Nick Cave - Canberra Theatre Centre

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nick Cave

Canberra Theatre Centre

28 November 2022

 

I used to see Nick Cave everywhere. When the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra opened, they seemed to have only one painting.  A graffiti portrait of Nick Cave.  It became a bit of a joke between my wife and me. “There’s bloody Nick Cave again”. Every exhibition seemed to find a way to jam in that Nick Cave painting. 

 

The thing was that neither of us liked Nick Cave.

He was never really my thing. It’s not even that he did nothing for me.  I actively disliked him. I always thought that he was just too pretentious. I felt that he was an artist I should have liked but didn’t. Every artist that I like cite him as an influence but he left me cold.  However, one of the things that occurred in lockdown was that I re-evaluated his back catalogue. The excellent Skeleton Tree album was the gateway which then lead me to explore his entire back catalogue.  A strange thing happened.  I first started to admire his work and then I slowly started to really like it! 

 

Seeing him at the Canberra Theatre was a revelation.  It’s a bit of a cliché to say that Nick Cave is like a preacher from an alternative secular universe.  But he certainly brings a religious fervour to his performance.  It was mesmerising.  The performance was very much like being in a church in the deep south where all the emotions that a human can experience have free reign to be expressed.  Not only sadness and grief, but surprisingly joy, levity and wicked humour were also on display. 

 

His latest albums deal with the tragic loss of his son and the show leant heavily on this material. If on record the songs seem like they have the most personal lyrics imaginable, in a live setting the slight changes of delivery bring them to another level.  The holding onto notes and emphasising certain lines make you feel you are literally watching someone process the grief that losing a child must bring.  It is almost too much to bear witness to.

 

There were other moments where you felt you were in the presence of an evangelist preacher and you didn’t want to do anything that might break the spell and others where you felt like if this charismatic front man would ask for your soul, you would willingly give it to him.  Yes, it was that powerful. 

 

It feels like a cliché to say that I’m converted.  But nothing about the performance was a cliché.

 

I feel that I’m a new convert to the Church of Nick.