Nick Cave has reflected on seeing Radiohead in London, describing the concert as a powerful spiritual and emotional experience.
Nick Cave has shared an unusually personal reflection on seeing Radiohead live in London, describing the experience as something closer to a spiritual ritual than a standard arena concert. Writing on his blog The Red Hand Files, Cave responded to a question from a fan who asked whether he enjoys attending other artists’ shows.
Cave explained that while he generally avoids concerts when he is touring himself, the circumstances recently changed. “When I’m on tour, the last thing I want to do is go to someone else’s concert,” he wrote. “I feel sonically and emotionally overloaded, and the live experience is simply too intense.” After taking a couple of months off the road, however, he found himself drawn back into the live music world.
During that break, Nick Cave attended several performances, including shows by Bob Dylan, Swans, Cameron Winter, Dirty Three, and Radiohead. The Radiohead show, held at London’s O2 Arena, stood out not just musically but personally. Cave revealed that it was the first time he had ever attended an arena concert as a member of the audience.
“At the Radiohead concert at the O2, I was sitting among twenty thousand people,” he wrote. “Bizarrely, it was the first time I had ever been in the audience at such a large show, and I was stunned by the depth of love in the room – people dancing, screaming, crying, hugging each other, throwing themselves around.”
“I was struck by the realisation of just how powerful live music is – that a group of individuals can come together and concoct a sound unique to them, and that people can connect with that distinctive vision as if it were their own experience.”
Nick Cave described sensing what he called a moral dimension to the experience. “I could feel its moral quality – how this singular force has the capacity to repair the world with its goodness,” he wrote.
He went on to compare the Radiohead concert to other forms of spirituality in his life. “I engage in various spiritual activities – I swim in a lake, go to church, walk in nature, meditate – but none offer the transcendent opportunity of a live concert,” Cave explained. “It is a form of human activity that radiates goodness, working its way through the crowd and into the world as a reparative, cosmic force, improving matters, keeping the devil at bay.”
According to Cave, the reaction of the audience was about more than just the songs themselves. “I believe Radiohead’s audience was responding not only to the music, which was astonishing, but also to the courage of the performers – the sheer nerve to stand before a crowd and offer up their souls. Like everyone else there, I was deeply moved and humbled.”
He concluded by framing Radiohead’s performance as something quietly heroic, calling them “a band engaging in a remarkable act of ordinary courage, a distinctly human form of heroism – the audacity to stand before the world and declare, ‘This is what we think. This is what we feel. This is who we are.’”
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