Nick Cave

No futuristic stage. No strobe-light show worthy of Pacha in Ibiza. No screen as tall as a three-storey building. No flames or pyrotechnics. No guest act with a single to promote, let alone a troupe of dancers worthy of a Broadway musical. Just a plain black backdrop, essential lighting, a grand piano and a bass. There's no need for special effects or glittering filler when you have two artists of the calibre of Nick Cave and Colin Greenwood (bassist of Radiohead, ed.) on stage, who last night enchanted the Cavea of the Auditorium Parco della Musica in Rome for nearly two and a half hours, on the second Roman date of the Warracknabeal bard's tour.

Nick Cave's poetics draw their lifeblood from the tension between opposites — life and death, love and fear, redemption and damnation — making him a kind of Caravaggio of modern blues, supremely skilled at conjuring melodic flashes of extraordinary clarity out of the most desolate darkness. Very few artists possess the charisma, communicative power and intensity of the Australian singer-songwriter, without question one of the greatest frontmen in rock history. There was great curiosity to see him perform without the reassuring wall of "Spectorian" sound provided by the Bad Seeds, the supergroup that (despite various line-up changes) has backed him on stage since way back in 1983, relying instead solely on the support of bassist Colin Greenwood. Anyone who has had the good fortune to see Nick Cave live knows well that the live setting is the privileged space where the artist reveals his two souls, the incendiary and the intimate, creating a disorienting alternation of emotions that only the greats of rock are capable of.

Naturally, on this intimate, acoustic tour, the punk rage that has always characterised his performances is absent, as is the almost carnal relationship that forms between Cave and his disciples, with a wall of hands constantly reaching out to seek him and touch him, as if in messianic anticipation of a revelation from this charismatic, unpredictable secular preacher. A concert of nearly two and a half hours of voice and piano, with the discreet but effective presence of Greenwood's bass, could prove fatal for most contemporary artists, but not if your name is Nick Cave. With long, glossy black hair, invariably dressed in black, his face gaunt and pale, his gaze dark and intense, Cave once again proved himself an extraordinary frontman, naturally endowed with a magnetic charisma that allowed him to take the audience wherever he wanted and hold them spellbound for two hours without a single moment of boredom or dip in intensity.

What struck us most about the concert was the contrast between the almost religious silence that accompanied most of the songs in the setlist (except for those in which he explicitly invited the audience to join in) and the thunderous roar that greeted each and every one of his songs, with many spectators rising to their feet to applaud him. A few days ago we attended a concert at the Stadio Olimpico (we won't name it, out of patriotic decency) where for most of the time the audience filmed the stands on their phones, took endless selfies and did Instagram livestreams, paying almost no attention to the songs at all. Last night there were very few phones lighting up the Cavea of the Auditorium Parco della Musica (except towards the end, when Cave invited the audience to join him in front of the stage), because the crowd's focus was entirely on the performance and the songs. Last night's concert reconciled us with live music, where every word of a song carries weight, every note played is necessary, every gesture serves the meaning of the piece.

Nick Cave and Colin Greenwood walked out at 9:15pm, greeted by a standing ovation from the Cavea's front rows. The first jolt of the evening came with "Higgs Boson Blues", a classic from his repertoire with the Bad Seeds: slow, measured and hypnotic, the song recalls the finest ballads of Neil Young, its mantra "boom boom boom, can you feel my heartbeat?" repeated with the fervour of a Baptist preacher. Nick took the microphone and stood up to greet the warm crowd: "I'm just back from a long, exhausting tour of the US with the Bad Seeds, which involves a lot of people. For me, being here alone with Colin is like a decompression holiday in the most beautiful country in Europe: we're on holiday, and in the evening we play. With piano and bass, my songs go back to the original form in which they were written, returning them to their raw essence."

Nick loves telling the stories behind his songs: "'Jesus Of The Moon' tells the story of a boy who leaves his girlfriend alone in a hotel: he feels happy and free, but after a while he starts to wonder if he's made a terrible mistake. I wrote 'O Children' while watching my kids play when they were little, feeling like I wasn't able to protect them." Before playing "Galleon Ship", Cave recalled writing the song "inspired by my wife while she sleeps: she always falls asleep while I'm composing at the piano." Regarding "Papa Won't Leave You, Henry", the Australian singer-songwriter recalled writing it "thirty years ago while I was living in Brazil. Terrible things were happening there at the time, and I used to sing this song to get my son to sleep, and it worked."

Among the most moving moments of the concert were "I Need You" and "Skeleton Tree", both written in 2016, shortly after the tragic death of his son Arthur, who fell from a steep cliff near Brighton at just fifteen years old. Cave showed his most intimate, heartfelt side, without ever abandoning the latent tension that runs through his music, and above all the rawness with which he recounts pain with a disarming, almost unbearable sincerity.

After so much sorrow, the Warracknabeal bard lifted his fans' spirits with the playful "Balcony Man", for which he asked the crowd in the tiers for a fun bit of participation: every time he said the word "balcony", they had to shout and make noise. No sooner said than done, with the entire balcony of the Cavea rising to its feet and shouting at the top of its lungs, drawing more than one smile from the usually brooding singer-songwriter.

The end of the concert was a crescendo of emotion, with "Jubilee Street" and "Push The Sky Away" one after the other, two of the best-loved songs from his (rich) catalogue, with the audience singing along right below the stage, just a few feet from their idol. As his fans know, Cave is not an artist who likes to repeat the same show night after night, so the encore was almost entirely different from the previous evening at the Auditorium: out went Leonard Cohen's Leonard Cohen's "Avalanche" and "Watching Alice", in came "Man In The Moon" by Grinderman and "Love Letter" and "Sad Waters" by the Bad Seeds. The closing song, almost a given, remained the same: the magnificent ballad "Into My Arms", sung in chorus by the whole Cavea in a moment of great emotional power and connection.

Nick Cave's show in Rome was not merely a "rock" concert, but a genuine celebration of the cathartic power of music, officiated by a true master like the Reverend Nick Cave. Last night, on a warm summer evening, the Australian singer-songwriter spoke to the heart of each and every one of us, suggesting that death is nothing but the other side of life, the very thing that gives it urgency, that the opposite of love is not hatred but fear, and that there can be no redemption without first crossing the desert of pain.

(Photo: MUSA/ Fondazione Musica per Roma)

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