In the next few days Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds play Leeds, Glasgow, Manchester and London. There are still some tickets left. The price is reasonable but the price doesn’t matter when the band are unequivocally one of the finest of live acts. By whatever means you can, go.
When you get there, enjoy Nick Cave himself, of course. Prepare to be awed by ‘Tupelo’, converted by ‘Into My Arms’. Prepare to cry to ‘Girl in Amber’ and dance to ‘Stagger Lee’. Get ready to experience an assault on every one of your orifices by the impossibly loud and dark ‘Jubilee Street’.
‘I think you feel like you’re a young person until you accept that you’re old. And I don’t want to do that’
But also watch Warren Ellis. The best position to do this is by standing near the front, stage left. That’s where Ellis stands. Don’t worry about your distance from the front-man – Cave moves around plenty in the three-piece suits he’s worn forever, even when he was scoring heroin. It’s Ellis that you want to be near. Over the course of a show, he’ll play the violin, piano, guitar (some six strings, some five), electric keyboard, flute, perhaps even a mandocello. The first time I saw him on stage, he scared me. His dark glare makes him look like he’s sizing you up. He’s thin, always suited and is one of those bald men with long hair. His beard, stretching down to where his heart is, has a range of greys as magnificent as an Inverness sky. He writhes and jerks, hacks and saws at his violin, which is occasionally wired into an amplifier. He makes it sound like a plane’s engine during take-off when he really starts going for it.
He’s Cave’s co-writer, his right-hand man. He’s from a city called Ballarat in Victoria, Australia, which had a good gold rush. He started playing music after finding an accordion in the local tip. He went on to learn the classical violin, his first love. He got to know Cave when he was part of a string ensemble that played on his album Murder Ballads (1995). His role grew over the next three decades, to the point where he and Cave are as creatively symbiotic as two musicians can be – and best friends. Now, 30 years later, they’re on tour for the Wild God album, which came out in August.
I spoke to Ellis on Zoom with some trepidation. I thought he’d have one of those scary Tom Waits voices and demeanours. Silly me. Ellis is an unassailably nice man who has spent his recent years setting up an animal sanctuary in Indonesia. A chirpy Australian accent greets me.
‘This record – Wild God – is a wild shift from Ghosteen,’ Ellis says, referring to the Bad Seeds’ last album in 2019. Ghosteen brought to an end a remarkable run of three albums that started with 2013’s Push the Sky Away, followed by 2016’s Skeleton Tree. At the time – as Sam Leith wrote in these pages – Cave went through a ‘detonation of grief’, when his 15-year-old son Arthur died in an accident in 2015. Skeleton Tree (despite mostly being written before Arthur’s death) and Ghosteen are not, as a GQ headline said, ‘haunted’ by the death of his son, but the albums are, as Cave himself says, inescapably Arthur-touched and Arthur-contained.
Wild God is, in Ellis’s words, an ‘about face from Ghosteen’ in more ways than one. First, the lyrics. In the song ‘Joy’, a ‘ghost in giant sneakers’ comes to visit Cave, and says: ‘We’ve all had too much sorrow, now is the time for joy.’ It is in other words, despite everything, an uplifting album. Ellis says that ‘the time to make a record like this could only be decided by how Nick was feeling’. Wild God is maximalist in its ambition, and maximalist in its sound, with the full band – drummer, bass, guitar, keys – back in the creative fold. The past three albums had seen them somewhat step back to serve the sound, with Ellis taking principal control of the music. Cave himself said that ‘Push the Sky Away is the ghost-baby in the incubator and Warren’s loops are its tiny, trembling heartbeat’. ‘I remember Tommy [Wydler] was trying to play drums on Ghosteen,’ says Ellis, ‘and he was the one who just said eventually that it didn’t need it and it wasn’t working.’
Ellis disputes my suggestion, however, that this album is in any way heavier than what’s come before. ‘I think Ghosteen is an incredibly heavy record, sonically,’ he says. ‘I find more minimalistic stuff way more powerful.’ We’ve got our conceptions of what is hardcore all wrong, he adds. ‘Look at Gorecki’s Third Symphony. You don’t have to make the usual moves to make something heavy. It’s all about perspective.’
His own perspective is still malleable. So many artists – because they’re human – become more conservative with their creativity as they age, and usually, that means they get worse. That’s obviously not true for the 67-year-old Cave or the 59-year-old Ellis, whose current output is madly ambitious. ‘I’m still just attracted to the things that don’t sound like anything else that I’ve done before,’ he says. ‘That doesn’t seem to have changed all my life.’ I ask him if the creative process requires keeping an avenue open to the fearless, stupid, playful, childhood brain. He sees it as an act of will: ‘I think you feel like you’re a young person until you accept that you’re old. And I don’t want to do that. It changes how you engage in the world. My father was 90 when he died, and he was curious up until the end. I see it with Nick too.’ Having said that, the Bad Seeds’ schedule is anything but playful. Cave says he approaches songwriting like an office job. He starts at 9 a.m., finishes at 5.30 p.m., and takes a lunch break. Ellis says that he’s taken some inspiration from that: ‘When I wrote my book, I actually listened to what Nick said to me. He said: “You’ve just got to sit down and do it.”’
What does he think about AI, and the idea that all of that struggle can be bypassed by some good prompt engineering? He is emphatic: ‘What’s central to anything creative is that it’s made by humans. People talking about the turmoil they go through to make it, a whole day going by feeling like you’re worthless. Any creative act is a deeply and profoundly human instinct.’ He says ‘thank God’ AI hasn’t managed to capture the noise of a ‘40-piece orchestra starting up in a room – there is nothing like it on this Earth’.
Ellis says the Wild God tour is going to be a ‘tour for the ages’. I was looking through the set lists from the early shows the other day. Such is the continuing brilliance of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, and the fact that after almost four decades they are still so fiercely contemporary, I found myself thinking something no one ever thinks when going to see a band: I hope they play lots of the new stuff.
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds are on tour until 15 November.
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