Live Review: Conversations With Nick Cave

It’s a brave thing to be an artist. To bare one’s soul live on stage through whatever medium. Perhaps braver still is the notion of relinquishing the sense of control a performer has over to an audience. With that in mind, tonight’s ‘Conversations With’ event is an experiment in connection. As the man of the hour takes the stage, the devastating beauty of spoken word piece Steve McQueen is playing over the speakers. Nick Cave sits down behind the piano and begins to play The Ship Song. 

The lights come on and there is rapturous applause. Therein lies the rhythm of the night’s proceedings. Unfiltered questions from the audience peppered with songs sung solo behind the piano. A Q&A, of sorts, with one of Australia’s greatest. He tells us the events are slowly turning into “something” although he is not quite sure what that is. Really, he is just trying to “work towards a greater connection to things in general”.

First, a touch of housekeeping though. Wave down a flashing baton and do your best to, as Cave requests, “be as bold as you can and as challenging as you can”. It’s a feat some grasp the concept of. Others - as you might expect with no moderation in place - seem more interested to stroke their own ego. Some are flustered in Cave’s presence. Those too consumed by their own question to listen to previous answers means there is some repetition.

Cave dodges these with humour and class. He thoughtfully traverses themes of dichotomy. Of life and death. Of grief and love. Of physical love and love of “the other”. There’s moments of profound meaning and moments where he proves he is a funny, funny man. It’s a one-off experience that positions Cave as thoughtful and importantly, human; the rather informal nature highlighting the rawness and realness that these events transpire.

Musically, we are treated to “one of the most misanthropic songs ever written” in Leonard Cohen’s Avalanche as we learn of his influence on Cave and how Songs Of Love & Hate blew open his life in an extraordinary way at a very young age. No More Shall We Part is offered to an engaged couple who ask for it to be played as a wedding present. Into My Arms is as intimate as to be expected.

We learn he is halfway through the next Bad Seeds records and it is “fucking awesome”. We learn his favourite Bad Seeds song is Stranger Than Kindness, written by Anita Lane about their relationship at the time. The best Dylan record is Slow Train Coming, don’t try and argue. He doesn’t like to answer whether he believes in god but will say he is happily deluded. He agrees to play The Ship Song at one audience member’s funeral.

At three hours long, this is by no means a walk in the park. It is a dense evening and there are times where we feel we need to come up for air. But at about the two-hour mark when a paediatric palliative care worker asks for Cave’s advice on dealing with grief we know tonight is a gift.

It is an answer he has no doubt already contemplated considering the death of his son has been a topic of great discussion, but it in no way loses its power. He pauses. “Grief is not something I can give any advice about. Grief is something that is so awesome and so vast and so beyond our tiny selves that we really have to just kneel down to it. It’s simply beyond us. But it is testament, in my opinion, to the human spirit, how much we can actually feel and the magnitude of our feelings about things. Once you understand that and once you understand the capacity of your heart to feel that way, it can feel in other ways too. So the terrible truth I would say about death and bereavement and that sort of stuff is that there is an implicit beauty that lies behind it all.”

He continues, “I really feel like we live two lives. We live a life where we learn to be what we are. We learn how to be an individual being so we can stand on the world and say, 'This is what I am and this is who I am.' And then something comes along and shatters that belief and crushes it. All of your understanding of what you are as a person. And this is a necessary destructive course that should happen to all of us. And coming out of that is a second life and that life is something that has huge richness and depth and value to everybody, suddenly you're able to radiate a kind of power out to people. People who are living their first life simply don’t know about the second life, it’s like the great secret actually.”

He ends the evening urging us all to read Philip Larkin’s poem The Mower. “We must look after each other, we must be kind while there is still time.”