Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds raise the roof and turn back the clock

The 9000-seater ICC Theatre nearly had its brand new roof blown away when Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds whipped up some rock and roll fervour.

Nick Cave performing at the ICC Theatre, Darling Harbour, for Sydney Festival. Picture: Prudence Upton

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THE 9000-seater ICC Theatre at Darling Harbour nearly had its brand new roof blown away when Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds whipped the Sydney Festival audience into a rock and roll religious fervour over two nights.

In his two-hour set Cave and his eight-piece band peppered songs from their newly released dark and poetic album Skeleton Tree with hymns ancient and modern from their 30-plus year collaborations.

He even went back to the very start, 1984 and From Her to Eternity, and milked the crowd shamelessly with old favourites like Mercy Seat, Into My Arms and The Ship Song.

But before Cave came on The Necks played a 40-minute piece of extraordinary sustained improvisation. It started like water falling, with Chris Abrahams’s tinkling piano, Lloyd Swanton’s bowed bass and drummer Tony Buck’s subtle use of bells, gongs and percussion.

The Necks opening for Nick Cave at ICC Theatre, Darling Harbour. Picture: Prudence Upton

This unique mixture of jazz, ambient and minimalism gradually built to a joyful hypnotic crescendo, the three musicians seemingly wired into each other’s musical DNA. Finally spaces started to appear and Swanton set up a jaunty bass line while Abrahams broke into a short solo with a Latin-American feel, before it all died away to a final chord.

Cave started the evening with his dark and pessimistic vision of our planet’s future, Anthrocene, a reference to the epoch when human activity starts having an effect on the Earth’s geology and ecosystems, from Skeleton Tree.

Dressed in a dapper grey suit and dancing his way around the stage, Cave occasionally consulted his lyrics which included these lines: “Come over here and sit down and say a short prayer/A prayer to the air, the air that we breathe/And the astonishing rise of the Anthrocene”.

(It) had an eerie spectral feel with Cave’s half-spoken, half-sung lines underpinned by Warren Ellis’s high-pitched swooping synthesiser sounding like some electronic bird cry

The album was being recorded when Cave’s 15-year-old son Arthur died after falling from a cliff in southern England and its opening track Jesus Alone, with its opening lines “You fell from the sky/Crash landed in a field”, had an eerie spectral feel with Cave’s half-spoken, half-sung lines underpinned by Warren Ellis’s high-pitched swooping synthesiser sounding like some electronic bird cry.

Cave also dipped liberally into his 2013 album Push The Sky Away, with Ellis on guitar for Higgs Boson Blues and providing his trademark violin loops elsewhere.

OUTSTRETCHED

But the song that got the loudest cheer of the night was a spectacular version of Red Right Hand, complete with tubular bells, rotating spotlights and crashing climaxes over Martyn Casey’s grooving bass.

In between Cave stepped off the front of the stage on to a boxlike catwalk and grasped the outstretched hands, at times threatening to crowd surf but always pulling back with casual elegance.

There was a change of mood when a video of Danish soprano Else Torp’s angelic tones was projected on to a massive screen for the haunting Distant Sky.

It was a night when everybody’s favourite was sung — Cave even gave us Henry Lee despite quipping that they were “contractually obliged not to play it”, as well as his hilarious anarchic take on the murder ballad Stagger Lee.

We may have lost Cave’s great hero Leonard Cohen in the past few months but thank God — interventionist or not — we still have Nick; and he’s looking and sounding better every year.

SYDNEY FESTIVAL

● CONCERT: Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

● WHERE: ICC Theatre, Darling Harbour

● WHEN: Saturday, January 21