk roots with the Birthday Party, through the many incarnations of the Bad Seeds melodic aesthetic and beyond, staying on top of yourself and the world for nearly half a century while growing from a theater cabaret raconteur into a stadium-filling evangelist makes for a singular career in popular music. This tour is proof that no matter what Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds play, the result will be nothing short of wondrous. Perhaps most impressive is that, after all this time, the passion is not gone from the flesh and bones of these rare veterans; if anything, it burns as ferociously as ever, just in a palpably different form. 

However, there is one crucial thing that hasn’t changed over the years: Cave still needs God to deliver him, and we still need Cave to deliver us. The sins, hopes, and expectations may vary, but the longing for understanding and peace remains universal. As a preacher, a back-alley jester, or even a consumer’s matinee idol nowadays (he was invited to King Charles’ coronation and has a line of homeware, after all), Cave remains acutely aware of all this, never missing an opportunity to pry at our innermost fears with unmatched vigor. The baring of his thoughts and heart makes him a tortured poet, nearly a cliche, but his candor does away with any inkling of parody. Cave has always had a knack for surpassing stereotypes with brute lyrical and melodic force; adding delicacy and fear to the mix, something he’s leaned into heavily in the past decade, only makes the experience more real, paradoxically, also more corporeal. 

 His and his band’s method may be sadistically intense beneath the layers of expansive or visceral melodies, but the cleansing, the exorcism one can count on at a Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds concert (sermon) is unparalleled. The band known for asking the most difficult questions seems to have been exorcised themselves, up to a point at least – where there was doubt and violence, now love and grace flourish. It’s a curious step forward for a legend of blazing irreverence but a bold and most welcome one. Yesterday we sang an ode to carnage, today we sing an ode to joy. Let’s see what happens tomorrow when the two are reconciled.

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The Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds North American Tour begins April 14, 2025, in Boston.

Setlist

Frogs
Wild God
Song of the Lake
O Children
Jubilee Street
From Her To Eternity
Long Dark Night
Cinnamon Horses
Tupelo 
Conversion
Bright Horses
Joy
I Need You
Carnage
O Wow O Wow (How Wonderful She Is)
Red Right Hand
The Mercy Seat
White Elephant

Encore 1:

Palaces of Montezuma
Papa Won’t Leave You, Henry
Henry Lee
The Weeping Song

Encore 2:

Into My Arms
As the Waters Cover the Sea