nick cave & the bad seeds
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds are plotting a global live stream of their Bob Dylan-approved performance at Paris’ Accor Arena in November.
The performance, titled Wild God – Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds Live in Paris, captures Cave and his bandmates as they perform the final date of their U.K. and European tour in support of 2024’s Wild God. Taking place on Nov. 17, the 22-song show largely leaned upon the nascent Wild God album, peppered with tracks from the band’s extensive back catalog.
“With Cave’s electrifying stage presence and a powerful band featuring Warren Ellis, George Vjestica, Colin Greenwood, Jim Sclavunos, Carly Paradis and Larry Mullins, plus a four-piece gospel-inspired vocal section (Wendi Rose, T Jae Cole, Miça Townsend and Janet Ramus), Nick Cave led a high-intensity, emotionally charged performance in front of 20,000 fans,” a description of the stream reads.
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Notably, the November concert saw the band gaining a high-profile blessing when Bob Dylan took to his sporadically-active social media account to Tweet a message in support of the show.
“Saw Nick Cave in Paris recently at the Accor Arena and I was really struck by that song ‘Joy’ where he sings ‘We’ve all had too much sorrow, now it the time for joy’,” Dylan wrote. “I was thinking to myself, yeah that’s about right.”
Cave himself took to his own Red Hand Files website to respond to Dylan’s message, labeling it “a lovely pulse of joy that penetrated my exhausted, zombied state.”
“I felt proud to have been touring with The Bad Seeds and offering, in the form of a rock ‘n ’roll show, an antidote to this despair, one that transported people to a place beyond the dreadful drama of the political moment,” he wrote.
“I was elated to think Bob Dylan had been in the audience, and since I doubt I’ll get an opportunity to thank him personally, I’ll thank him here. Thank you, Bob!”
The Wild God – Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds Live in Paris concert will be streaming from April 7 via the ARTE Concert YouTube channel and their own ARTE.tv website. North American fans will be forced to wait, however, with the broadcast available from June 1. “We assure you that your patience will be rewarded!” ARTE guaranteed on social media.
Australian musician Nick Cave has always been full of surprises, from his incendiary live performances as the singer of The Birthday Party in the early ‘80s, to collaborating with Kylie Minogue as leader of Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds. However, few may have seen Staffordshire-style ceramic sculptures as the post-punk icon’s latest passion.
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While it’s not the first topic to come to mind when Cave’s name is mentioned, the 67-year-old has been hard at work as a ceramic sculptor for a number of years now, having first adopted the craft during the global pandemic. Later in 2022, he held his first exhibition, with a series of 17 figures depicting the life story of the devil going on display at Finland’s Sara Hildén Art Museum.
In a recent interview with The Art Newspaper, Cave discussed his fondness for the figures, and his ‘The Devil — A Life’ series, which is currently on display at Museum Voorlinden in Wassenaar, Netherlands.
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“I’ve collected Staffordshire-style sculptures for years. I just love these things,” he explained. “They’re not expensive works of art; you find them in second-hand shops. I just had them in front of me as I was just sitting at my desk. We sort of grew idle through Covid [and] were allowed to do things that we normally wouldn’t have done. I sat there looking at one of these Staffordshires just thinking, ‘I can do this.’”
According to Cave, his mother had loved the clay figurines he made as a teenager, and her passing at 92 during Covid left him with a “sentimental tug” that soon evolved into his newfound passion. “Mostly it was just that I thought, ‘F–k, you know, it can’t be that hard to make one of these things,’” he explained.
Admitting there is “no irony” to his love of the art form, Cave added that his 17-piece ‘The Devil — A Life’ series also served as a way for him to come to terms with some of the internal feelings that still resonated following the accidental death of his 15-year-old son Arthur in 2015.
“The whole thing started to have a more mysterious, mystical pull,” he explained. “Then they started to be in order, one after the other. They were trying to make sense of my predicament in a way that I couldn’t make sense of it in my songs, for some reason.
“Ultimately, this ended up being something about culpability and forgiveness around the death of my son,” he added. “That was something that I could never quite get to in my songwriting. To me, these became acutely personal.”
Cave’s most recent body of work, Wild God, arrived in August as his 18th studio album with the Bad Seeds. The record reached No. 2 on the charts in his native Australia, while peaking at No. 66 on the Billboard 200. The album received two Grammy nominations and was also nominated for the Australian Music Prize, ultimately losing out to Kankawa Nagarra’s Wirlmarni.
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