All Photo Credits: Dougal Gorman
Andrew McLean
Grief worker and author Francis Weller writes that if we are to be transformed by our grief, our stricken hearts require the container of communal ritual, a village of holding hands and keening mouths to participate in and metabolise our grief.
As I leave the open field of the Domain, the botanical gardens looming behind the exit gate, I am reminded of Weller’s insight. A young man wrapped in denim, laying with his head rested against his partner’s chest, stares at the night sky, forlorn and exhausted. At the Art Gallery, a barefoot woman splayed on the marble bank of a wishing well rests waiting for a taxi.
Perhaps it is Cave’s ability to transform an arena into a container for grief that explains the almost universal belovedness of his live shows, wherein metaphors of conversion and religious experience abound.
Unlike the first time I saw him live at Hanging Rock, when the tragic death of his son was so near at hand you could practically see him there, perched upon the piano, this time Cave delved into the wider emotional repertoire of the Bad Seeds, into the territory of rapture and deliverance. His latest album, Wild God (of which he is touring), seems to reach ecstatically towards the heavens, an eschatological vision of redemption.
Watching him perform it on stage with the moon and stars sheening overhead, it’s as if some heavenly realm might glimpse through the clouds afterall, through sheer carnal intimacy with the naked world.
In the Sunday rain / Amazed to be back in the water again / Frog-marching us home to a bed of tears. He sings in the opening track, Frogs.
In Bright Horses, Cave sings, “We are all so sick of seeing things as they are.”
On that night, the crowd, rather than seeing things as they are, perhaps glimpsed things as they might be, on the other side of deliverance. Cave creates an opening in which something new might rush in, a world in which crowds fulls of people weep together in open fields, as when a woman in the front fainted and fell into the arms of those behind her. As Cave’s Wild God with “long trailing hair”, puts it:
it starts with the heart
With the heart.
To find information and tickets for the rest of Nick & the Bad Seeds Australian tour, visit: https://www.nickcave.com/news/bad-seeds-australia-new-zealand-tour/.
Andrew McLean lives on unceded Wangal land and is currently writing a novel as part of a PhD program with the University of Sydney.
