Equal parts feline and lupine

A huge pile of laundry and a half-unpacked suitcase: I must have been away for more than an evening. My return to the lumpy bosom of my workplace was a sleepy one, although no students seemed to mind the super-low-key tutorials today.

To narrate all my adventures in one entry would be to tax even the most dedicated reader, so I’ll string you along over the course of several entries, some of which I hope to grace with pictures when I haul ‘em off harvestdad’s laptop.

Nothing quite ratchets up the tension at the end of a working day like squeezing into the ungenerously-sized seats of a commuter flight. This I did on Thursday, although the woman beside me was even less comfortable than I, remarking ruefully to her husband that, had they been on a flight that had business class, they might have been upgraded because of her size. Still, sitting next to a larger woman is no problem really when compared with the more common commuter gent who’s not going to tuck his elbows in or keep his knees within the boundaries of his seat for anyone, so it was nice to avoid my usual lot when flying.

I love Wellie; its lights and compactness, the way so many suburbs can be reached by driving upward at an angle of remarkable steepness. After heigh-ho, up a hill or two in the shuttle, I eventually found myself in town to collect the tix, and then, striding with the cheerful assurance of someone who is geographically unlikely to run into students while she’s drinking, I met Mariella, Veegee and assorted work colleagues at the local Brewing Company Brewpub, there to drink Verboten Vice, a wheat beer. I suggested to Mariella that here was a tautology at work: surely all vices are by definition verboten? Was this a doubly-negative, not at all vice-like beer? Two pints failed to make up my mind, whereupon we headed back to the town hall for the show.

I had theorised earlier to Mariella that Nick Cave might be our generation’s Frank Sinatra; I came to this hypothesis after seeing some live footage from a recent UK concert in which the front few rows were packed with women in their thirties, looking notably dreamy-eyed in relation to the volume. Would we be thus showing up for a similar show in twenty years’ time, only to be mocked by future generations as golden oldies? But, as Mariella pointed out, there were plenty of twenty-somethings at the show, so our taste hasn’t completely detached from youth culture yet.

We walked through from the foyer just as the show was starting up, “Abattoir Blues” all dry staccato and dirge-like tempo, while the downstairs audience shot forward in a rush. The three of us ended up staggered out along the left-hand speakers (with a resultant deafness in one ear that lasted well into the weekend), able to see all of the band but the back-up quartet. We were around five heads back and close enough to make eye contact, had our showman been of a mind to do so.

Equal parts feline and lupine (although, struggling to name that second part after the show, all I could come up with was “sexy monkey”), Sir Nick (as Momo dubbed him in passing) worked the crowd with detached amusement, at the same time as performing with that audible commitment to the music that gets up and smacks you around the face in concert just as it does on the albums. Indeed, the resemblance of the live show to its recorded antecedents (give or take a few additional “motherfuckers” and other lyrical extensions) made me remark on just how damn impressive the whole band of Bad Seeds is. The rhythmic steadiness and, when called for, soloists’ expansion, made our hearts soar, although the bodily throwing around of Warren Ellis’s violin playing made Veegee and I (as string players) snicker. That won’t cut it at the community orchestra!

The show was heavy on the new songs (fine by me, although they didn’t play “Cannibal’s Song”, perhaps my favourite off the album) and anchored by various of the Murder Ballads and earlier material. “God is in the House” was the sole number from any of The Boatman’s Call, No More Shall We Part or Nocturama, which might have felt like a gap were it not for the immediacy of the show before us.

Cave’s asides to the audiences were few and dry. I didn’t get a sense that he needed, on the surface at least, our validation, in the way that some performers seem to be hanging out for you to love them. With the mass of excited adulation that constituted the main atmosphere, it’s hardly surprising. But that didn’t stop Mariella and Veegee and I, and any number of excited concert-goers around us, beaming like idiots as each new number came around, or waving our hands in the air each time our frontman came waving his long arms at our corner of the floor.

As it was for the redoutable Joanna, the second encore was a highlight for me, “The Ship Song” reminding me of why I’m single; it’s my failure to meet someone for whom moral philosophy is embedded in their aesthetic, however detached (and who thinks such remarks are interesting rather than intractably geeky). Joanna said it and I’ll quote it again,

I have to say that “We talked about it all night long / we defined our moral ground / but when I crawled into your arms / everything comes tumbling down” is right up there with the most expressive and vivid lyrics ever.

Hot damn. And then, “Stagger Lee”, played with a ferocity and expansiveness that topped even the rendering, earlier in the evening, of “The Mercy Seat”, that made me think my ears were about to start smoking. Oh how we cheered as the anti-hero fatally shot each of his unfortunate victims; what better allegory for not giving a damn than shooting the devil? Veegee was delighted: her cries of “Stagger Lee!” from the end of the first set had been rewarded.

We stopped off at Mariella’s work on the way home to pick up my bag, to find that the workmate of hers who had kindly dropped it off there on his way home had taken the liberty of taking my clean underwear out and hanging it from Mariella’s computer. Queen of Practical Jokes, tell me whether or not this is funny or just f*cking dodge? It could have been worse, I suppose, but since we’d met only a few hours before I was a little unsettled. Even repairing back to Mariella’s for a quiet post-midnight pipe couldn’t quite remove the “ew” factor of that postscript to our evening, although it did lead me to a monologue on how the fact that we are each a separate consciousness inside our own heads, yet sharing the same space, was, you know, amazing and stuff.

With my left ear painlessly buzzing in its temporary deafness and the roof of my mouth lightly seared and tasting like steak, I retired for the evening. Despite coming home on the red eye, I loped about Concrete University with a permanent smile all the next day. Getting out of town is the best medicine for any work-related malaise. I’ll take a case of abattoir blues over the latter ten times out of ten.