“All that has dark sounds has duende” the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca once wrote, many years before Nick Cave quoted him in his 1999 essay The Secret Life Of The Love Song, which probed the extreme emotional palette of flamenco. The hispanophile Gerald Howson defined the feeling perfectly: “the state of tragedy-inspired ecstasy”. Cave argued that it was hard to find in rock music, though many had tried. Lorca suggested a reason: “Perhaps there is no money in sadness, no dollars in duende.” Perhaps…

If you spend much time on fan forums, you’ll know some of Nick Cave’s most loyal apostles are reluctant to walk down the paths with which he appears currently preoccupied. If you want to get a discussion going, open with “I still love the music, but…” then mention religion, politics, choirs or even the shape-shifting nature of the band – tonight, the Bad Seeds’ enduring rhythm section, Thomas Wydler and Martin P. Casey, are both absent through ill health (replaced by Larry Mullins and Radiohead’s Colin Greenwood respectively), leaving Jim Sclavunos and Warren Ellis as the only veterans of the 1990s.

If you spend much time on fan forums, you’ll know some of Nick Cave’s most loyal apostles are reluctant to walk down the paths with which he appears currently preoccupied. If you want to get a discussion going, open with “I still love the music, but…” then mention religion, politics, choirs or even the shape-shifting nature of the band – tonight, the Bad Seeds’ enduring rhythm section, Thomas Wydler and Martin P. Casey, are both absent through ill health (replaced by Larry Mullins and Radiohead’s Colin Greenwood respectively), leaving Jim Sclavunos and Warren Ellis as the only veterans of the 1990s.