june 24, 2003.

Okay. The Nick Cave concert.

Imagine that the world is ending in some fiery, inevitable way - you pick your poison. As the sky lights up with a foretaste of Hell, you make your way to the last bar in town. It's a bar that plays both kinds of music - Country and Western - but you heard there was going to be a punk act there tonight. It's the last night on earth and this is the only game in town.

When you get inside, you immediately notice the little punk kids, huddling distrustfully in clumps and snarls. The locals are clutching their cans of Coors, waiting for an excuse to use them as softballs. The band is just tuning up. You watch as a painfully thin man in a cheap black suit sits down in front of a piano. He calls his band the Bad Seeds. You wonder why. Soon it becomes obvious.

What he plays is neither punk, nor country, nor any other nameable thing. It is loud & angry. It is soft, mournful and inevitable. It is music that makes and defines the edge of doom. It is growling music, sobbing music, screaming spittle flying across the audience music. The thin man in the black suit shakes and moans like his soul is anxious to be past Death and free of the body. He yelps some songs; croons others. At the heart of all the songs are hope and despair, twined so tightly around each other that you can't tell where one stops and the other begins. He - they - are stunning. You walk out into Doomsday without your breath and without your heart.

That, my friends, is what the Nick Cave concert was like.

"This next song's a cautionary tale. [silent beat] In fact, they all are. That's what I do. [silent beat] That's my thang."

I can't say that I was thrilled at standing for 2 hours in fishnet stockings, weaving my large body through the crowds in search of a sightline for a 5 foot 5 girl. But hearing the Birthday Party song "Wild World" was very worth it. And I enjoyed the fact that he actually took requests for the encores.

"We don't play that song, son. It's obscene."