Nick Cave in Athens. Source: Kostas Stamou. All rights reserved.There is no one place to start on Nick Cave in concert, in Athens or anywhere else. The man, together with his Bad Seeds, is a comet, he screams through our atmosphere and you simply choose to which of his glorious trails you will grab a hold. In truth, to review the concert seems little more than to record that which is self-evident, a higher brow version of the – I have to say it but – insufferable, people lifting up their phones in front of you. To record is the most overrated, distracting, masturbatory act of our self-involved age and really the only reason to record Nick Cave live is to implore others to see Nick Cave live.
For the man, like his comet, is on fire, ablaze. Subtly too, he is on a quiet, artistic mission to save the world. Or perhaps only to reach newer heights of his art, and in so doing have the same effect all the same. Cave finished his gig in Athens with a hundred of the nearest audience up on the stage and dancing with him, dressed as ever in a black jacket and unbuttoned white shirt. You could describe it as a man who started punk in crowded, piss-stinking venues but who still, taken to the biggest of stages, understands that same truth that he is his crowd and his crowd is he. He is his crowd and his crowd is he.
To politicise such an act, needlessly but again I must, the most ambitious artist of our age, crowned in any individual glory he’d wish for, thrives in the collective act of sharing his stage.
