Terrifically good value: Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds reviewed

A few years ago, I received an early morning phone call from Nick Cave’s former PR, berating me for not crediting his band the Bad Seeds in an album review. She was quite right. As Cave says, with a hint of paternal pride, during this powerhouse Glasgow show: ‘This band can do anything.’

It’s not just that the Bad Seeds’s task ranges from delicately enhancing the most nakedly exposed ballads to unleashing a raging firestorm of noise. It’s that supporting a performer as mercurial as Cave takes oodles of nous and empathy. He’s a wild thing, but they never once lose him.

Alternating between sitting at the piano and patrolling the apron of the stage, where he clasps countless hands and leers wolfishly into the pit, Cave brings to mind that volatile drunk left lingering at the fag-end of a house party: one minute slumped in maudlin despair, mumbling weird words about the girl that got away, the next sprung into antic life, unspooling manically, ranting about God. Which is to say, he is never less than terrifically good value.

Cave is touring his new record, Wild God. A couple of those songs feel stodgy, their religiosity and call-and-response gospel vocalisations verging on the formulaic. But Cave has reached the point where you suspect it doesn’t much matter what he plays. His energy, his engagement, his control, his complete commitment to being Nick Cave, brings everything into compelling focus.

Much of the older material – ‘Tupelo’, ‘From Her to Eternity’, ‘The Mercy Seat’ – are not so much songs as extended exercises in churning texture, allowing him free reign to rage and prowl. Hearing such visceral bloodletting in a shiny arena feels both strange and reassuring. ‘Red Right Hand’, the murderous blues song adopted as the theme tune to Peaky Blinders, has become a cheery singalong; ‘Into My Arms’ a modern hymn.