9 March ‘08

Nick Cave entered from the right and departed the left. He wore a black suit and white shirt, had a head of receding black hair and a skinny black line on his top lip. Next to him on one side was an imp with a child’s guitar and a full beard. Anent the other were a four-tier keyboard and a mess of pedals, leads and amps. Behind him were two drum-sets, each sending claps of deranged thunder with the regularity of a heartbeat. The combined sound he and the Bad Seeds made was that which would ooze from a metallurgic pit. It was a rumble from the belly and a screech from the diaphragm, a clapper striking a white-hot bell that peals then recedes leaving the air ringing with vacuitous silence. The combined image he and his band presented was that of a demonic, writhing dance in Hades.

It was a fine concert, a messianic concert, a concert with music that is now etched in the brain with the tenacity of a drill-bit.

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds followed Dizzie Rascal, St Vincent, Jose Gonzales and others. In between acts a comedian desperately tried to gain mileage from hipster jokes. Desperately because the audience was as unidirectional as a torpedo; the only act of the night, as far as they were concerned, was the finale. Jose Gonzales, for example, singing with an acoustic guitar, was impotent against a restless, talkative crowd. And Dizzie Rascal, a stalwart member of the UK hip-hop scene, though impassioned and enthusiastic was about as relevant to the mainly thirty-something audience as African famine is to the world’s middle-class. Even worse were the Plug Music Awards—ostensibly the primary reason for the night—which, like the pre-Cave acts, were borne as necessary chore. The disinterest of the audience is perhaps understandable. Nick Cave is, after all, in the [animate] musical pantheon with the likes of Dylan, Cohen, Springsteen, Neil Young et al.

He is thick with history and has an oeuvre diverse enough to appeal to most demographics. As a performer he is a tall, lanky, apparition of a man, half demon half sprite. The music he produces, when he’s on form, is half heavenly, half ghoulish. And like all great art that is spawned in the conflict between good and evil, attraction and repulsion, love and hate, Cave’s music resonates with blinding energy and maniacal force. William Blake wrote that he ‘saw a mighty Devil folded in black clouds, hovering on the sides of the rock’ who with corroding fires wrote prophecies for those on earth. Nick Cave in his best moments is that devil on the rock, gorging on blood and bones and spitting out the fibrous innards. He is unrestrained and hedonistic. And so he should be, after all, ‘those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained’.

This week I head to Albuquerque, New Mexico for a ‘Fulbright Enrichment Seminar’. I do not know, yet, just how I will be enriched—reports from those currently at similar conferences in other parts of the country talk of mock elections, high-school talks, and dinners with local families… just the sort of contrived events that normally dominate such gatherings—but there’s always hope, I suppose. Next Sunday I arrive in New York at midnight, hire a car, fill it with gas and return to the heavy sky and sweeping horizon of Canada.