Idiot Prayer: Nick Cave Alone at Alexandra Palace, review: mesmeric and quietly devastating

At least we know Nick Cave hasn’t been letting himself go in lockdown. No grey roots, stubble or tracksuit bottoms for the dapper goth singer-songwriter. With jet black dyed hair and those lugubrious, snub-nosed gargoyle features, he still looks like a cross between Shrek and Johnny Cash in a Gucci suit.

Cave’s imaginative attempt to overcome pandemic restrictions on live entertainment with a solo live stream gig proves a strange, solitary affair, less a communion with an imagined audience than a private meditation between one man and his own songs. Shot in a gorgeously empty Alexandra Palace with Cave playing 21 songs from across his career solo at the piano, it looks icily beautiful but more art movie than gig.

It has been created to be broadcast as a single never to be repeated live event, without recourse to pause, rewind, fast forward or repeat. Yet the performance was filmed in advance by award-winning cinematographer Robbie Ryan (The Favourite, Marriage Story), whose small crew were occasionally caught in the background of his elegantly composed shots. It was edited by Nick Emerson (Lady Macbeth, Emma).

Cave has a long and interesting history of adapting his work to film, yet the simple awareness that you are effectively watching a movie inevitably strips the concert experience of tension, that crackle of immediacy where anything might happen.

Cave doesn’t speak, look into the camera or do anything to break his own private spell. Apart from his entrance and exit, he remains seated at a black Fazioli grand piano in the middle of a vast empty hall, leafing through handwritten songbooks and pages of lyrics, discarding them on the floor around him as he completes each number.

His focus is intensely on the words in front of him, as his gold ringed fingers run across the ivories, the rhythms and nuances of his grave and fragile voice interweaving with the rhythm and flow of sonorous piano chords.

An unfussy pianist, Cave gives himself just what is needed to carry each song. The set comprises material from across his career, reworking the early 1992 Bad Seeds grand guignol of Papa Won’t Leave You Henry into a sad, sinister lament for a lost child and Grinderman’s grungily atmospheric 2007 Man In The Moon into a sorrowful elegy for a lost father.

And therein lies a problem. Without the range and expanse of his fantastic, long-serving backing musicians, the tone is uniformly sombre, as his recorded work has more recently tended to be.

There is a debut for a new Nick Cave song, the cheerily titled Euthanasia, yet another tender meditation on loss, grief and redemption that has been his theme since the death of his son, Arthur, in 2015. “I looked for you underneath the damp earth / I looked for you in the night sky … and in looking for you, I lost myself in time,” Cave gently croons.

Cave is one of the boldest and most lyrically dazzlingly singer-songwriters of our time. His material has always exerted a primal power in its mythic depictions of all too human struggles with matters of life, death, love and salvation. Stripped to its barest essentials and fired up by this new quality of almost transcendent sorrow, it has entered a different realm. To surrender to his quietly devastating performance offers a mesmeric and emotionally cathartic experience.

The act of surrender itself is the difficulty, however, in this strange hybrid medium, where there is no atmosphere, no interaction, no shared audience rapture, and no sense of risk, all the things that make live music so compelling. The camera’s eye and editor’s choices impede our own volition, whilst each individual viewer’s experience is shaped by separate circumstances.

There is something wondrous at work, for sure. But as much as I understand Cave’s intent in making it a one-off event, I would prefer to be able to listen at my own leisure. Watched in isolation on a personal device, the experience is creepily akin to eavesdropping on a musician’s private hell.

Idiot Prayer will stream tonight, 23 July: UK & Europe: 8pm BST, Australia & Asia: 8pm AEST, North & South America: 7pm PDT/10pm EDT. Tickets from nickcave.com