More about: Nick Cave and the Bad SeedsNick Cave
It streams tomorrow and you must buy a ticket
“The gift in the gauntlet was a new and raw honesty toward myself and toward the world.” In one of his tender replies to fans on his Red Hand Files, Nick Cave notes that after the death of his son “I had been exposed.” What followed were a series of projects that lead Cave even further into the core of what it means to be human. If before he had cut to the heart of the matter, now he was carrying out delicate open heart surgery. With Idiot Prayer: Alone at Alexandra Palace, this singer-songwriter continues his pilgrimage into humanist enlightenment, reporting back with breath-bating excellence.
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As a UK resident for almost thirty of his 62 years, Cave has had his fair share of Ally Pally visits. He’s even played there. Like many of his artistic decisions, filming there is a choice you couldn’t have predicted, but one that feels just right. As Cave speaks the poem behind his ‘Spinning Song’, he walks his long, lopsided gait through the North London’s gilded corridors dressed in Gucci. Tall and box-dyed sable, he cuts an impressive figure: a goth bathed in gold. At the sound of his gravelly voice forming the words of one of his many love songs, the gooseflesh commences. And that’s before he even sits down at his piano.
Good to his word that he would share his new-found gift of “raw honesty”, Idiot Prayer is an intimate portrait. Robbie Ryan’s camera drinks Cave in: the detail on his gold rings jump in the light, a mug filled with tea sits on a pile of scattered papers that grows as each song comes to an end. And the songs! Each is as beguiling as the last: an endless chain of cuts from Cave’s long and prolific career, carefully spun into their new iteration as delicate, undone piano pieces.
‘Spinning Song’ without its synth. ‘The Mercy Seat’ without its storm of sound. ‘Papa Won’t Leave You, Henry’ without guitars. All of them work heart-stoppingly well, as if they had simply been waiting for Cave to draw back a veil and discover their raw middle.
This is a feature-length film. 90 minutes. 22 songs. If you know and love Nick Cave, it’s a goldmine of intimate content worth double the price of the ticket. Filmed in breath-bating proximity to the man himself, it’s the first time a quarantine-induced livestream has come close to replicating the experience of hearing music live. Perhaps that’s because it doesn’t try to remember the particular sensation of standing sweaty in a broiling crowd. Instead, it proposes a new kind of experience: a kind where the music fan stands solo beside the artist, so close as to feel the disturbances in the air as papers are shuffled.
Idiot Prayer is a film that even Cave non-converts will watch with quiet awe. Everyone must watch it.
Nick Cave plays:
Spinning Song
Idiot Prayer
Sad Waters
Brompton Oratory
Palaces of Montezuma
Girl In Amber
Man in the Moon
Nobody’s Baby Now
Are You The One That I’ve Been Waiting For
Waiting For You
The Mercy Seat
Euthanasia
Jubilee Street
Far From Me
He Wants You
Higgs Boson Blues
Stranger Than Kindness
Into My Arms
The Ship Song
Papa Won’t Leave You, Henry
Black Hair
Galleon Ship
Idiot Prayer: Nick Cave Alone in Alexandra Palace will stream on 23 July - UK & Europe: 8pm BST (Australia & Asia: 8pm AEST, North & South America: 7pm PDT / 10pm EDT) Visit nickcave.com for tickets and full information
More about: Nick Cave and the Bad SeedsNick Cave
Photo: Joel Ryan
