“All music is political, right? You either make music that pleases the king and his court, or you make music for the serfs outside the walls” said Efrim Menuck of Godspeed You! Black Emperor. There is no doubting which side of the wall Nick Cave is on. He was invited to the English king’s coronation and thought it was a splendid day out, but he manages to remain pretty popular with the serfs too.

Buying a ticket to see Cave always involves a bit of umming and ahhing. On the one hand, he is a fine songwriter with a band that always puts on a magnificent show. On the other hand…

It is impossible for anyone who hasn’t gone through the losses that he has in recent years to comprehend how it must affect a parent. The paradox is that the deaths of two of his children have made him embrace life and relationships much more intensely and less selfishly. Early in Saturday’s set he sang O Children, explaining that it was how parents sometimes fail to protect their children. Everyone in the audience knew that this 2004 song had taken on a whole new level of meaning for him.

For a public figure who has written so well and with such sincerity about loss and death this would have been an opportunity to reflect on the unknown thousands of Palestinian children who are being starved, mutilated and shredded by Israel. The closest, to my knowledge, he has ever come to expressing some parental empathy with Palestinians is a Times interview in August 2024 in which he ruminates on the boycott campaign and says “this is an enormously difficult conversation because of what’s happening in Gaza…that’s an absolute catastrophe.”

My approach to these things is that if I were to restrict my cultural life to only people I agree with on everything I’d be confined to sitting in a pub reading a fairly limited number of books.

So, Cave keeps off politics in his performances, less so in his actions. But this is a band still at the top of its game. Warren Ellis has the look of a man they found outside an off licence begging for 50p to buy another can of Kestrel super strength lager, but Cave is probably right to describe him as a genius. The sounds he gets from his electric violin as he jumps on and off an unstable looking chair are shrieking and beautiful in those sections when the band lets rip a tornado of sound.

Cave is dallying with an arm’s length Christianity, not that you would know from the amount of swearing he does, and his shows have an almost celebratory religious feel as he sings of love and death. After two and a half hours the service concluded with the celebrant on the piano as the congregation sang along to the well loved hymn  Into My Arms and went home uplifted, smiling beatifically.