God, the Devil and Nick Cave

Several songs into Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’s performance in Kraków last night, I began to understand why Islam is often understood to prohibit the use of musical instruments.

That sounds like an insult. Far from it. The performance was so captivating that I could understand why people might assume a god to be jealous.

That might sound like I’m some sort of rabid superfan. A real Cavehead. Not really. I am a fan, of course — no drinking session with my best friend has reached its zenith if we haven’t sung “Jubilee Street” — but I couldn’t name you the b-side of “The Weeping Song” or the first bassist of the Bad Seeds. When I listened to their new album “Wild God”, I was moved — but I wasn’t moved halfway across the world.

Hearing its songs live was like opening the curtains in an art gallery. The richness of the music — which, in all honesty, I may have been too distracted to appreciate before — was vividly illuminated.

Cave’s sheer energy is astonishing. The man is 67 and he was moving across the stage with the verve of a 23-year-old athlete. (Never mind Bryan Johnson. What is this man’s diet and exercise routine?) His voice — darkly evocative as the wind in a storm — didn’t flag once.

Behind him, the Bad Seeds whip up soundscapes with the power of a squall or delicate birdsong. Seeing Colin Greenwood on bass was a treat. Now I can say I’ve seen my favourite band (well, one fifth of them, and playing someone else’s songs, but still…).

I suppose Cave’s songs could be somewhat imitable. Take a reference to God, a reference to body parts and some adjectives like “wild” and “dark”, and then sing them over the top of brooding guitars, and you might be halfway there. But the other half is fuelled by rich sincerity. As Cave introduced the timeless “O Children” — “They’re mopping up the butcher’s floor/Of your broken little hearts” — one could sense the personal and global resonance. “O Wow O Wow (How Wonderful She Is)” came with a lovely tribute to Cave’s late girlfriend and collaborator Anita Lane.

Back to God. And the Devil. To point out that Cave’s lyrics are full of references to the sacred and the profane is as obvious as saying that Afroman sang about drugs. (Well done, genius, you figured that out?) I’ll leave lyrical exegesis to someone more informed. What struck me — and I mean struck me like a blast of wind, not just “struck me” in the sense of coming up with a diverting thought — was the quasi-religious power of the concert.

Cave stood right on the edge of the stage, with the people’s arms stretching up towards the hem of his blazer. Sometimes, he dashed back to his piano and battered the keys like a mad scientist. Warren Ellis, Cave’s longtime collaborator — not to be confused with the comic book writer — has a distinctly druidic appearance and manner. There was even a gospel choir.

There were moments of humour, too — with Cave posing dramatically for twenty seconds before telling people to “put your fucking phones away”, or, in an unplanned but hilarious moment, when a discarded microphone rolled under a platform, forcing roadies to scramble after it with mad panic — but the sheer emotional intensity was spellbinding.

This sense of inchoate religiosity is not exclusive to Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, of course. I’m sure you have experienced it yourself at concerts — be it Taylor Swift or Slayer. But I’d never experienced it so powerfully. I’m not sure that many of us treat musicians like gods. That seems like post-religious overreach. But it’s tempting to see them — symbolically, not literally — as secular angels, channeling the transcendent.

This is not without its questionable implications. “From among my followers,” states one hadith, “There will be some people who will consider illegal sexual intercourse, the wearing of silk, the drinking of alcoholic drinks and the use of musical instruments, as lawful.” (I appreciate that the veracity of this hadith has been contested, and that there are varieties of opinion among Islamic scholars on the question of music, but this is one interpretation.) I’m not sure what Muhammad had against silk but it’s hard to be completely baffled, even if one disagrees, about his alleged attitude towards booze. Longtime readers will know that I like a drink but a few recent excesses have made me, rather grudgingly, a bit more sensitive to the darker side of its allure. No one ever contracted cirrhosis from listening to an excess of music, of course, but I can somewhat grasp how theologians might have felt that it diverted our passions away from God towards something more pagan.

Even accepting the main theistic premise for a moment — if in my unscholarly, impressionistic way — it seems hard to believe that a god would create the capacity for joy that exists in music, and alcohol, and sex without their having valuable intrinsic and extrinsic implications. Still, even in the West — and even beyond moral panics about heavy metal — the dark power of music is something we often acknowledge in religious terms. Robert Johnson, of course, was rumoured to have traded his soul to Satan in exchange for musical success. How many times have you heard the old phrase that the devil has the best tunes?

I remember watching Top of the Pops with my mum, who was an evangelical Christian, and she found something demonic about the furious intensity of a young Arcade Fire. This struck me as quite amusing but I regret that now. Of course, I don’t literally think that “Rebellion (Lies)”, or any other song, is Satanic. (Funeral is still a fine album, by way.) But Mum was at least taking music seriously, as something with real spiritual as well as aesthetic implications — even if I understand “spiritual” in a secular sense — and not just as something fun to listen to.

In the end, there is the beauty of the experience. Beauty can be deceptive. The sirens were singing after all. But where is beauty directing us? I don’t want to reduce experience to its effects beyond itself — or when could we just appreciate experience? — but I think I left the concert slightly more serious and sensitive. That effect can fade, of course — hell, perhaps it has already! — but it seemed real nonetheless.

Sometimes, with music, we are groping towards the divine. We may not reach it. For all I know, there may be nothing to reach. But it feels like we are going in the right direction.