{"id":639298,"date":"2025-12-18T01:24:34","date_gmt":"2025-12-18T01:24:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/639298\/"},"modified":"2025-12-18T01:24:34","modified_gmt":"2025-12-18T01:24:34","slug":"nick-cave-compares-seeing-radiohead-live-in-london-to-spiritual-activity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/639298\/","title":{"rendered":"Nick Cave compares seeing Radiohead live in London to “spiritual activity”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Nick Cave<\/a> has recounted his experience of seeing Radiohead<\/a> live in London, comparing the gig to \u201cspiritual activity\u201d.<\/p>\n

Cave was asked on his blog\u00a0The Red Hand Files<\/a>\u00a0by a fan named Jordan from Dublin if he liked going to other artists\u2019 concerts. It transpired from his reply that he does, though not when he\u2019s touring himself. In fact, Radiohead ended up being the first arena show he had ever seen.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I\u2019m on tour, the last thing I want to do is go to someone else\u2019s concert,\u201d he wrote. \u201cI feel sonically and emotionally overloaded, and the live experience is simply too intense. However, I\u2019ve had a couple of months\u2019 break from touring, life has settled down, and, to my surprise, Jordan, I\u2019ve had the urge to go and see live music. Over the past couple of months I\u2019ve attended many gigs \u2013 incredible evenings, all of them \u2013 including Bob Dylan<\/a>, Swans<\/a>, Radiohead, Cameron Winter, and Dirty Three<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt the Radiohead concert at the O2, I was sitting among twenty thousand people. 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 \u2013 people dancing, screaming, crying, hugging each other, throwing themselves around. I was struck by the realisation of just how powerful live music is \u2013 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. I could feel its moral quality \u2013 how this singular force has the capacity to repair the world with its goodness.\u201d<\/p>\n

He continued: \u201cI engage in various spiritual activities \u2013 I swim in a lake, go to church, walk in nature, meditate \u2013 but none offer the transcendent opportunity of a live concert. 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. I believe Radiohead\u2019s audience was responding not only to the music, which was astonishing, but also to the courage of the performers \u2013 the sheer nerve to stand before a crowd and offer up their souls. Like everyone else there, I was deeply moved and humbled.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Radiohead,Radiohead, live in Madrid, 2025. Credit: Alex Lake<\/p>\n

To conclude, Cave described Radiohead as \u201ca band engaging in a remarkable act of ordinary courage, a distinctly human form of heroism \u2013 the audacity to stand before the world and declare, \u2018This is what we think. This is what we feel. This is who we are.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Radiohead bassist Colin Greenwood<\/a> has been playing live with Cave and the Bad Seeds recently, filling in for Martyn Casey. \u00a0Greenwood also played with Cave live on his recent solo tours<\/a>\u00a0as well as several dates of the \u2018Carnage\u2019 tour with\u00a0Warren Ellis<\/a>. Greenwood\u00a0also contributed parts to the band\u2019s new album, \u2018Wild God\u2019<\/a>, too.<\/p>\n

Speaking to NME\u00a0about filling in for Casey while on the band\u2019s tour<\/a>, Greenwood shared: \u201cIt\u2019s an awesome group of people to play music with. They\u2019re brilliant and with ferociously loud drummers; what a team. For me, it\u2019s a really fun thing to do because it\u2019s not Radiohead. There are a lot of different colours in the music, so I\u2019m having a blast.\u201d<\/p>\n

The musician also touched on Cave\u2019s artistry and said: \u201cHe\u2019s such a great story-teller, and I really love his piano-playing. When I took the rough recordings from the new album home to listen to and heard his voice fill up my front room, I thought, \u2018What a voice! He\u2019s got the lot!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

He added: \u201cI knew his music of course, but I didn\u2019t know it super-well. I knew \u2018Let Love In\u2019 and really liked that record, as well as the previous records \u2018Push The Sky Away\u2019 and \u2018Skeleton Tree\u2019, Being lucky enough to watch him work and write with Warren has been a true privilege.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a\u00a0five-star review of the opening London show of the Radiohead tour<\/a>,\u00a0NME\u00a0concluded: \u201cWhat a show: a visceral energy, a tasteful spectacle, all delivered with a generosity of spirit, Yorke in full rockstar mode as the band trade places to tend to each corner of the venue. For a band once embarrassed by the notion of \u2018arena rock\u2019, nobody does it better. A new album and another night like this can\u2019t come soon enough.\u201d<\/p>\n

Radiohead wrapped up their first UK and European tour in seven years in Copenhagen this week, with vocalist Thom Yorke<\/a> looking particularly emotional as he bid farewell to fans.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Nick Cave has recounted his experience of seeing Radiohead live in London, comparing the gig to \u201cspiritual activity\u201d.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":639299,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7757],"tags":[748,393,4884,257,453,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-639298","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-london","8":"tag-britain","9":"tag-england","10":"tag-great-britain","11":"tag-london","12":"tag-rock","13":"tag-uk","14":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115737963624326344","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/639298","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=639298"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/639298\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/639299"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=639298"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=639298"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=639298"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}