Years ago, people asked Nick Cave questions at their peril. In 1988, one NME hack riled him so badly that Cave started swinging punches, tried to steal the interview tape, and screamed: “You’re nothing but a shite-eater!” Today, though, you can ask him anything—literally—and he’ll answer on his Red Hand Files website. How do I cope with losing someone I love? Should I bring children into this world’s Boschian hellscape? Do you enjoy stage magic? Every warm, generous response makes Cave seem more like a kindly agony uncle instead of the larger-than-life construct of yore. The man who once passed for some crazed netherworld shaman, as unearthly and sinister as the stranger from “Red Right Hand,” usually limits the supernatural grandeur to discussing his beloved dachshund, Nosferatu.
Other recent projects have made Cave the flesh-and-blood human more visible, too: chatty Q&A shows, candid documentaries, and a poignant Bad Seeds record, 2019’s Ghosteen, touched by the death of his son, Arthur. But none have been as eerily intimate as Idiot Prayer. A live film and LP recorded at London’s Alexandra Palace after Covid-19 waylaid a Bad Seeds tour, it finds him performing alone in a deserted concert hall, reworking 22 career-spanning songs into haunted piano sermons. The 84 minutes are filled almost entirely by melancholy keys and Cave’s rich croon. On the solitary new track, the longing ballad “Euthanasia,” he sings of spending a desperate evening roaming lonely landscapes, unmoored by grief and seeking salvation. “In looking for you, I lost myself,” he quivers over its elegant arrangement.
That contemplative approach means Cave doesn’t so much strip songs down as peel back the flesh and expose their skeletal beauty. “Sad Waters” is recast as a pretty, tumbling lament; “Stranger Than Kindness” is broken down into a ghostly hymn; an otherworldly “Girl in Amber” entrances. Nearly a third of the set is taken from 1997’s The Boatman’s Call, a choice which forges a spiritual link between that record’s stately heartbreak and Ghosteen’s sublime ruminations on grief. In Alexandra Palace’s lavish, uncanny void, the lines between past and present start to blur, and compositions become unstuck in time. Twenty-year-old wounds are as tender as purpling bruises on “Brompton Oratory” and “Far From Me,” while Cave’s choked falsetto on the sparse, sumptuous “Black Hair” suggests the scent that an ex-lover left on his pillow still fills his nostrils. “Waiting For You,” on the other hand, emerged just last year, yet he purges the Ghosteen version’s gauzy electronic sheen until only a brittle prayer remains, and his voice cracks as if he’s spent an eternity in purgatory.
