Nick Cave has recounted his experience of seeing Radiohead live in London, comparing the gig to “spiritual activity”.
Cave was asked on his blog The Red Hand Files by a fan named Jordan from Dublin if he liked going to other artists’ concerts. It transpired from his reply that he does, though not when he’s touring himself. In fact, Radiohead ended up being the first arena show he had ever seen.
“When I’m on tour, the last thing I want to do is go to someone else’s concert,” he wrote. “I feel sonically and emotionally overloaded, and the live experience is simply too intense. However, I’ve had a couple of months’ break from touring, life has settled down, and, to my surprise, Jordan, I’ve had the urge to go and see live music. Over the past couple of months I’ve attended many gigs – incredible evenings, all of them – including Bob Dylan, Swans, Radiohead, Cameron Winter, and Dirty Three.
“At the Radiohead concert at the O2, I was sitting among twenty thousand people. Bizarrely, it was the first time I had ever been in the audience at such a large show, and I was stunned by the depth of love in the room – people dancing, screaming, crying, hugging each other, throwing themselves around. I was struck by the realisation of just how powerful live music is – that a group of individuals can come together and concoct a sound unique to them, and that people can connect with that distinctive vision as if it were their own experience. I could feel its moral quality – how this singular force has the capacity to repair the world with its goodness.”
He continued: “I engage in various spiritual activities – I swim in a lake, go to church, walk in nature, meditate – but none offer the transcendent opportunity of a live concert. It is a form of human activity that radiates goodness, working its way through the crowd and into the world as a reparative, cosmic force, improving matters, keeping the devil at bay. I believe Radiohead’s audience was responding not only to the music, which was astonishing, but also to the courage of the performers – the sheer nerve to stand before a crowd and offer up their souls. Like everyone else there, I was deeply moved and humbled.”
To conclude, Cave described Radiohead as “a band engaging in a remarkable act of ordinary courage, a distinctly human form of heroism – the audacity to stand before the world and declare, ‘This is what we think. This is what we feel. This is who we are.’”
Radiohead bassist Colin Greenwood has been playing live with Cave and the Bad Seeds recently, filling in for Martyn Casey. Greenwood also played with Cave live on his recent solo tours as well as several dates of the ‘Carnage’ tour with Warren Ellis. Greenwood also contributed parts to the band’s new album, ‘Wild God’, too.
Speaking to NME about filling in for Casey while on the band’s tour, Greenwood shared: “It’s an awesome group of people to play music with. They’re brilliant and with ferociously loud drummers; what a team. For me, it’s a really fun thing to do because it’s not Radiohead. There are a lot of different colours in the music, so I’m having a blast.”
The musician also touched on Cave’s artistry and said: “He’s such a great story-teller, and I really love his piano-playing. When I took the rough recordings from the new album home to listen to and heard his voice fill up my front room, I thought, ‘What a voice! He’s got the lot!’”
He added: “I knew his music of course, but I didn’t know it super-well. I knew ‘Let Love In’ and really liked that record, as well as the previous records ‘Push The Sky Away’ and ‘Skeleton Tree’, Being lucky enough to watch him work and write with Warren has been a true privilege.”
In a five-star review of the opening London show of the Radiohead tour, NME concluded: “What a show: a visceral energy, a tasteful spectacle, all delivered with a generosity of spirit, Yorke in full rockstar mode as the band trade places to tend to each corner of the venue. For a band once embarrassed by the notion of ‘arena rock’, nobody does it better. A new album and another night like this can’t come soon enough.”
Radiohead wrapped up their first UK and European tour in seven years in Copenhagen this week, with vocalist Thom Yorke looking particularly emotional as he bid farewell to fans.
