A homecoming show of sorts for Nick Cave, an emotionally charged experience for the performer, who has deep-running roots in the area. From the first song, Get Ready for Love, Cave and The Bad Seeds make clear their infatuation with the seaside city. What a place it is, too. With Pride just around the corner and a heatwave that has cooled just a touch in the coastal area, it couldn’t be a better time to catch the Australian rocker and his long-serving band. Preston Park proves a suitable place for Cave, with the city lacking a venue big enough to hold the sold-out crowd. Is a VIP section the right place to experience a gig? No, not at all. But there we were. There Cave was. Noah Taylor, too, presumably rifling through the bathroom supplements box as we did. Thanks for the gum. It’s a triumphant homecoming show from the 68-year-old songwriter, who hasn’t lost a moment of energy in his decades as a performer.
Cave has an abundance of hits and picks from those carefully throughout this 19-song set. Get Ready for Love and From Her to Eternity serve as excellent set openers, crowd pleasers that both test the mood and highlight the thrills of long-serving instrumentalist Warren Ellis. Extravagant and emboldened interpretations of his best works continue, and the band sounds ready to take a few risks with the likes of Train Long-Suffering and a Kylie Minogue-featuring Where the Wild Roses Grow. It’s a surprise Murder Ballads performance which has rarely featured in Cave’s sets of late, and it works as a wonderful reunion for the Australian performers. A shame they didn’t roll out Death is Not the End, but getting a monumental Minogue-featuring moment before a stretch of all-time great hits from Cave is the calm before the storm that so few artists know how to sail through. Cave’s strength on his last UK tour was the new album, Wild God, but two years on from such a release and he’s back to breathing new life into his biggest songs.
You can feel the change in the air as The Mercy Seat kicks into effect. Those hands clawing at Cave from the crowd, this figurehead of spirituality that Michael Jackson had tried and failed to capture, come to Cave earnestly, and he repays the dedication with a suggestive stage presence. He is one of the great frontmen of his era and remains as much on the Preston Park stage. There’s the obvious emotional connotation, the “dark cloud” as Cave once called the overhang of Skeleton Tree and the tragedy surrounding it and extending into his time in Brighton, but it makes no showing on stage. A teary Cave at the piano in those early moments with O Children and Joy is replaced by a roaring frontman keen to stand on the palms of the crowd for Papa Won’t Leave You, Henry and to toy with the chimes of Red Right Hand. Cave, much as he was in Leeds last year, is a treat of a stage presence.
His songs, even the latest works, have cemented themselves as essentials over these last few years. Joy, Rings of Saturn, and Wild God, are exceptionally well-written, brilliantly performed pieces that get to the core of Cave and The Bad Seeds’ last decade of work. They’re not just contemporary stock, they’re as lived-in as the rest of those classics littering the setlist. But then he digs that little deeper, into the likes of Jubilee Street which no doubt many of the 50,000 attendees walked along on their way to the gig, or the surprise turn of Hollywood, a Ghosteen song Cave and the band only saw fit to perform from last year onwards. What goes through his mind when assembling a setlist is impossible to know but the joy of being back in his hometown of so many years is not lost throughout this performance. Many of these songs rely on spirituality and these feelings of losing yourself, or a loved one, and how you then deal with it. They’re morose and morbid, but they’re adapted into the instrumental thrills expected of a blistering, sunny day in Preston Park. Credit to English Teacher too for a setlist that nearly stole the whole day.
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