Dragging his hand across the piano keys, Nick Cave leaps into the air and charges towards the crowd like a preacher breaking from the pulpit. “Bring your spirit down!” he cries repeatedly, arms flung wide as the choir roars behind him.
It’s barely 10 minutes into their set at Fremantle Park in Perth, and Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds have the audience in the palm of their hands. Touring their 2024 album Wild God in Australia for the first time, they open with the brooding track Frogs and the eponymous Wild God, an explosive crescendo of high-pitched strings, soaring vocals and pounding percussion.
“You look fantastic!” a fan calls out to Cave from the crowd of almost 10,000. “Yeah I do,” the 68-year-old replies, glancing down at his slick black suit and tie. “Actually, I look like a Mormon.”
It’s a moment of sardonic self-recognition for Cave, who has found solace in Christianity following the deaths of his sons Arthur and Jethro. Tellingly, the title track of his 18th studio album sketches a God-like figure: an ageing, proselytising man who travels through memory in search of believers, not an omnipotent deity but one forged through suffering.
The tour marks the first time Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds have performed in Australia since 2017, following an introspective period in which Cave made the albums Skeleton Tree and Ghosteen with collaborator Warren Ellis. Released in 2024, Wild God brings the full band back into focus for a record steeped in biblical language and philosophical inquiry.
Cave is joined on stage by a formidable ensemble – Warren Ellis, Jim Sclavunos, George Vjestica, Larry Mullins, Colin Greenwood and Carly Paradis – alongside a four-person gospel-inflected choir. Over a generous two-and-a-half-hour set, they move between new material and songs spanning Cave’s four-decade career.
Introducing O Children (2004), Cave calls it “a very old song – it’s ancient – it’s coming to you with a fucking Zimmer frame”. A cautionary plea to care for the next generation better than the last, it moves from rolling, gospel-tinged restraint into a swelling urgency, with Ellis’s violin cutting sharply through choir and band.
Later, Tupelo (1985) ignites the crowd. Cave prances the stage, leading a call-and-response of “cry, cry, cry”, tossing his microphone into the audience so he can mime rocking a baby – a nod to the mythic storm that surrounds the birth of his “personal friend” Elvis Presley in the song’s fevered retelling. Green lights flash, the band pummel the song forward, and the effect is electrifying: Fremantle Park is dancing.
The staging amplifies the set’s intensity. A narrow runway stretches across the front of the stage, pulling Cave into the crowd, while banks of lights flash in gold, green and red. Lyrics blaze across the side and rear screens in stark, debossed lettering – “amazed of love”, “amazed of pain” – mirroring the Wild God album artwork.
“This is a very beautiful song … this one just poured out of me,” Cave says of Bright Horses (2019). Written during the period that produced Ghosteen, the song is widely understood as a response to Arthur’s death. Live, it is devastating, Cave’s voice steady but fragile as he sings of tyrants, love and the exhaustion of seeing the world as it is.
The mood shifts with Joy (2024), drawn from Wild God. Its central refrain – “we’ve all had too much sorrow, now is the time for joy” – lands in stark contrast to Bright Horses. Ellis’s high, keening vocal threads through the song before Cave pares it back to a stark a cappella, the word “joy” briefly flaring on the screen.
After rapturous applause, Cave and the band return for a five-song encore. Skeleton Tree (2016) is introduced with quiet candour, Cave explaining that he packed the song away after writing it in the immediate aftermath of Arthur’s death, later returning – as he wrote on his website The Red Hand Files – to discover “a beauty I could not begin to see back then”.
Just when it seems finished, Cave returns alone to the piano for Into My Arms (1997), singing its plainspoken doubts: “I don’t believe in the existence of angels. But looking at you I wonder if that’s true” – before he calls on the crowd to sing the final lines together.
In hindsight, it feels prescient: a song written decades earlier framing Cave’s approach to faith not as certainty, but as something provisional and relational – an act of devotion shaped by love, loss and the fragile hope that follows.
Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds’ tour continues through January and February in Perth, Adelaide, Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne
