UAnd what did Nick Cave do in the pandemic? learned to play the harmonica. That was still missing in his range. Contrary to a prejudice to the contrary, rock’n’roll is not dead. Following the mercantile zeitgeist, it has only consolidated. The small animals have disappeared, what remains are the large conglomerates, which, like Abba, also appear as avatars if necessary. The Stones will soon be playing here in Berlin’s Waldbühne, at the final concert of their world tour, the first without Charlie Watts, which by their standards is almost an intimate club gig in front of 22,000 spectators.
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds also fill the glorious amphitheater next to the Olympic Stadium. It’s kind of a home game; Australian-born Cave lived here longer, on Dresdner Strasse am Kotti, still an irresistible magnet for night owls thanks to alcoholic institutions such as the Würgeengel. He composed his song “The Mercy Seat”, five minutes of pure energy, here, in a super inspired time called youth.
Cave greets Berlin a few times that night, making an effort to pronounce it like a local, which more or less works. Once he allows himself to be carried away into an excursus that is longer by his standards, in which he announces that Berlin is at its most beautiful when it’s “fucked up”. Berliners, who have been suffering from the increasingly unbroken beauty of their city for a long time, especially since it is accompanied by ever higher rents, bawl and raise their plastic cups of beer for nine euros (including deposit) in agreement.
In this tomb
So what does Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds have to offer? Punk like the Sex Pistols, ballads like sad ballad singers, religious ecstasy like Depeche Mode, elegance like Bryan Ferry, edification and quasi-La Ola kitsch like, well, actually just like Nick Cave. “Get ready to love,” sings this strange person at the beginning. One cannot avoid calling him a man of sorrows, no matter how much it hurts in the fingers that type these letters themselves, because it is usually a meaningless little word in exaggeration – but with Cave it is one hundred percent true. You could say it’s tailor-made for him, like his uniform of a dark suit with a vest over a white shirt with a Karl Lagerfeld commemorative collar and monstrous cuffs.
Up close: Nick Cave stormy in Berlin
Source: DAVIDS/Christina Kratsch
At seven o’clock in the grave’s garb he threw himself into a redeemer’s pose – the sun was still high and biting in the sky. Is he perhaps a vampire after all, just one well creamed against the deadly UV light? “Boom, boom, boom,” he calls out and sometimes taps his own chest three times in repeated gestures with the microphone. In there, he wants to say, a glowing heart beats. “Cry, cry, cry,” he usually adds, several times on this beautiful summer evening, no matter what song he’s singing. Followed by “All night long”. It may not be the right weather for nightmares, but Nick Cave is a world star that means he can take on the sun if need be.
On the other hand, playing in the open air suits him immensely. His at most semi-secular priesthood, the evangelical whipping of the soul, which he performs with the power and endurance of a dervish, only comes into its own against a cosmic background, which stretches from the stage roof to the end of the universe. “There are some people trying to find out why,” says the song “Hand of God,” which he’s about to perform, “There’s some people who aren’t trying to find anything/ But that kingdom in the sky. ‘ He, he probably wants to imply, belongs to the latter, to those who seek their salvation in faith.
That alone would be hard to bear, especially for the religiously unmusical among the 22,000. But Cave contrasts the Christian ecstasy with brutal banging and obscene explosions. The sound is so close to the noise limit that even a Neil Young would have trouble keeping up. That would not work in the Vatican.
The audience owes this on the one hand to the impetuous Cave, on the other hand at least equally to the multi-instrumental playing of the shaggy-bearded Rumpelstiltskin Warren Ellis, who switches without hesitation from the violin to the electric guitar to the wobbly lap keyboard. The sounds he elicits from any device are knee-deep even for atheists. A highlight that alone was worth the pilgrimage: the “Higgs Boson Blues” from the album of the century “Push the Sky Away”. The same applies to the song “Jubilee Street”, which you can listen to at the same place.
A few weeks ago, the international press announced the death of Cave’s first-born son. Another tragically fell off a cliff in Cave’s adopted home of Brighton a few years ago. That evening, the singer doesn’t say a word about it. What was he supposed to say? In fact, thirty years ago he began to confront the end of everything, it is the theme of his work. As it says in the great “The Mercy Seat”: An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, I’ve told the truth anyway, and I’m not afraid to die. Goosebumps at 26 degrees.