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“I look like I’m dressed as a Mormon,” Nick Cave joked to the thousands of fans gathered at Fremantle Park on Saturday night after catching a glimpse of himself on the big screens.
Decked out in a charcoal-black suit, white shirt, and tie, Cave resembles an evangelical tent-revival preacher trying to whip his congregation into a religious fervour during the opening song Frogs from his latest album, Wild God.
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds perform at Fremantle Park on Saturday night.Credit: Brendan Foster
The song features an elegant arrangement and a transcendental, meditative flow that has characterised much of Cave’s work of late.
The 68-year-old slowly prowls the stage, touching his congregation’s hands, as the startling, tender, hymn-like tunes Wild God and Song of the Lake unfold.
With a Bad Seeds lineup that includes Radiohead’s Colin Greenwood (bass), Carly Paradis (keyboards), Larry Mullins (drums), Jim Sclavunos (percussion), trusty multi-instrumentalist Warren Ellis, and a four-member gospel choir, it’s hard not to be swept up in the sweeping choral arrangements.
But Cave’s shows are more than a rousing church procession. He’s soon rattling the bones of picnic-goers and blanket-dwellers with his visceral, glowing, gothic rock song From Her to Eternity from the band’s first album. The older fans who yearn for the post-punk, rockabilly and dirty blues sound of Cave’s earlier incarnation, The Birthday Party, are suddenly jolted awake.
But just when Cave’s ageing followers had dusted off their stove-pipe pants and leather jackets, the band gently slipped back into the hauntingly tender baroque songs from the album Wild God.
Pain, suffering and death have featured heavily in the singer-songwriter’s work of late, but optimism, faith and love are never far away in songs like Joy. The shimmering, haunting song reminds us that, despite moments of grief, joy lurks on the other side. Cave’s signature primal roar is awoken in the song Tupelo, from the outfit’s second album, The First Born Is Dead.
The track, which Cave admits he has been performing “at nearly every Bad Seeds concert since it was first written”, describes the birth of Elvis Presley during a heaving storm in Tupelo, Mississippi.
Cave might be the ultimate showman, but he doesn’t shy away from rolling out the crowd-pleasers from his last 18 studio albums.
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He unrelentingly parades around the stage again during the festival favourite Red Right Hand. Cave can still deliver the southern gothic song, which emerged from a jam session held by Cave and his long-term collaborator, Mick Harvey, and drummer Thomas Wydler.
The bands then launch into the theological masterpiece, The Mercy Seat. Even without Cave’s guttural growls, there’s enough menace in his voice to prevent it from tipping into a cabaret version.
Even though Cave and the Bad Seeds mainly delivered up two-and-a-half hours of rock-gospel hymns, there was still the haunting, bleak and noisy soundscapes of their earlier work.
There were the odd moments of imperfections, blips, and bum notes, but Cave’s Pentecostal-type explosive energy and the splendid rumbling sounds of the Bad Seeds disguised any minor flaws.
Whatever punters think of Cave’s anti-rock muses these days, his artistic evolution as a musician over the past 40 years is extraordinary.
His post-punk rage may have been replaced by babbling bible songs of love and hope, but given the world is a mess, who can blame him?
As he says in the song Joy: “We’ve all had too much sorrow, now is the time for joy.”
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