Nick Cave and Warren Ellis - 'Carnage' and Redemption at the Royal Albert Hall

 

There was no 'Mercy Seat' or 'Tupelo', indeed, not much at all from before the 21st Century, and the only thing that we got from The Boatman's Call was the beautiful, but funereally over-exposed 'Into My Arms'. Yet Nick Cave and Warren Ellis at the Royal Albert Hall was perfect. Much of this is down to just how powerful Cave and Ellis's lockdown album Carnage is. I've taken my time to reach this conclusion, but I've made my mind up: it's Cave's best, surpassing even The Boatman's Call. Is this to do with maturity? The earlier album manages to find the girl and then lose her; the latest effort loses a child but somehow, incredibly finds hope. 

'What am I to believe? I'm the balcony man ... when everything is ordinary until it's not'

It was a spare set up last night. Cave and Ellis were accompanied by three wonderful backing singers and a drummer / keyboardist. Yet these six people managed to make the Albert Hall sound both as fired up as if it was playing host to Beethoven's Choral Symphony and as intimate as a spontaneous jamming session in a late night basement bar. The chemistry between Cave and Ellis is adorable. The latter a Catweazled holy fool, tossing up his legs as if he's just been possessed by a demon; whilst Cave ranges about the stage like a 64-year old Zebedee, falling to his knees and springing straight back up in a manner that I've not contemplated since high school. 

Opening with 'The Spinning Song' and 'Bright Horses' both from Ghosteen - an album that I find almost too raw to listen to, as it's dominated by the recent memory of the death of Cave's son Arthur - laid down the blueprint of quasi-religious fervour. But it was the arrival of the title track to Carnage that caused the first prickle of that thing that music does, stir up something deep inside that makes you feel much more than the sum of your parts. The image of 'a barefoot child with fire in his hair' and a 'sudden sun' exploding, combined with the whole of the interior of the Albert Hall lighting up in red. I thought of my own red-haired child and wanted to reach out and hold him as close as possible. 

Warren Ellis and Nick Cave

Carnage dominated the night. 'White Elephant' and 'Hand of God' pulsed with rage, the latter culminating in Ellis frantically waving his arms and legs and almost levitating up towards the Albert Hall's collection of huge sound-discs hanging from the ceiling. 'Balcony Man' was close to cathartic, the repeated insistence that 'this morning is beautiful and so are you' ringing out and up to the balcony (the standing area that Cave dedicated the song to). I've been up there and I felt just how much I would have appreciated that gesture. 

From the Bad Seeds back-catalogue we got some real surprises - I'm not very keen on 'God Is In The House' - but tonight it felt like a much needed skewer to political and religious hypocrisy everywhere; whilst Henry Lee sounded like a two hundred year old murder ballad rather than something that was written in the 1980s. That Wendi Rose made me temporarily forget P J Harvey as she sang the latter's lines is testament to just how good she is (if you've seen the video of Cave and Harvey singing pre-coitally, you'll realise just what kind of achievement that is). And there was also a glorious cover of Marc Bolan's 'Cosmic Dancer', Cave's lugubrious voice emphasising the rhyming happenstance of 'womb' and 'tomb'. If Bolan hadn't been paying attention to Samuel Beckett, Cave was certainly placing the writer on the Glam rock star's celestial book-shelf: 'They give birth astride the grave'. 

My highlight though was yet another song from Carnage, one that I've not quite been paying attention to, 'Shattered Ground'. Visceral and teeming with longing it felt like a lunar prayer: 'And there's a madness in her and a madness in me, and together it forms a kind of sanity' sang Cave, and as the song headed towards its crescendo, the Albert Hall - lit up with blinding white beams - suddenly felt like a mad, secular cathedral. Which is apt, as Cave is really a preacher, filling the void that that other much missed explorer of God, sex and love left us with. Leonard Cohen's best lines always had a quiet and wise simplicity about them. Nothing fussy, yet as elegant as a smile. And this is something that Cave now manages in almost every song. As he sagely tells us on the title track to Carnage - "It's only love, with a little bit of rain" - and you're left with that one thing that music can always be relied on to do, provide an unconditional and consoling balm.