Up Jumped Nick Cave

By MIKA ROSS-SOUTHALL

Nick Cave is an oddball. His music, writing, performance – everything about him, or what we can make out about him, is a strange, intense mixture of menace, chaos, gentleness and self-mockery. We like him when he calls us “motherfuckers” and tells us to “fuck off”, as he did several times at the Royal Albert Hall on Sunday night. We cheered louder when he coolly threw his mic over one shoulder to resume playing the piano during a mesmerizing delivery of “Higgs Boson Blues” (poor – or lucky? – person in the front row who was caught by the flying mic stand). At one point, he invited a few members of the audience onto the stage, group-hugged them, and then abandoned them to continue parading up and down the aisles of the stalls, looming over us like a bird of prey, pointing in faces and touching heads as if granting absolution: “Can you feel my heartbeat? / I’m talking to you / My heart goes boom boom boom boom”. 

In 20,000 Days on Earth (2014), a docu-fiction film in which Cave plays himself, he says that rock stars must be “god-like”. And indeed he was on Sunday evening: from his haunting piano-solo ballads, such as “Water’s Edge”, which was introduced by Warren Ellis's (of the Bad Seeds) mournful violin, to Cave’s powerful whispers at the beginning of “From Her to Eternity” that impressively erupted into anarchic clashing chords and Thomas Wydler’s manic outbursts on the drums. On the first gleeful ding of the bell in the song “Red Right Hand” – the phrase is taken from Milton’s Paradise Lost – the entire auditorium was saturated in red light.

Reminders of early Cave came from a performance of “Up Jumped the Devil”. Here he brashly hammered on a comically tiny xylophone during the chorus (the sticks were also tossed over one shoulder). “This song was about being drawn into hell”, he told us before he began, “but I don’t believe in that anymore.” Maybe not, but his lyrics since then haven’t lost their (often playful) references to doom, death, the devil or the soul. Just a handful of examples from his set: in “Mermaids”, he sang, “I believe in God / I believe in mermaids too / I believe in 72 virgins on a chain”; in “Jubilee Street”, “I’ve got a foetus on a leash”; and in “Higgs Boson Blues”, one of his most fanciful tales, “If I die tonight, bury me / In my favourite yellow patent leather shoes / With a mummified cat and a cone-like hat”.

For the encore, as well as the beautifully elegiac “Push the Sky Away”, he sang a cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Avalanche”. “I saw him play here”, Cave said. “It was quite good.” There was a lot of endearing dialogue like this, especially between Cave and Ellis: “I can’t see you over there”, Cave called to Ellis halfway through the show, “it’s your beard”. (The lighting technician spotlighted Ellis from then on.)

“There’s something that happens on stage”, Cave tells us in 20,000 Days on Earth. “You’re transported and time has a different feel and you are just this thing and you can’t do any wrong. Then you look down the front row and somebody yawns. And the whole thing falls away and there’s just this schmuck . . . .”

Cave simmered and surged for nearly two and a half hours without a break on Sunday night. No one was yawning.