Review: Nick Cave offers a prayer for our time

Across 90 minutes in a concert filmed at London’s Alexandra Palace, Nick Cave digs deep into his songbook to offer something for fans old and new.

‘Laying himself bare’: Nick Cave in the West Hall of London’s Alexandra Palace, raising the bar for lockdown concerts. Picture: Joel Ryan / supplied

With an intimate and captivating concert film named Idiot Prayer, Australian singer-songwriter Nick Cave has raised the bar for the novel concept of lockdown performances, which began in March with the global spread of the novel coronavirus.

Not for Cave the notion of live-streaming from his phone or laptop, nor turning the camera on himself to offer some candid music from his home, as dozens of Australian artists did for this newspaper’s Isolation Room video series earlier this year.

Instead, the Brighton-based musician elevated the medium by booking London’s Alexandra Palace. In the centre of its cavernous West Hall, he placed a beautiful Fazioli grand piano and he hired award-winning Irish cinematographer Robbie Ryan, whose filmography includes Marriage Story and American Honey, to capture his every move and sound. Screening at 8pm on Thursday (AEST), as a ticketed one-night-only online concert that cannot be fast forwarded, paused or rewound, Idiot Prayer begins with Cave striding through the vast, empty spaces of the palace while his voice is overlaid with the opening lyrics from Ghosteen, his 17th studio album with The Bad Seeds, released last year.

From those opening moments through to the end, the man in black offers a commanding performance at the piano, while his surroundings alternate between brilliant natural light and tasteful, subtle lighting designs. Ryan’s cinematography favours long, static shots of the artist in profile and from across the piano. Only on a couple of occasions are viewers reminded of the presence of production staff: otherwise, it’s all Cave on screen, all the time.

The room is so quiet — and the microphones near him so sensitive — that at times you can hear his leather heel tapping against the floor, and his ringed fingers clashing while he plays.

Across 90 minutes, Cave digs deep into his songbook to offer something for fans old and new. Songs from Ghosteen bookend the concert, and while he offers several tracks from the 1980s including Stranger Than Kindness, Sad Waters and a fearsome reading of The Mercy Seat, the bulk of his selections are taken from the 1990s onwards, including six from his 1997 release The Boatman’s Call such as Into My Arms.

Idiot Prayer includes the debut of an unreleased track, Euthanasia, but the highlight arrives midway through in a reading of the 2013 song Jubilee Street. The solo arrangement has a different feel and tempo to the Bad Seeds’ version, but beneath Cave’s fingertips, it loses none of its power. “I’m transforming / I’m vibrating / I’m flying / Look at me now,” he sings while delivering what has become one of his signature songs.

Since the shock death of his teenage son Arthur in 2015, Cave’s public life has pulsated with a ­vitality and vulnerability that is inspiring and often moving to watch. Like his global series of “conversations” concerts – where he offered himself to his audience and their many questions for hours on end – this is another instance of the artist laying himself bare in a way that few of his peers could match.