Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds Prove, Again, That No One Else Comes Close

LIVE REVIEW: NICK CAVE & THE BAD SEEDS + ALDOUS HARDING

Brisbane Showgrounds | Tuesday, 27th January 2026

Photos: Craig Patch-Taylor (@craigs_not_here) Words: Ben Preece (@p.r.e.e.c.e)

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The excruciating heat has lifted, and it’s a beautiful, breezy night under the stars, well, mainly clouds, for what anticipation is already calling an exceptional evening of music. “It’s good to see some goths out,” my friend says in passing. It is indeed. They’re here alongside just about everyone else too, predominantly Gen X, with a healthy scattering of older heads. What they all seem to share is politeness. Maybe it’s the long weekend calm carrying over, but this is a crowd far from rowdy, relaxed, patient, quietly buzzing. It’s a new venue for this writer, and so far, it’s doing everything right.

"Aldous Harding" appears emblazoned onto the big screens bookending the vast stage in massive font, a neat coincidence given the New Zealand singer of the same name has just begun her set. Harding is flanked by two others, seated in a perfectly tight triangle, the sounds they produce immediately sublime. Bizarrely, her short six-song setlist is drawn from just two albums, Party and Warm Chris, but it hits the mark. You can hear exactly why she was chosen to open tonight.

Her ethereally warm, tender voice floats effortlessly through the space as the crowd continues to file in, conversations tapering off almost without realising it. Her stage presence is minimal, almost austere, but her voice, wrapped in that strange, elastic folk-meets-baroque pop hybrid, is more than enough to break the ice. Subtly extraordinary, she sits somewhere between PJ Harvey and The Velvet Underground & Nico, her lyrics wonderfully strange and slightly unhinged, matched only by her shape-shifting vocal gift. ‘Imagining My Man’ is the closest thing to a hit, yet it feels lifted from another time. It’s sophisticated and just gorgeous. ‘Leathery Whip’ closes the brief set, leaving the sense that something quietly special has just occurred. The space is properly filling now, softened, tuned, and ready for what’s to come.

The meditative music drifting over the PA, paired with the subtle, ever-shifting colours of the Wild God logo, slowly pulls us under. Hypnotised might be the word. It’s the only explanation for this shared state, this charged calm, as we collectively prepare for what will be revealed song by song across an astonishing set from Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds.

One by one they file onto the stage, The Bad Seeds in extended form tonight, including four backing singers, Colin Greenwood on bass, yes, that Colin Greenwood, the unmistakable silhouette of Warren Ellis, and finally Nick Cave himself. The room tightens. It feels like church. It feels like a cult. Cave is the preacher, and we are ready to be spoken to.

“I look like a Mormon,” he shouts to someone in the crowd at one point, puncturing the reverence with a flash of humour. It’s remarkable how little his aesthetic has changed across decades, and how completely right it still feels. Black suit, sharp lines, preacher’s posture. Timeless, unwavering, utterly commanding.

Touring their 2024 album Wild God in Australia for the first time, they open with the brooding ‘Frogs’ before rolling straight into the eponymous ‘Wild God’. The latter lands heavier tonight, its slow burn erupting into an explosive crescendo of high strings, pounding drums, and vast, soaring backing vocals. A few of those descriptors will be recycled before the night is out. The vocalists add gospel-height peaks to the live renditions of the new material, lifting the songs into something more commanding, more communal.

The first step backward comes with ‘O Children’, its arrival greeted warmly, and made heavier still by Cave’s dedication to the awful state of the world right now. The backing singers return here too, swelling the song into something mournful yet defiant, grief-stricken but unbowed.

The setlist proves wildly eclectic, flipping from cathartic religious experience to something closer to unhinged in a single breath. ‘Jubilee Street’ draws the loudest cheers so far, its slow-build tension releasing the room in waves, while ‘From Her to Eternity’ marks the beginning of the controlled unravel, Cave prowling, provoking, pushing against the edges of restraint.

Nick Cave feels different these days. Preacher, conduit, confessor, physical force, sometimes all at once. His body, his voice, his humour, his tenderness, his grief, none of it feels performed. It’s difficult to imagine anyone else sustaining that level of emotional transmission across a 150-minute set. He is more spiritually open now, more present, yet still as theatrical and dramatic as ever, perhaps even more so. The darkness remains, but it’s a memory illuminated, reframed, transformed into something closer to communion than confession. The touchy-feely interplay with the crowd feels like a lost art, one Cave continues to practise with total conviction.

He actually spends a remarkable amount of time with the crowd, leaning forward, locking eyes, clasping hands, holding faces, turning fleeting contact into something intimate and disarming. It’s not chaotic or grabby, but deliberate, purposeful, almost tender. He conducts the front rows like an extension of the band, drawing energy upward and feeding it back amplified. There’s a trust at play here, from both sides, a shared understanding that this is part of the ritual. The touch, the eye contact, the closeness collapses the space between performer and audience, turning a massive outdoor show into something improbably personal.

Without naming every song as a highlight, because they truly are, ‘Tupelo’ arrives after Cave sets the scene with a story about Elvis and the night he was born, when a storm tore through the Mississippi town that would give the song its name. What follows is an utterly unhinged, larger-than-life rendition of the 1985 classic, all thunder and biblical menace, as if the band is attempting to summon the storm itself. It’s immense, overwhelming, and feels genuinely dangerous in its scale.

‘Conversion’ is this writer’s personal pick from Wild God, an uplifting, gospel-heavy number that makes the most of Warren Ellis’ flawless falsetto and the backing vocalists’ towering presence. The repeated line, “you’re touched by the spirit, touched by the flame,” lands with the force of a revelation, less rock lyric than divine decree, as if some ancient force has briefly taken hold of the stage and refuses to let go. “You’re beautiful, you’re beautiful, you’re beautiful,” Cave bellows endlessly. I believe you, Nick. I really do. I am beautiful.

What follows is perhaps the “sad” run of the set, a stretch Cave approaches with striking candour, especially given the darkness of the subject matter. Songs drawn from Ghosteen, Skeleton Tree, and eventually Carnage, the Cave and Ellis COVID-era collaboration and, frankly, a career highlight from 2021, are given the kind of reverence they demand. This is grief handled carefully, openly, without theatrical armour.

‘I Need You’ is particularly devastating. Just Cave at the piano, repeating “just breathe” over and over like a mantra he’s still trying to convince himself of. His pain is palpable, unguarded, and the crowd responds in kind, falling into a near-total silence, not out of politeness but shared solace.

The mood flips quickly, and what better way to do it than with ‘Red Right Hand’, a song that has long since outgrown even this band. Its mythology has been reinforced through countless soundtracks, most famously as the theme to Peaky Blinders, until it feels almost untethered from its original context. Tonight, it receives a particularly epic treatment, the band peeling back its layers in a state of perfectly controlled chaos. When the most famous bell strike in modern music finally rings out, it cuts cleanly through the wall of sound, a moment of collective recognition that still somehow hits with fresh force.

‘The Mercy Seat’ and ‘White Elephant’ round out the main set in similarly ferocious fashion, both songs stretched and sharpened until they feel almost unbearable in their intensity. It’s a brutal, exhilarating place to leave things hanging. The best, somehow, is still to come.

Spoiler alert, this encore is plain and simply perfect, arguably one of the finest ever witnessed. It unfolds like a perfectly rounded second set, beginning with Cave recounting the origins of The Bad Seeds. He name-checks The Boys Next Door, which initially feels like a casual aside, until he begins to describe a song Rowland S. Howard brought to the band in those earliest days. A collective, crowd-wide audible gasp ripples through the venue. They are going to play ‘Shivers’. Something you never expect to witness, and almost can’t believe you are. Impossibly, it steals the entire show.

‘Papa Won’t Leave You, Henry’ harks back to the violent Cave of old, as does the sole Murder Ballads inclusion, ‘Henry Lee’, with the extraordinary Janet Ramus stepping forward to recreate PJ Harvey’s infamous vocal part. It’s chilling, seductive, and time-warping, effortlessly dragging us back to when the wild roses grew and when Cave’s dating life was still prime tabloid fodder.

He introduces ‘Skeleton Tree’ by explaining how his relationship with the song has shifted, softened, after a fan asked about it via The Red Hand Files. It lands gently, heavy with perspective rather than grief. By all accounts, this should be the end. The band file off as orderly as they arrived. And then, casually,

Nick Cave sits back down at the piano. “One more,” he suggests.

The opening chords of ‘Into My Arms’ ripple outward. The greatest love song of its generation. A perfect song, and a perfect ending to a show that feels definitive. There is something resembling a full-blown renaissance running through Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds right now, a level of focus, confidence, and emotional clarity that even the most seasoned veterans in the crowd are calling unprecedented. These are not just great shows. They are, quite possibly, the best the band has ever played. Nothing extra could improve this setlist tonight. Not because there aren’t a hundred other songs we could wish for, but because nothing more is needed. It leaves us utterly, completely satiated.

On the days that feel truly shitty, it’s worth remembering that you existed on the same planet, at the same time, as Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds. Let that settle. It is a privilege beyond measure.