There can be no doubt that Nick Cave is navigating the choppy waters of middle-aged rock stardom in an entirely unprecedented way. Not for the 50-year-old Cave the muted designer suit and dignified demeanour of the elder statesman. Tonight, he appears conservatively dressed for a provincial nightclub in the immediate aftermath of Saturday Night Fever: moustache, flared trousers, black shirt split to the navel, selection of medallions. Dyed black and arranged somewhere between a mullet and a comb-over, his hairstyle doggedly refuses to go gentle into that good night of male pattern baldness. Thus attired, he dances in a manner that makes you wonder what he pulls out to embarrass his kids at wedding discos. He punctuates his 1985 single Deanna with a series of lascivious pelvic thrusts, useful clarification for anyone in the audience who thought the relationship between the song's protagonist and its titular heroine might be based on a shared interest in gardening.
He has developed a style of keyboard-playing that Little Richard would have rejected as slightly florid: legs splayed, knees bent, head back, one arm skyward and, at particularly dramatic moments, fist shaking at God. The overall effect is at once viscerally powerful and coolly ironic, both hilarious and utterly gripping. You watch him slack-jawed, trying to think of another artist who could pull this off, but there isn't anyone.
It helps that Cave has spent the past few years making the best music of his career, a fact of which he seems abundantly aware - the set is confidently peppered with tracks from the recent Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! - and that the Bad Seeds remain as unique as their frontman, one minute impossibly aggressive and decorated with Warren Ellis's feedback-laden electric mandolin, the next bringing out the subtleties in the delicate Jesus of the Moon. Red Right Hand surges belligerently, Get Ready for Love roars into life, but the highpoint is a furious We Call Upon the Author: Cave's litany of modern-day ills set to chaotic garage rock. As it crashes thrillingly on, you once again search for a comparison, and once again, draw a blank.
