Concert Review: 'Conversations With NickCave' is an extraordinarily show that is part Q&A, part music and part group therapy.
— and its latest incarnation is this “Conversation” tour, which he describes as an “exercise in connectivity.” It finds him answering unfiltered audience questions and playing songs from all across his solo career; he launched it on a short U.S. jaunt last year and has taken it to his native Australia, New Zealand, the U.K. and Europe, and now a 15-date U.S. tour. before he takes it back to Europe next year.The answer to The Question was simple: “My son died,” Cave said.
The show, which featured Cave accompanying himself on piano, obviously lacked the physicality of his full-band concerts, but there was no loss of intensity or intimacy . It’s an unusually open format that, as any person of the cloth will tell you, is also a Pandora’s Box: As Cave himself said in the middle of one audience member’s uncomfortably long commentary, “That’s the thing with these ‘Conversation’ shows — you never know what you’re gonna get.
He played two other covers as well. When an audience member if he’d been a fan of the influential singer-songwriterafter many years of struggles with mental illness, Cave said he’d been a big fan and sang some of Johnston’s “Devil Town” a capella. And he spoke of the vast influence of artists like John Lee Hooker, Leonard Cohen and Johnny Cash, who covered Cave’s harrowing song “The Mercy Seat,” which is told from the perspective of a man about to be executed.
He was also very funny at times. He said his song “Girl in Amber” was “written in failed rehab number three”; when asked where his inspiration for songs comes from, he said he was troubled by songwriters’ frequent comment that a song “came from God” — “I find it problematic that God is responsible for all the crap songs in the world.”