You could spot Nick Cave fans on their way to his first UK gig with the Bad Seeds since 1999 long before they reached the venue. They may have read about this season's vogue for fashions in primary colours and pretty pink, but they are having no truck with it. Black and charcoal separates dominate, as does a certain intensity about the gaze. It is not the most rosy-cheeked gathering you'll ever see.
Cave steps up on stage dressed for a smart funeral in a black suit and tie, with white cuffs big enough to give designer Laurence Llewelyn Bowen sleepless nights. The stage is lit necromantically in black, white and red; it will later change later to purples, crimsons and other hues to suit Cave's songs of possession, damnation and the dark thing that love can be.
The 100-minute set is dominated by tracks from the lushly gorgeous recent album No More Shall We Part, and much of the show is as powerful melodically as it is lyrically - the Seeds are in fine, haunting musical form. There is still a brutal urgency about Cave's take on the world: in a track called Hallelujah you might expect redemptive celebration, but the song ends with talk of 20 buckets of tears and "20 deep holes to bury them in".
The set moves between tender, doom-laden love songs and thunderous renditions of faster numbers. The former include an affecting encore of Henry Lee, The Ship Song, and the Tom Waits-tinged Love Letter, during which someone lights a lighter - something you only do in Cave's company to light a big church candle. Meanwhile, Cave performs Fifteen Feet of Pure White Snow like a preacher from the underworld having a bad day.
During these faster numbers (Oh My Lord, Do You Love Me), Cave moves in a manner that seems to have been taken from the Fire and Brimstone Book of Dancing: he thrashes and tilts about, largely from the armpits up. When he does his one high kick of the night, in the midst of the visceral assault that is The Mercy Seat, a more benign inspiration reveals itself: you realise Cave dances in the way Basil Fawlty used to move across the hotel lobby.
Between and during songs he endlessly lights cigarettes for himself and others in the band. Still, at least he has given up the hard drugs. Cave recently became the father of twins and his lyrics are being published as literary works - but even in this new era of grown-up respectability he makes an unhealthy, bleak and cadaverous view of the world fabulously seductive.
• Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds are at Brixton Academy, London SW2 (020-7771 2000), from Saturday.
