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Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – Live

By Stewart Lee in The Sunday Times Posted on Thursday, May 8th, 2008

Promoting the uncharacteristically accessible Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! album, Nick Cave’s back with The Bad Seeds. The elegantly dishevelled interncontinental post-punk supergroup assembled a quarter century ago after the collapse of Cave’s breakthrough Melbourne group, The Birthday Party. Tonight the septet’s fifty year old front man valiantly defeats the onset of middle-age by adopting a look that is on the verge of adsurdity. His huckster hairstyle and tight Wild West pants defiantly challenge you to find him ridiculous, like a local eccentric who regualrly arrives at the pub dressed as Doc Holliday and recently had his replica six guns confiscated by a community police officer. Few men could carry this look off. Nick Cave is already ahead on points.

Cave is flanked by two key players. Stage right stands his Horatio, his lieutennant of thirty years, the multi instrumentalist Mick Harvey, who seems grimly professional throughout. Stage left is his fool, the violinist Warren Ellis, looking like a seafaring Alan Yentob who has been abandoned on a desert island by disgruntled fellow pirates. The newly guitar-toting Cave’s emergence from behind the piano he somberly sat at throughout his forties means there’s now a lack of any discernable lead instrument in The Bad Seeds’ sound, save the occassionally plucked strings of Ellis’ violin. When the ensemble do stretch out to fill the spaces, they tend to respond not with genuinley inspired improvisations, but, as in tonight’s storm tossed version of Tupelo, with simple but effective shifs in textural density or rhythmic intensity. The group are at their best during the flailing free-form sections sneaked into the breakdowns of We Call Upon The Author, Ellis riding its krautrocking throb as if electrocuted. But the Velvet Underground groove of More News From Nowhere reveals their limitations. When the mighty lead pendulum of this incarnation of the Seeds fails to swing they have little to fall back on, and things can drag.

When Cave pruned his Seeds into the garage-rock quartet of Grinderman last year, critics said it represented a rebirth. But Grinderman only made explicit the sharp end of a stylistic spread always implicit in the prolific polymath’s canon, giving journalists something new to say in the thirty year narrative of Nick Cave. Tonight, with high kicks, catwalk wheels, greatest hits like the clanging Red Right Hand for the dabblers, and relative obscurities for the faithful, Cave is committed both to entertaining the crowd and expanding their horizons. He is at last the anti-Elvis of his teenage dreams, and his dissolute image conceals a canny survivor’s instinct. Luckilly for us, Nick Cave seems to be figuring out a way of becoming immortal.

Written by Stewart Lee in The Sunday Times on 8th May 2008. Filed Under: Written For Money
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