About three-quarters through a performance by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds on a Friday night in Columbus, Ohio, in a quiet moment between songs, a gentleman had a song request: “Release the Bats!” he yelled. But “Release The Bats” is a song from 1981 by Cave’s second band, the post-punk, grungy gothic noise merchants known as The Birthday Party. Cave — who, with the incredible stage presence that allows him to perceive everything that’s going on around him, onstage or in the audience — addressed the request: “Wrong band,” he said, noting that he’d had to think about whether the band that performed it hadn’t been the same ensemble he was onstage with.
That was, of course, a joke, an example of Cave’s self-effacing wit mixed with his eternal unwillingness to suffer fools: this tour, supporting his 18th album with the Bad Seeds, “Wild God,” is the absolute opposite of anything The Birthday Party ever did. The implied undertone was, of course, that if you looked at the 10 musicians onstage (including the four-person gospel choir) and thought that it would be a good time for two and a half minutes of industrial grunge and shrieking histrionic vocals, you had come to the wrong concert.
If you were acquainted with Cave through his nihilism in the years of The Birthday Party or with the ’90s version of the Bad Seeds, or perhaps through some of his quirkier noir-esque material in movies or television — his 1994 song “Red Right Hand” was in the opening titles of “Peaky Blinders,” for example — you would be forgiven for thinking that this might seem a tad outdated or perhaps just not your kind of thing.
Which is unfortunate, because the Nick Cave onstage (and on record) in 2025 is delivering a larger, brighter kind of transcendence than you would have experienced even 15 years ago. There is so much beauty and joy; there are sing-alongs, there is call and response, and there is also a robust amount of humor, sarcasm and self-deprecation. It happens because Cave does the work every night to deliver a night of redemption in a variety of shades and flavors. The chorus of the album’s title track, the second song in the set, declares, “Bring your spirit down,” and by that moment in the show, you will be willing to follow him wherever he goes.
The Nick Cave onstage (and on record) in 2025 is delivering a larger, brighter kind of transcendence than you would have experienced even 15 years ago.
Released in late 2024, “Wild God” is a vivid, lush, almost surrealistic collection of songs, and so the tour that presents them at its core is constructed to support that. The stage setup is vast and multi-level, with the four backing singers — clad in silver lame (or full black) and styled by Cave’s wife, Susie, the former proprietor of a line of clothing known as The Vampire’s Wife — arrayed at the top of the arrangement. On the second level, positioned dead center is percussionist Jim Sclavunos, who has worked with Cave since 1994, energetically and emphatically wielding a variety of instruments — watch him during “Red Right Hand” where he never stops moving.
Nick Cave of Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds performs at BP Pulse Live on November 15, 2024 in Birmingham, England. (Katja Ogrin/Redferns/Getty)To his left is the rhythm section featuring drummer Larry Mullins (no, not that one) and bassist Colin Greenwood of “F**king Radiohead!” on one side, and keyboardist Carly Paradis on the right. Guitarist George Vjestica is on the bottom level, stage right, while the incomparable Warren Ellis holds down stage left. Cave’s grand piano is on the other side, off-center presumably to give him the room he requires. The staging is a practical arrangement, but it is also a presentation meant to convey gravitas and to ensure everyone can keep an eye on their mutable front man. What this ensemble has in common is a high degree of technical competence combined with the ability to flex as Cave’s needs dictate. Calling them “the Bad Seeds” appears to be more of a loose organizational construct that separates this tour from outings Cave does with Ellis or his solo piano tours that he has embarked on with Greenwood than denoting any kind of object permanence to this arrangement.
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To Cave’s left onstage is his songwriting partner and co-conspirator, Ellis, sitting (or often, standing) on an ancient, tattered task chair, playing violin or electric guitar or some form of keyboard or other electronic wizardry. Ellis audibly counts the band in when required, and sometimes conducts or directs them with a nod or a wave of a violin bow. He is smaller in stature than Cave, adorned with a shaggy beard and long gray hair. (Cave has likened his appearance to John the Baptist.)
Ellis appears slight, but he is absolutely vital, and he is also much beloved by the audience. In Columbus, Cave informed us that Ellis was under the weather — “don’t let him lick your face!” — and he was slightly more subdued, hydrating and/or vigorously toweling his head and face after every song, but for Ellis, “slightly more subdued” would likely be a normal energy level for any other artist. When Ellis gets the spotlight playing the violin, the crowd’s reaction is the same kind of adulation given for a guitar solo. And when he does play electric guitar, the hair on the back of your neck will stand up from the menace of its tone. He founded an animal sanctuary for animals with special needs, and I would also choose him to be on my side in a bar fight.
“You don’t know whether to stand . . . or kneel.”
Cave wants the audience to be with him because he needs them for his particular version of musical alchemy. His performances have always been physical, but he has refined that over the years. He is this tall, lanky Australian man in his late 60s wearing dress shoes, a tie and a three-piece suit, his jet black hair slicked back. And yet, somehow, he is like a cat with a toy, except in his case, the toy is a ball of energy that he brings out and then bats around and shapes into different forms.
Cave stands at the edge of the stage singing, and then tosses the hand microphone away to rush back to the grand piano. He plays a few bars, sometimes more, sometimes the whole song, only to then grab the mic on top of his piano and head to stage right, or stage left, where he perches on the speakers and sings, reaching out to the crowd — or sometimes, reaching into the crowd, or becoming part of it. In Columbus, in the middle of “Wild God”’s “Conversion,” he made his way up the aisle to the very center of the orchestra, where he perched on the arms of the seats, keeping his balance with the help of the crowd around him as he reprised the final refrain, declaiming,“You’re beautiful!” over and over and over. You will believe him by the time it’s over.
A favored gesture of Cave’s is to grab the arm of the tallest and burliest audience member closest to him, and to use their hand as a makeshift microphone stand so Cave can balance or gesticulate or emote as the spirit moves him. It is also a gesture of trust; the person holding the mic treats the responsibility as sacred and does not move until Cave retrieves the microphone a few bars later. It is simple, but it is touching; touching that he trusts us, touching that the audience wants to be worthy of the trust he has extended. Because it’s not just the dude holding the microphone that needs to be part of the circle of trust, it’s everyone in the vicinity.
There is truly not a dead moment in the set, no song during which the crowd files out to get another beer. The beating heart, though, is the nine-song run that begins with “O Children” and runs through “Joy,” and it is a vast and complex routing through a variety of tones and emotions and volume. “Jubilee Street,” from 2013’s “Push the Sky Away,” sometimes introduced as “a song about a girl,” (“They’re all songs about a girl, it’s kind of my – thing,” he’d deadpan in Detroit) is the moment when if you are not on the edge of your seat/on your toes he will make you get there. There is that emotional mix of anticipation from the people who know what can happen here, combined with a palpable, psychic battening down the hatches because no one knows what is actually going to transpire.
On the outside, it seems like it’s a quiet, calm ballad as it opens; Ellis on guitar, a recitation of the story of “a girl who’s got no history / got no past.” But even if you have experienced it before, you don’t know the exact color or shape of the coming sonic and energetic explosion on any particular night. In Detroit, it was purple; in Columbus, it was every color of the rainbow. It’s the nature of what energy the audience is picking up and circulating and sending back, and what Cave does with it when it completes that circuit. It goes from murder ballad to power ballad, from soap opera to hymn. Cave runs back to the piano, he overturns the mic stand, Ellis is a constant, but there is so much room even within that, and this is also when you will appreciate the rest of the musicians onstage because they are what is keeping this performance from spinning into orbit.
There is that emotional mix of anticipation from the people who know what can happen here, combined with a palpable, psychic battening down the hatches because no one knows what is actually going to transpire.
“F**king COLUMBUS,” Cave will exclaim upon completion. That’s been one of his things this tour: when a city has earned it, he will append the f-bomb to the city’s name out of respect. Detroit got it pretty early in the evening, but Columbus had to earn it, and they did once he’d solved the problem posed by the reserved seating. But now it was time for “From Her To Eternity,” the oldest song in the set, from 1984, and while it used to feel like a switchblade, it is now vast and almost orchestral while still maintaining the same line of anguish and desperation. It doesn’t feel dated, though, it just feels deep and endless.
“Long Dark Night” and “Cinnamon Horses” lets Cave sit at the piano and the ensemble admirably replicates the vast landscape of those two songs — Ellis’ falsetto on the latter’s choruses are particularly gorgeous — before Cave is back at the front of the stage talking about Elvis Presley and everyone who’s sat down is standing up again, getting ready for what’s next. Cave talks about the night that Presley was born, and how we probably appreciate having an Australian tell us about Elvis, and he was born in a town called…”WHAT?” “TUPELO!” the crowd bellows back in anticipatory response.
The applause that acknowledged “There’s no shortage of tyrants/and no shortage of fools” seemed to surprise the audience, a moment of spontaneous reaction. It was different in quality from the cheer that arose in response to “We’ve all had too much sorrow, now is the time for joy” in “Wild God”’s “Joy.” (Even Bob Dylan acknowledged that line last fall.) By the time Cave returned to the piano for “I Need You,” it felt like the audience decided that we all needed a moment, because the entire theater was absolutely silent but still absolutely engaged and, honestly, entranced. It was a stunning and singular performance.
The back third of the set, including the encore, is the space for the better-known songs, from the aforementioned “Red Right Hand” to “The Mercy Seat,” “The Weeping Song” and “Papa Won’t Leave You, Henry,” but also an unexpectedly gigantic “White Elephant,” where the backing singers come down to the front, making everything feel closer together. In Columbus, instead of “Skeleton Tree” being the last song in the first encore, we were gifted a slightly rough but rare and amazing performance of “Shivers,” a beautifully angsty ballad from Cave’s first band, The Boys Next Door, written by his former bandmate, the late Rowland S. Howard.
The last song of the night is just Cave and the grand piano and the 3,400 occupants of the Palace Theater singing “Into My Arms.” It is beautiful and awesome, not the least because you’re not expecting a communal sing-along at a Nick Cave concert. And yet here we all are, singing “Into my arms/o Lord” during a song that is 100% sincere and also mildly sarcastic at the same time (“I don’t believe in an interventionist god/but I know, darling, that you do”) alongside a man who should probably by all rights be dead or ruined. Yet he is still here in front of us in 2025, not trying to be someone he used to be, but yet 100% who he absolutely is.
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from music columnist Caryn Rose