venue: Ljubljana / Dvorana Stožice / Slovenia
date: 30.10.2017
Nick Cave and his band of “bad seeds” long ago earned honorary Slovenian citizenship over their long and prolific career. He belongs to that handful of foreign acts, the elite, you could say, who are truly cherished and adored by the Slovenian music scene. And that’s despite the fact that he doesn’t come from the territory of the former common homeland, meaning the Balkans on the far side of the Kolpa. The man has played in Slovenia a few times already, but a dozen years had passed since his last visit, so plenty of people understandably missed Cave something fierce.
Tickets for the big Hala Tivoli melted away, which was to be expected. Given demand that simply refused to die down, the organizer decided to release just under a thousand extra tickets, and the concert was moved to a bigger venue, the Stožice arena. The upper stands stayed closed, though. When we found ourselves on the floor a little after eight in the evening, I felt like I’d landed in Zagreb’s Arena. A massive crowd had arrived for this show from neighboring Croatia, and they took up the vast majority of the front of the floor, where, even before Cave and his companions took the stage, you could feel the real adrenaline fever of pre-show euphoria.
And sure enough. The hall faded into blue darkness, the Bad Seeds were already standing on stage, setting the scene, and then Nick Cave climbed up last and ran right to the edge of the stage, where the stands and the floor erupted. High-pitched shrieks dominated the racket, at times reminiscent of waves of hysteria. From the screaming ladies, of course. Nick Cave, in his typical style, pulled the audience in at once. A statue of boundless sorrow, a contrite, broken heart sinking endlessly to the bottom in all its pain and longing.
A year ago, Cave released the new studio album “Skeleton Tree”. The title is no surprise. In mid-2015, his fifteen-year-old son Arthur died in a tragic accident. And so the tree, usually a symbol of the family, became Cave’s symbol of immense grief. “Skeleton Tree” is a powerful document, one of the strongest in his rich and prolific discography. The concert unfolded the same way. The album “Skeleton Tree” was the common thread, and Cave played the bulk of the material from it. As is already part of this artist’s stage folklore, Cave shook hands with fans in the front rows the whole time, at one point even climbing up into the stands, leaning on the hands of the crowd, sharing smiles, speaking words of encouragement to an audience that, as if spellbound, repeated the triumphant lines of Cave’s deep, piercing poetry right back at him.
Cave is of course a charisma without equal, but even so, the concert couldn’t have been experienced at full-blooded intensity without his backing band, the Bad Seeds, who have been a fixture for years and who put the dot on the “i” for the show. The name that stands out, of course, is Warren Ellis! He astonished again with his deeply felt playing, switching between a plethora of instruments. He handled the programmed loops, played synth, vibraphone, electric guitar, violin, and piano, and several times he went wild on stage, whirling into a proper shamanic dance. Especially when he was wielding the violin and the guitar. Besides Ellis, the stage was shared by acoustic guitarist George Vjestica, percussionist and vibraphonist Jim Sclavunos, drummer Thomas Wydler, and bassist Martin Casey.
Cave, whose performance proved once again that hardly anyone comes close to him in the sincerity of rapacious emotion and seething passion, is a master of incredibly intense, lived-in playing. With it he once again laid his heart bare and shared, without restraint, the whole emotional tangle of pain and love that glows inside the artist with his audience. In the middle of the show he sat down at the piano and played, among other things, a few universally beloved career peaks, such as The Ship Song, followed by Into My Arms, and The Weeping Song in the encore.
The concert worked like a mantra. Like a cleansing of soul and body, a total purification, so truly did Nick Cave and his crew pour their art into the stage theater itself. With his at times downright demonic magnetism, Cave pierced into the deepest and darkest corners of our souls. A true shepherd of souls. Short, concise movements full of minimalism, which, in their mutual dialogue of otherwise sacred simplicity, resound with biting, provocative and at times even bizarre force. They smash taboos and clichés and give music, as an art, a completely new qualitative component and an artistic dimension that’s impossible to pin down. The darkness of all darkness. Cave and the crew repeatedly built up layered soundscapes that, through repetition of just a few simple notes, created an extraordinarily gripping atmospheric backdrop, which the entranced audience communed with in total hypnosis. The sight of the whole venue was unbelievable. A solid two hours flew by in an instant. Simple as that. When someone stirs emotions in you, time and space no longer matter. Only the fusion with the energy we call music. And the awakener of souls and black sorcerer Nick Cave brought plenty of it to Ljubljana that night.
Nick Cave’s concert spectacle at Stožice can therefore be declared one of the highlights of this year’s live offering in Slovenia.
author: Aleš Podbrežnik
photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
setlist:
1. Anthrocene
2. Jesus Alone
3. Magneto
4. Higgs Boson Blues
5. From Her to Eternity
6. Tupelo
7. Jubilee Street
8. The Ship Song
9. Into My Arms
10. Girl in Amber
11. I Need You
12. Red Right Hand
13, The Mercy Seat
14. Distant Sky
15. Skeleton Tree
—dodatek—
16. The Weeping Song
17. Stagger Lee
18. Push the Sky Away
