Live at First Direct Arena, Leeds 3rd November 2024
This was a spiritual experience; journeying through Cave’s deceptively simple songs and adding further depths through the intense focus of Cave’s attention. I already knew him as a magnetic performer in mid-sized venues but here, in a 13,000 capacity arena, somehow his charisma reaches the balconies and everyone present takes an emotional rollercoaster.
Emoting furiously, lurching suddenly, running up and down the proscenium or clutching the hands of the front rows, it isn’t possible to take your eyes off Cave. And, though he feels it all deeply, he’s also planned carefully so he doesn’t do all the vocal heavy lifting – the four-piece backing chorus ends lines or does call and response. The rapt audience supplies some of the lyrics too.
The energy pouring off Nick matches the lazer focus but is lifted to a gospel intensity by the use of the chorus and the ten-piece backing band, who provide a Screamadelica-era Primal Scream depth. With the wayward excellence of the Bad Seeds enhanced by Radiohead’s Colin Greenwood, extra keys, extra percussion, chimes, glockenspiel, the sound is immense. The drumming is, of course, jazzy and imaginative and percussion plays a substantive part, frequently in the piano work.
Warren Ellis is Nick Cave’s foil and a major focus of eyes and ears. Found rocking back and forth or leaping or standing on his chair, Cave introduces him as “the deeply humble Warren Ellis”, following a bravura crowd-pleasing bout of showing off. It’s then that Cave spots an audience member cosplaying Ellis in wild hair and beard wigs. Moments like this show Cave’s legendary connection – not only hand-holding the front row and occasionally leaning on them, but regularly speaking direct to the balconies. Reaching to one man he says, “my brother, how have I not met you before”. To another group he says “I bring something out in you guys”. Fielding requests gracefully, he avoids the catch to arena shows – you have to stick to the setlist thanks to the lighting logistics.
And what a setlist! Covering most of the new album, it roams through old and new, dropping in one song each from so many albums and, such is the simplicity of the composition and clarity of the sound, it doesn’t matter if you’ve heard the song once or a hundred times; the emotional truth is there. A song like ‘Tupelo’, built on the fable that there was an epic storm the night Elvis was born, would be overwrought nonsense in anyone else’s hands yet Cave builds the intensity out of simplicity till it becomes a foundational tale.
‘Joy’, from the new album, feels like the emotional keystone to the show, setting out the need for joy amongst the dark night experienced elsewhere in the set and elswhere in lives. It becomes a hymn to self-redemption through deliberate belief, like the next song, ‘I Need You’. We can create ourselves through choosing beliefs and actions. In another life, skinny, energetic Cave would be a preacher. The show rolls on into ‘Carnage’ (“It’s only love, rolling down the mountain like a train”) and the emotional momentum builds and builds. When the main set ends, I’m amazed I’ve been listening for two hours – and then there are the encores, ending tenderly with the solo piano ballad of “’Into My Arms’.
I normally hate big venues but tonight, Nick Cave has made a big venue intimate.
