Went to see Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds play Wolverhampton Civic Hall...awesome.
Wasn't sure about Abbatoir Blues and The Lyre of Orpheus but live they make sense...Supernaturally has half the crowd hooping up the Hey! Ho! like a demented Jeff Beck discoteque...Get Ready For Love and There She Goes, My Beautiful World morph effortlessly from Nick by numbers album tracks to full throttled classics...in fact, all the new songs sound like standards...The Lyre of Orpheus begins things, the Bad Seeds already tight as hell, Nick spitting out lyrics that somehow rhyme 'Orpheus' with 'orifice' and everyone massing to yell out the O Mammas in Freudian choral echoes while Nick points his finger out at the dark, fingering a huge imaginary mollusc...
Five seconds in and you just know this is going to be amazing...
The Bad Seeds look like Nightmare Uncles turning up late at the wedding and dervish spinning to Elvis; you can hear the swish of their hair and the creaks in their bones, they don't seem separate from their instruments - Nick spends a fair amount of time gazing in awe and laughing; he knows he's onto a good thing with these guys...the torch songs and blues like Breathless and Babe, You Turn Me On and Easy Money are sunk and skeletal and so full of absolute belief that you can't help but be swept along... a few people keep yelling out for the classics - one guy yells 'Mercy Seat' every three minutes, touretting away like a stack-haired Goth but everyone else is transfixed, not caring what they play as long as they keep playing...
The Bad Seeds leave the stage and the crowd stomp in unison, demanding the songs we all know they're going to play...the encore is about 8 songs deep: The Weeping Song gets a cast of thousands, Red Right Hand drags the bottom of the well, tubular bells ringing like death knells...Henry Lee, God is in the house, City of Refuge rank up the tension until Stagger Lee erupts, drawn out from a quaking Nick, every 'motherfucker' reeking like spoilt whiskey...
But no, thanks to the dumb fuck in front of me, they never did get round to playing Mercy Seat...
These are just the album tracks unfortunately...
1 comment:
Looking at that pic, maybe you've found Pierce Brosnan's replacement ?
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