James Walton

Mourning glory

<p class="p1">The answer is triumphantly</p>

issue 07 October 2017

On the face of it, Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds aren’t exactly a natural fit with the O2. Cave’s songs range from the thrillingly cacophonous to the quietly lovely. But with their recurring themes of death, violence and religion, and a muse that rarely leads Cave in the direction of the mainstream, very few have ever seemed particularly arena-friendly. And that was before his latest album, Skeleton Tree, which forms the basis of his current tour — and which Cave completed after his 15-year-old son Arthur died falling from a cliff in Brighton.

Cave has warned against seeing the album as a direct response to the tragedy, emphasising that many tracks were written before it happened. Yet, while it’s true there are no explicit references to a child’s death, Skeleton Tree does open with the lines, ‘You fell from the sky/ Crash-landed in a field’ before serving up eight sparse, piercingly sad songs of loss, disorientation and yearning for the impossible return of a loved one.

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