Nick Cave Takes a Bath

If there is no rest for the wicked, I must have done something awful. The queue had been a who’s who of Nick Cave fans. Afficionados, maybe. Globetrotters meeting in a single place to regale each other with stories of their deep appreciation for ‘Nick’. Well, the ones who had come to Ballarat for this concert, anyway. They seemed a pretty keen bunch. I had never been to a concert, Nick Cave or otherwise, so I had nothing to add, but it seemed important that I bear witness to the depths of their fandom, whether I wanted to or not. If civilisation falls into the ocean, at least I know the guy with the daggy navy-blue singlet saw Nick Cave in Finland in ’97. Preening and posturing for the pecking order. Jonah had just stared at his phone. Had they followed us to ruffle their feathers further (great show, just amazing, really raw and authentic, you know?). But no, it was two women instead, one with frizzy blonde hair and her brunette friend. Maybe everyone here sounds the same, talks about the same stuff. Maybe that’s what a concert is for, like a fan club meeting. The blonde one is showing her friend her phone, presumably photos of Iceland. I look away. Between her sunglasses and the glare, I’m not convinced her friend can see the phone anyway.

The sun is lowering itself into the horizon, but the crowd is buzzing more now. It had been a long while coming too. We’d been standing around for long enough that people were beginning to get antsy, shifting their weight more frequently. Was this the first escalation in agitation waiting for this thing to start? Or had we been waiting long enough that we were getting comfortable? Not bloody likely. I jiggle my cider. The sense of humour that had justified paying $8 for a can had long since evaporated. I can’t be bothered facing the crowds around the concession stand again. Where can I put this thing? The bins are all way off on the edge of the crowd. It’s not worth fighting my way back in just to have my hands empty. Not if there’s a better option. Well, an easier one. Plenty of people have chucked them on the ground, but I wasn’t raised in a field. I cram it in my bag. Hopefully it’ll stay upright.

Shit, I’ve missed something. The two women are looking at me. “Maybe he’s not even here,” I suggest. “Maybe he missed his flight.”

“Nah. Someone posted a pic.” She pulls out her phone and starts scrolling. “Saw him at the chip shop on Sturt St. They took a selfie.” Yikes. My fault for being too indulgent. Who wants to see a rock star, someone you’ve paid nearly a hundred bucks to see, next to a stranger? Someone just like you? That’s what the stage is for, right? To give some distance, make you forget that they’re just people.

She keeps scrolling (it was at the top of my feed before, I swear). That’s the way that Facebook is designed. It doesn’t want people to look back on things they’ve already seen today. It just wants to save those memories so that it can remind you in six months’ time, to the minute, about what happened, and then you’re allowed to share it with other people. If it lets you revisit moments too soon, you might remember how many you’re missing staring at your bloody phone, boring strangers.

“There!” she proclaims. I offer a weak smile. Still looking at her phone she wiggles her shoulders slightly and scrunches up her nose. Her friend is looking away. I shrug. 

“Maybe he got hit by a car.”

“Nah, I reckon Facebook would know.”

What’s it like to have the world handed to you without wonder, to be able to just know that something hasn’t happened? What if something was happening right now, and Facebook didn’t know? What if something happened right in front of her? Would she post about it, or check her phone to see if it was really happening?

What about if he’s dead right now, floating in a bathtub behind the stage somewhere? Well he wouldn’t be floating. But is that even possible, a bathtub backstage at a concert hosted in the gardens? Of course it is. I can’t imagine him touring without one… soaping up that pale, pasty flesh, performing his ablutions before he faces an ageing shadow of a crowd. Just a huge, curtained-off room with a single clawfoot bath that someone has to fill up by hand with a bucket. Probably a metal one. I can’t imagine Nick Cave bathing in water that had touched plastic.

Maybe he doesn’t like plastic at all. Maybe it’s all boar bristle brushes on long wooden handles, sloughing the dead cells away into that steamy bath. Would it be steamy? Not if they were bucketing water, surely, but in my head that’s how it has to be. A pot boiling away with Nick Cave soup, all the things he has to leave behind washed away, or maybe bucketed out of the tub when he leaves to get dressed. Low dregs the bucket can’t reach. They’re probably towelled out. Maybe that’s why he wears cloth pants instead of black jeans, like all of the other rockers. Maybe his skin is still too damp when he gets out of the tub to wriggle into them. How many years of that can someone stomach? Is it time for comfort for Nick Cave? Maybe he spent the 70s wriggling into wet jeans so that when they dried they were even tighter, and now all he wants is some room to breathe. 

Don’t we all. I turn around to look at the concession stand behind us and there’s a hard bump against my arm. This arsehole trying to subtly work their way past me on the left without making eye contact, feeling the need to intimately acquaint their elbow with my upper arm. All this room and he wants to be where I am. Fuck him. I have a good look at him, hoping he’ll turn around to see me glaring at him. Greasy dyed black hair, still shiny, like they just coloured it but haven’t dared to shampoo it out properly yet. Did he do it this afternoon before he came here?  I look for dye stains on his ears, but the sun is behind his head and it hurts to look at it too close, and then he’s disappearing into the crowd. Jonah is here with me though, unjostled and endlessly swiping, and I wonder if any of the Twitter sophisticates have thought about the potential of Nick Cave fish and chip photos, or whether witty commentary and dredging up the past are more the order of the day. I try sneak a peek but it’s all truncated photos and truncated messages of hashtags. Maybe we’ll have a Rosetta Stone for Twitter twenty years into the future when the whole thing falls over. Oh, that’s what Buzzfeed is: historians documenting things before they become history. I stare at the side of his face to try and draw his attention but the reciprocal gaze of his phone is too much. 

How do people on Twitter brag about old things? I imagine half of these people fervently digging around in old boxes during the week before coming here, looking for the yellowing envelopes that hold their photos from the last time they saw Nick Cave live. Do they scan them in? I don’t think their phones let them do that. None of these guys look ironic enough to use Twitter on a desktop computer, like some kind of office nerd. Maybe they do flat lays, fanning them out instead so you know they were there without seeing the individual photos. They could even put their ticket stubs next to the fanned pile. Or maybe they just find the best one, where they still had good hair and were thirty kilos lighter, and spend a few minutes taking a photo of it without reflection marks all over it. I bet they even justify the effort by making it their profile picture as well, a blurry grimace behind huge sunglasses at night.

There’s a guy standing just ahead of me, not quite swaying but he’s pretty wobbly, with an open can of cider in each hand. I’ve seen people like him before. I wonder where he’s hidden his flask to get it in here. Dimes to dollars it’s empty already. I don’t know what he would have done if they’d had someone at the gate with a metal detector. Although, imagine hating Nick Cave enough to blow yourself up to ruin his day. This guy looks bored, tipping the cider up, looking at the second can as his head comes down, looking up at the sun. Will they recognise him in twenty minutes when he goes back up to order another two drinks? Will they try and stop him. Is an open air concert the place for an intervention? If so, is this the one? Is this where he realises that he can’t sustain this? That he has to find some other way to interact with the world? Or is he just a hapless victim caught in a one-off of one-offs, that Nick Cave could come here to Ballarat, of all places, and he must present his bag of meat and organs and consequence as best he can and do all he needs to do to cope?

Oh wait, his friend just came back from the toilets and he’s handing her her drink back. 

Are we an audience yet? Surely an audience all needs to be watching the same thing, but no one seems interested in looking at anyone else. Maybe they’ve realised what it’s like to be in a space full of people living their lives on broadcast only. Maybe we’re just a crowd at the moment. Everyone’s looking at their phones or straight ahead, as if the next five minutes will make the last two hours of standing here all okay, like we’re crack snipers waiting for our target to poke their head up over the parapet for a second too long. We’ll still be telling ourselves the same lies in twenty minutes. What’s life but waiting in twenty-minute blocks anyway?

I wonder if he’s dressed yet, backstage. How would he dry himself? Does he start with the feet, the more poetic beginning, or does he start with his hair and face, being practical. Or, like the rebel he is, does he do a little Hollywood rubbing motion across his back and shoulders as a kind of warm up before he does the rest of his body? Backstage would be cold, I think. 

Someone brushes past me again, the crowd rotating as even the people who tried to push forward to the front have to make a break for the bathroom or bar. There’s this mid-range churn between us and the stage, but the people against the barrier aren’t budging. What kind of preparations do those people make? Adult nappies? No drinks? A commitment to die if there’s a stampede? Imagine watching the news and seeing the stories about people dying in crowds during stage rushes and thinking hey, that’d be an okay way to go. What a passive kind of suicide for a concert. I’m not convinced that diehard Nick Cave fans want to die accidentally. It feels like the kind of thing they’d want a photoshoot about. Maybe that’s why they have their phones out just in case they need to document their deaths, their camera uploads set to send everything to LiveLeak, telling their friends that if it looks like they’re going to die, just remember to film it in horizontal.

I wonder if he brushes his teeth before he gets up there. I don’t think that he’s dirty or anything like that, but does he want to feel like a new, fresh person when he gets up there? Or is it more like when you go to a stylist to get your hair done, and they tell you not to come in with your hair freshly washed because it’s too soft and it won’t hold product? They want to be able to control it, which they can’t when it’s all fresh and soft. Like your hair has to build up to it. Sheesh, even your hair needs a warm up and it just sits there. What’s it like to get up there on the stage? Can they just get up and do it? Or do they work up to it. Spend the whole day building up to the point where they can face the one thing they have to do. Maybe going out and getting fish and chips is part of that full-day hype.

He’s lived in the UK for a bit, right? So tomato sauce or vinegar with fish and chips? Chicken salt? I wonder if it’s on his website. He’s been around long enough to have some really old fan sites out there, I bet. They might even be current. Maybe there’s someone keeping track of his favourite foods still on some free webspace, a futile task that will never be complete.

Unless, of course, he dies.

Unless he’s already dead.

The sun is nearly down now. For just a moment the crowd look like a hippo’s mouth, all demented teeth with dyed black hair and faded t-shirts shrunken with time and age. With the sinking sun where it is, the red behind the stage makes it look like a throat, the stage a tongue. Is it the mouth that we’re in, or another mouth coming to gobble us all up, a foreign tongue poised for a forceful invasion? Gushing saliva rolling over the stage and all over the audience, wet socks and gasping for fresh air. Brace for warm, wet impact. Three. Two. One. 

Guess not.

Brr, that breeze is chilly, but the heat of the crowd is sticking to us. It’s that sweaty kind of cold. Occasional puffs of air as people talk, if you look closely enough. How is that possible? How can I feel like my hands are burning while it’s so cold out? But like moths to a flame, hah, goths to a flame, we’re all drawn to the lights up on the stage. The boredom is palpable but maybe it’s like the fireworks, where you wait for hours because the invite said seven and then you remember at half eight that it has to be dark for fireworks. Duh. The warmup band appears on the stage. They don’t look convincing. If they’re really crap, maybe everyone will stampede. The people up the front will get their glorious death in action and we’ll be able to storm the back of the stage, looting whatever it is that they keep back there. 

They come, they go. They took the sun with them too, the bastards, and the last of the warmth. Maybe this wall of bodies isn’t enough to stave off the Ballarat cold. Is the magic starting to wane? Have we all blown our load on cheering the warmup band so vigorously? But time passes like it does, and we’ve all settled back into our waiting without thinking too hard about it.

How many people backstage does it take to make a concert? These guys with headphones keep on coming on the stage, moving things around and then leaving. It was interesting at first but now it feels like it’s antagonistic. Murmurs are going up whenever someone appears. A few people right up at the front barrier keep on trying to get their attention but they always have huge headphones on. They keep on flapping their arms to try get their attention but they just piss off the people next to them. It’s almost like he’s ignoring them. People at this concert not realising that they’re being ignored. At least they’re doing something, I guess. Not just standing here watching someone else do something.

Oh look, there’s another guy on the stage. No one murmured when he came out though. Maybe they’re learning how to stay hidden.

But now there’s movement on the stage. The first sound guy reappears. His face looks strange, but it’s hard to tell under the lights. He comes to the front of the stage then to the back again, but he doesn’t disappear. He’s wheeling something out slowly, and it’s getting caught on stuff on the ground. It’s one of those long, low trolleys like they use to stock supermarkets. But there’s something on it that I can’t make out, even though it’s big. Everyone’s craning their necks and raising their arms and cheering.

Holy shit, it’s a bathtub.

Nick Cave hangs like a pale, wet scarecrow would, shoulders up on the edge of the tub, arms dangling over the edge. His head is tipped back. I can’t see his knees or his feet. People are jumping and carrying on and I’m bobbing my head to try and see what’s going on properly There’s water sloshing out of the sides, just a little, as the trolley moves across the stage and gets stuck on cables.

“Ladies and gentlemen” the sound guy announces, and he sounds all choked up. “I present to you Nick Cave!”

Everyone explodes. Cheering, flailing, thin-haired ponytails bouncing with excitement as the front few rows bob like yoyos. This is what I thought a concert would be. I didn’t think about a crowd of fifty-somethings carrying on like teenagers. They’re shouting and tearing up and chanting as the tub just sits there, the sound guy standing next to it. Cheering like this is the most tremendous piece of artistic expression that they’ve ever seen in their entire lives, like Nick Cave has managed to out Nick Cave even himself.  A bathtub! “Like a birth!” I hear someone yell behind me, wondering if they’ve ever tried to even stand up in a bath, never mind give birth. But it’s a moment, just a moment, in what feels like forever. The cheering goes on and on as it rolls around to the back of the arena, undulating through the audience and reaching the people who can’t even see the stage.

But the rest of the band don’t appear. And no music starts playing. I’m watching the stage, but something doesn’t seem right. I look at Jonah but he’s looking up at the stage and cheering, finally, and when he looks over to me, all I can do is smile back at him. But I don’t think that this concert is going to happen.

I think Nick Cave is dead.