29 October 2023, Orpheum Theatre, Los Angeles, CA

“I love you Nick!”

Between every song came that call out. From a woman or a man, a disembodied voice from somewhere in the audience.

“I love you Nick!”

“I love you, too,” replied the gentleman on stage at the piano, each and every time.

And now and then he would add, “Now shut the fuck up.”

Night three of Nick Cave’s sold-out run at Los Angeles’ historic Orpheum Theatre, final night of a North American solo tour, accompanied only by bass player Colin Greenwood of Radiohead, and there was a huge amount of love in the room. Nick’s love for what he was doing, sharing his songs of love and loss, sweet spiritual dreams and mind-bending nightmares with his devoted fans. His devoted fans with their intense love and appreciation for Nick.

A lot of devotion.

I started my interview with Nick Cave in 2004, nearly twenty years ago now, for my book Songwriters Speak, with a kind of spiritual reference and a shift from typical reverence. At the same time, I made it evident that I came prepared, that I took the subject seriously, and as such, I was rewarded with three illuminating hours of conversation.

I emerged from that interview, and the lengthy research and preparation for it, with massive respect and gratitude. For his kindness, his graciousness, his articulate, thoughtful responses, his wonderful sense of humour, and his regard for what I was doing. I had embraced his work, whether it was sonically my kind of thing or not. The lyrics for the most part were. When his two-disc album, Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus, came out a few months after I had interviewed him, I digested the whole collection with the insight I had acquired from my study and our conversation. I saw him speak at the State Library of NSW. I saw him perform at a Leonard Cohen tribute. And then, just a few months before my book was released, I attended my first full Nick Cave concert, with the Bad Seeds, at Sydney’s Luna Park. I found hearing the songs enthralling, the older ones I had learned and learned to understand, and the new ones that I was absorbing.

Nick and I exchanged emails a few times, mainly for me to clarify and fact-check the interview. He was a willing and courteous participant in the process. His last email, when I wrote to let him know the book was about to come out, and he replied that he was looking forward to reading it, was signed “Love, Nick.” I loved that.

When I arrived at Nick’s house in Hove, near Brighton in England, in May 2004 to interview him, his wife Susie answered the door with her young twin sons clinging to her legs. After the death of one of those sons, Arthur, eleven years later, that image of the threesome at the front door came back to me potently. I thought about the dialogue Nick and I had had around the song “The Sorrowful Wife”:

It seems so naïve now, reading over that, but on that warm breezy spring day on the English south coast, how could either of us have known the devastation and grief that was to come (in my life as well as in theirs)?

I have greatly admired the courage of Nick and Susie, so open and raw about their grief, working through it intensely in many artistic ways, in defiance and love. But beyond watching the documentary, One More Time With Feeling, I did not submerge myself too deeply in their grief story. I had not read The Red Hand Files (although I think now I will), or his recent book Faith, Hope and Carnage (but I have now purchased it).

I didn’t seek out the albums Skeleton Key and Ghosteen and Carnage. That was my loss. I had not followed the prolific output of film soundtracks and other solo and collaborative works that populate his website. I just knew, after failing to secure a single ticket to see him at his Sydney Opera House concerts last year, that if he was playing in Los Angeles I needed to see him here, now.

So I returned to Nick, with reverence, on Sunday night at the Orpheum Theatre in Los Angeles. It was the perfect way back. Because now I have heard several of those newer albums’ songs performed without adornment, songs that floor you, like “Ghosteen Speaks”. FLOOR you. Devastate you. He is a poet, and a showman, a wry, droll master of ceremonies and a humble man of love.

He is also a beautiful vocalist and pianist. It was an intimate, gorgeous, deeply moving recital. (LA Magazine called it a religious experience.) There were a few songs I would have liked to hear played this way – “Red Right Hand” especially – that weren’t on his setlist. I was not disappointed in the pared back, stunning performance of “The Mercy Seat”. Or the literally breathtaking way he sang “I Need You” and repeated “just breathe just breathe just breathe” until he had no more breath to breathe. There is nothing quite so loving as the way he sang that, and “Into My Arms” and “Love Letter”. To hear older songs seemingly reinterpreted in the wake of tremendous loss in more recent years. Revelatory.

How appropriate to see Nick Cave at the beautiful Orpheum in Downtown LA, named for the Greek mythological musician and poet Orpheus, when the last time I had seen him was to promote a work jointly called The Lyre of Orpheus. Such symmetry was not lost on me as I sat in the midst of an almost entirely American audience who adore him. A very elegantly dressed audience, I might say. Nick noticed a woman in the front row who was wearing a stunning full length gold sequinned and feather duster coat. I was in the black sequinned dress I had worn to see Brandi Carlile at the Hollywood Bowl, not that Nick could have seen me a few rows back. But I believe a concert is a special event and should be dressed for accordingly. Maybe it was the Halloween vibe, or the huge, bright full moon that night, but I was very impressed by the splendour of his LA fans.

I asked the woman next to me, on her own and dressed more casually, to tell me when she had discovered Nick Cave. In 1984, she told me. And she has since seen him countless times in different countries, in Europe and North America, but not in Australia. There really was nothing Australian about the evening or Nick except his accent and those unapologetic orders to shut the fuck up. I was amazed at how many Americans know and love him. How did I not know that he was so huge here? So huge that Anthony Mason, intelligent celebrity interviewer of choice for intelligent musicians, interviewed him not so long ago on CBS This Morning. That he was featured in major pieces in The New York Times Magazine and The New Yorker. Oh my, those are beautiful interviews. These and more were focused on grief, how he made art in defiance of grief. Yet art also imbued with grief, because grief, as the late Queen Elizabeth II remarked, is the price we pay for love.

Republishing Songwriters Speak this year had brought back to the fore my memories of interviewing Nick Cave because he is the songwriter most people interviewing me want to know about. Many great interviewers have spent time with him since, with the subject matter much more earnest in the wake of not just one, but two sons who died (the other, more recently, his older son Jethro from an earlier relationship). But I am glad to be one of those that did once spend time with him talking intelligently about his creativity, and glad to now be able to sit and listen and take photos of him on stage giving and receiving love.

So how many close-up photos of Nick Cave at his piano is too many? There were plenty of mobile phones out snapping and videoing, one elderly gent even placed himself squarely on his knees on the carpet in the aisle alongside my seat to video the latter part of the performance. He looked like Warren Ellis. Maybe he was. I couldn’t tell but he was unselfconscious about sitting on the floor holding up his phone, and Nick loved everyone too much to mind what anyone did. Nick didn’t seem to want to leave, so there were three encores.

My little camera got a good working out as the lens loved Nick’s face, his solemnity, his soulfulness, his poise and grace, and the occasional smile, smirk or “Shut the fuck up”. (You can view the gallery of photos by clicking to enlarge.)

Love letter, love letter. More photos, the more the better.

Thank you, Nick. Love, Debbie