Nick Cave's Idiot Prayer shows the future of streaming concerts is bright

With his once-in-a-lifetime live-streamed concert special, Idiot Prayer, Alone at Alexandra Palace, Cave redefines the definition of a livestream from the poor quality, bandwidth-choked grainy videos of yore, to a full-fledged cinematographic experience meant to capture you in the most intimate way possible.

Idiot Prayer serves as the final film in a trilogy, along with 20,000 Days on Earth and One More Time with Feeling. “It’s the luminous and heartfelt climax— alone at Alexander Palace,” he says. “I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed making it.”

His voice, deep, poetic, and raw, bounces off the empty walls of Alexandra Palace as he opens his hour-and-a-half set with "Spinning Song", the wistful spoken word that opened last year’s Ghosteen. Live music has seemingly come to this: awaiting anxiously at our screens as a man sits down at his piano alone, surrounded by the striking architecture of a building you remember being filled to the brim just months before. But of course, Idiot Prayer’ is much more than just a man through a screen— it’s ninety minutes of Cave baring his soul, singing words of exquisite, tortured poetry matched only by the spoken words he opened with.

“I loved playing deconstructed versions of my songs at these shows, distilling them to their essential forms – with an emphasis on the delivery of the words,” Cave explained. “I felt I was rediscovering the songs all over again, and started to think about going into a studio and recording these reimagined versions at some stage – whenever I could find the time.

“Then, of course, the world went into lockdown. The Bad Seeds’ global 2020 tour was postponed. Studios shut down. Venues shut down. And the world fell into an eerie, self-reflective silence. It was within this silence that I began to think about the idea of not only recording the songs, but also filming them.”

The setlist spans years, gliding from the concert’s namesake, 1997’s “Idiot Prayer”, to 1986’s “Sad Waters”, to 2016’s “Girl in Amber”, to last year’s “Waiting For You”. At times singing to his small production team in the wings and at most times to himself, every performance has a snowflake quality that begs us to listen deeper: to the brooding cover of “Palaces of Montezuma” right before the plunge into “Man on the Moon” by the same band; to the dark, twisting grapple with loss on ‘Euthanasia’ that follows the timeless, intense Christian imagery of “The Mercy Seat”.

And the beauty is in the transitions. He finishes his songs to hollow, self-reflective silence— no applause, no jeering crowd, no drunken shouting to destroy it all. Just the sad, sharp tips of sweet melodies, suspended in ether, crystal clear as they sit for an undisturbed moment before bleeding into another. He wields our collective isolation to his advantage, demanding the spotlight in the most gentlest of ways, commandeering our focus for just 90 minutes of our busy quarantined lives. It’s more vulnerable than he’s ever been; his making tiny marks on the setlist, throwing notes to the ground, nearly kicking that half-drunken cup of tea are all moments we’re allowed to witness in great detail, anonymously, against the backdrop of our own private spaces.

Of course, this sort of lonely setup is in no way new for Cave; he most recently appeared without the Bad Seeds during his 2019 tour— aptly titled “Conversations”— swapping heavy instruments and loud guitars for endearing conversational sessions of Q&A and a range of songs performed at the piano. Both enlightening and lighthearted, “Conversations” opened up a side of an artist always careful to let us in /just/ enough. But when we’re /all/ forced to relish in the silence /together/, to “exercise in connectivity”, to slow down and rediscover what it means to really listen, we discover a side of things that wasn’t exactly hidden, per se, but was never paid attention to long enough to notice it was there.

Leave it to Cave to bring a haunting elegance to the most simple of concepts— a filmed concert. In his face there’s yearning, in his eyes a shallow determination to get it all right in one take. And it’s every bit a concert as it is a light show— you can tell by the lighting changes when he’s switched moods. “We wanted to give each song a subtle difference in terms of colour and effects,” their cinematographer Robbie Ryan revealed to NME. Lights flash almost a fiery shade of orange for “(Are You) The One I’ve Been Waiting For”, a stunning yellow for “Girl in Amber”. And for the final few minutes, the lights dim to a low purple as he prepares for one last song, “Galleon Ship”.

‘Idiot Prayer’ is a “prayer into the void” in the singer’s own words— a gripping ode to these uncertain moments, a quiet light amidst these dark and incomprehensible times. In a world now full of barriers, the short film is a complete dismantling of barriers from bygone eras that Cave himself had left up.

And it couldn’t have come at a more fitting time. If this is the future of concerts, then I quite like where we’re headed.