Bob Dylan banned the use of mobile phones at his concerts in Prague two weeks ago. Singer Nick Cave put on such a powerful show this Thursday that people forgot about them. Sometimes, of course, someone took out the device and filmed a few seconds. But probably to make sure in the morning that it didn’t happen to him.
In Prague’s O2 arena, none of the rumors about the largest Czech roofed hall were true. The sound was so clear that if Nick Cave’s cufflink fell off his shirt in his carefully tailored jacket, even the back rows would hear it. That it is an isolated, cold space? The singer turned the multifunctional hall with an ice rink hidden under the floor into a cathedral of humanity.
At the same time, it was not a community experience. Everyone seemed to be experiencing the performance deep inside themselves, viscerally connected to the songs. Among them, people did not whisper, hug, or sing together.
“I’m changing / vibrating / shining / flying,” Cave sings in the finale of the hit Jubilee Street, as The Bad Seeds roar behind him. The song was already released on the Push the Sky Away album in 2013, but now Cave is transforming, vibrating and shining before everyone’s eyes. “Look at what I look like,” he shouts.
He looks happy, at the peak of his strength, and around 15,000 people are watching him intently. He is sold out in Prague, which is common on the current European tour. In about two and a half hours, all shades of life will be covered. From the darkest to those for whom white is not enough.
When someone leaves
Nick Cave treats art like magic and is dead serious about it. His lyrics not only remain relevant regardless of the date of creation, they sometimes become cruelly fulfilled.
Nick Cave turned Prague’s O2 arena into a cathedral of humanity. | Photo: Lukáš Bíba
“I wrote this song at home in Brighton, watching my sons play in the garden,” he says on 2004’s O Children. “I wrote it about the world we as adults prepare for our children,” he explains, after turns red.
When the Australian native moved to the cold coast of Great Britain around the turn of the millennium, he sometimes despaired of the weather there. In order to at least symbolically tame the wild scenery outside the windows of the Brighton house, he began to write about them every day. He felt that the climate controlled the strokes of the pen in the journal.
In the 1990s, he wrote his fantasies and feelings into murderous ballads, hiding behind the masks of murderers and outcasts. He danced around death for so long that it touched him. “You fell from the skies and crash-landed near the river Adur / Flowers sprouted from the ground,” he wrote just months before his 15-year-old son Arthur fell off a cliff to his death in 2015. In that moment, everything changed.
A tragic event caught the musician while working on the Skeleton Tree album. In Prague, he is remembered with the heartbreaking piece I Need You. “It doesn’t matter at all when one of the loved ones leaves,” he repeats over the drawn-out synth beats handled by bandmate Warren Ellis.
The first recording, which was created completely after the death of the son, was the surprisingly meditative Ghosteen. Set in a kind of alternative vacuum, the 2019 record represents Cave’s first attempt at reconciliation. Bright Horses chose it in Prague and it is another exceptional moment.
The musician Carly Paradis, who provides the keyboard instruments on the tour, sits behind the grand piano. Cave comes to the edge of the stage again. “The train’s coming and I’m standing here to see it well,” he sings in a song built around a repetitive piano melody, already obscured by the hazy sound of synthesizers and the voices of a four-piece choir. Cave firmly holds the hands of the fans in the front rows while singing.
He experiences the loss of loved ones again and again, night after night, because his other son died the year before. As if there was no other way to process grief. “I feel like someone in my family just died,” he says on new song Joy, which breaks into a joyous opus in the second half.
People clasp hands with the sixty-seven-year-old Cave all the time. Not out of nostalgia, but because they feel they understand their fears and pains. As if he could heal.
The song Red Right Hand, as Nick Cave sang it this Thursday in Prague. Photo: Lukáš Bíba | Video: Jiří Pelikán
Birth of a King
His concerts were never just a harrowing and harrowing catharsis. After half a century, he acts as a casual showman on stage. “Dyk? Is that really what it’s called?” he is amazed when he learns from the audience that the spoken version of “thank you” in Czech sounds like the English term for penis. “I can’t wait to use this at home,” he says amused. When he later introduces his closest bandmate with the words “Warren Ellis, dyk,” he breaks into a fit of laughter like he’s seventeen, and takes a moment to return to rock bon vivant.
“Oh, little boy,” Cave says another time, before leaning toward the forest with outstretched arms. “This kid is like nine years old,” he explains as he signs something. “Especially don’t sell the record on eBay,” he adds.
This time in Prague, Nick Cave did not resemble a preacher. | Photo: Lukáš Bíba
Almost the entire current album Wild God is played in Prague, he plays nine songs out of ten. The rest of the nearly two-and-a-half-hour set is made up of songs from throughout his career, one from each album.
From his debut From Her to Eternity, which was released 40 years ago in May, he chose the edgy title composition. On the stage of the O2 arena, a claustrophobic cabaret takes place depicting the state of a person just before a nervous breakdown.
At Tupelo, Cave transforms a Vysočan hall into an arid small town somewhere in the American Mississippi. Rather than an excursion to the birthplace of Elvis Presley, about whose birth the song tells, it is a fever dream taking place in a kind of storm. The band plays perfectly, the composition sounds like a delirious incantation accompanying the birth of the king of rock and roll. But Elvis is dead, Nick Cave reigns in Prague.
In the same font that he used on the cover of the album Wild God, fragments of the lyrics are displayed on the giant projection screen. Under the lights and effects, they act like messages from another world and underline the power of the message.
The members of the band Bad Seeds carefully weigh every movement, touch of a string, strike of a keyboard or hi-hat, which is part of the drum kit. On the other hand, if something doesn’t weigh, it’s emotions. The lightness of reconciliation is the red thread of the current album with a white cover. With its release, it was as if Nick Cave had finally found peace. This time in Prague, he does not resemble a preacher. It shows that life can be beautiful. Despite everything it brings.