Rock music is rarely short of surprises, but there has been something genuinely unexpected about Nick Cave’s ascension over the past decade from cult star to arena headliner. More than a headliner, in fact: the Australian has become one of the great live performers, a crooning iconoclast who, at 68, combines the late-career soulfulness of Leonard Cohen with the ragged, freewheeling anarchy of Cave’s friend Shane MacGowan at his peak.
The horrible irony is that this renaissance has unfolded in the shadow of a double tragedy: the deaths of his teenage son Arthur, in 2015, and of his eldest child, Jethro, in 2022. Cave has unpacked those terrible losses in his music, most movingly on Ghosteen, his 2019 LP, on which he explores every nerve ending of his grief for Arthur yet somehow leaves listeners feeling better about love, life and their place in the world.
This unlikely rejuvenation culminated in Cave’s Wild God tour of 2024, which transposed his luminescent long-player of the same name to usually soulless enormodomes across Europe. Having attended two of them, I can attest to their bulldozing spiritually.
Even long-time Cave agnostics who believed a certain amount of shtick was mixed in with the cement will have been floored by the concerts, which gave a glorious gospel makeover to gnarly highlights from his catalogue and conveyed the meditative ache of the Wild God tracks.
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Cave wisely recorded one of his dates in Paris, and it’s now released as this stunning double album. Attendees at Accor Arena included an awestruck Bob Dylan, who took to social media (the least Bob Dylan thing ever) to proclaim his love for the gig. “I was really struck by that song Joy where he sings, ‘We’ve all had too much sorrow, now [is] the time for joy.’ I was thinking to myself, yeah that’s about right.”
Joy is a key track on Wild God: Cave interrogates the universal experience of travelling through the long dark tunnel of bereavement and not quite knowing what to do with yourself when you emerge at the other end. He has suffered the most any parent could, yet here he is, with this life that he must continue. How do you reckon with that?
The answer, which Cave stumbles towards in his lyrics, is to crack the shutter open and allow a sliver of daylight in. The idea that hope is worth clinging to in the darkest times is enormously powerful, and it gives this collection a clarity and a beauty that often verge on breathtaking – aided by the brilliantly stark recording, which conveys the scale and bombast of the Wild God shows.
Wild God pulls off the daunting balancing act of acknowledging that we live in a world of pain while encouraging the audience to count their blessings and embrace happiness when they find it.
That’s the message of the opening track, Frogs, a shape-shifting orchestral celebration of the miraculous in life (specifically a rain shower of frogs). It goes on to namecheck the country singer and actor Kris Kristofferson, a reference that has gained in poignancy in light of his death, in 2024.
The oldies shine angrily, too. Cave and his long-time collaborator Warren Ellis (violin, guitar, keyboards) scrape and holler through Tupelo, which reimagines the birth of Elvis Presley as a portentous Old Testament dirge, and gallop through Papa Won’t Leave You, Henry, a fire-and-brimstone belter.
[ Warren Ellis: ‘Marianne Faithfull always shot straight. Sometimes it hurt’Opens in new window ]
The solitary concession to the old carnival-barker hokum is Red Right Hand, forever ruined by its association with Peaky Blinders. (As with the rest of the performance, it features Colin Greenwood of Radiohead on bass.)
The Paris set finishes with As the Waters Cover the Sea, from Wild God – a fine tune yet one lacking the impact of Into My Arms. That great piano ballad pops up on Live God as the penultimate song, whereas in Dublin in November 2024 it made for a stark and emotive full stop.
The real surprise is the sublime White Elephant, a subdued digression when it featured originally on Carnage, Cave and Ellis’s brooding lockdown LP, from 2021. Here, fuelled by Ellis’s battered keyboard, it becomes a cathartic gospel juggernaut.
It really shouldn’t work, with Cave teetering on self-parody as he swears and declaims through the verses. But it is sublime as it opens out into an almost Wagnerian chorus, a cry in the darkness that fills the room with light and forms the rousing centrepiece of one of the great recent live albums.
