Nick Cave: a majestic concert in Barcelona | Culture

If the drugs are bad, the ones he consumed in his years of lead must have been very good. If the death of those close to him sinks, the Australian must have been very emotionally submerged to emerge with such determination. If old age weakens, it still does not seem to have dented the vigor of an artist who yesterday, suited, thin and expansive, navigated between slaps and caresses, subduing with his music for two and a half hours the public that filled three quarters of a Sant Jordi who adjusted his capacity with a curtain to the convening power of a splendid and dominating Nick Cave. From start to finish, from Frogs to Into My Arms, alpha and omega of an overwhelming, torrential concert of an unusual intensity for a 67-year-old gentleman who has not precisely spent his time meditating. With his Bad Seeds, six musicians with a notable accent on percussion, four choristers to bring the embers of hell to the incense of the church and Warren Ellis with his airs of an urban druid in the style of a violin torturer, Nick Cave was overjoyed. That which does not kill can strengthen. Yes to him.

Two extremes taken at random, there were many others in a concert of varying intensity exposed between electric tension and spiritual solemnity. Pieces six and seven, From Her To Eternity and Long Dark Night. A tense, urgent, tense one, with a voice that has been spit on since the eighties when he signed her with his Bad Seeds. Voltage and electricity. Another slow and from this year, led by Cave’s piano, airs of classic repose, of a balladeer Elvis and almost crooner intonation with the support of the four voices, three female, one male, to pause the storm unfolding like a mantra secular, a godless gospel intoning “my poor soul was having a dark night.” Two sides of life and music in songs that followed each other like a stormy day precedes a sunny one, while the audience got wet under the deluge of a Cave who spent a good part of the concert walking through a narrow hallway parallel to the mouth of the stage that allowed him to play and be touched by the audience, biblical waters on which he seemed to walk. It was rock, it was gospel, there was electronic music, a little blues and always a lot of passion, an incorruptible tension, a cataract of changing sensations to not stop believing in the owner of that elongated face framed by hair and whose forehead could not fit in the Mt. Ruhsmore.

His last album, Wild God, It occupied a good part of the repertoire, which covered his practical musical life. But still there were no leaps, there was no interruption in the majestic waste of energy of an artist in vein, expansive and if possible even too flattering, repeating ad nauseum with his gaze on his faithful that they were beautiful, impelled to sing, to clap his hands, to hold his figure such that that Locomotive that the oldest people in the place remembered leaning beyond its center of gravity without falling. Nick Cave was not supported by a fixation on his feet like the television character, but by the arms of his followers, in which there was something as symbolic as one of them holding the microphone while he sang so that he could gesture with both hands. . They would have gone to hell itself for Nick Cave while he took them to a heaven where they found Anita Lane, a deceased former partner of The Bad Seeds to whom he dedicated the beautiful and slow O Wow O Wow (How Wonderful She Is) who opened the first encore bringing to mind Kurt Wagner who used the vocoder at the time Flotus.

Altogether 22 compositions soberly displayed on a stage with three screens that remained only on one, the central one, when Nick Cave played the ballad on the piano. I Need You. He would be left alone in front of the piano again in the final Into My Armsbeautiful farewell that allowed many couples to hug each other. At all times the visual weight fell on him, jumping, running, knocking over microphones, in transit between piano and stage mouth. Also in Ellis and his high-pitched voice, like when he opened Bright Horsesor like when he used his bowless violin in Tupelo or like when he blew kisses to the crowd almost as if they were tender stones the size of his rings. To Cave’s left was his crutch. A Cave speller of words, stressing each syllable as he mumbled them, speeding up English phonetics as when in Conversion He pronounced a “stacked stones” that must have cracked the membrane of the microphone with the stones that had been stacked for centuries that the song mentions. Ages. We do not live them, fleeting as we are despite packaging of ridiculous and minuscule greatness. Even with everything, Nick Cave told us, this Friday he will do it again in Madrid, that life has many beautiful twists and turns and that it itself can rise from death, a life whose wounds music helps heal. You have to squeeze that life while it lasts, a recurring idea at funerals, also yesterday at Nick Cave’s vital concert. Someone might also believe that drugs help you reach almost seventy like a brush of raven hair, but it’s better not to believe that.