Parallel Kingdom
Nick Cave’s beautiful and tragic music brings redemptive catharsis to a grief-stricken city.
Review of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, playing at The Domain, Sydney (23 and 24 January 2026).
Bats migrate across the twilight. A fingernail moon hangs between city buildings. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds emerge from the parkland of The Domain below singing “O Children.” Each night, Cave’s introduction changes. At first, he talks about how the song has followed him around, its meaning shifting over the years. On the second night, Cave’s introduction is rawer: he extolls the beauty of Sydney and warns people “not to fuck it up” for those that follow us. “Maybe that’s all the song really means,” he says, with a shrug.
Located directly across from the Art Gallery of New South Wales, The Domain is picturesque. Church bells ring out from nearby St Mary’s Cathedral, triggering a premature cheer for what sounds like the start to “Red Right Hand.” I felt as if I were inside a Brueghel painting—perhaps an Antipodean, reverse version of “The Hunters in the Snow,” all summer air, silver skies, and gentle optimism. Brueghel’s work depicts exhausted hunters returning empty-handed to their icy northern European home. It’s usually interpreted as a portrait of failure and fragility—but there’s also a hint of relief in the idea that they have just made it back okay. The truth lies somewhere in between those moods. We live in a world of uneasy balances and now and then, we are reminded of this.
The Domain was set up in the best way I’d ever seen. A flat green field had been turned into a vibrant fair, where 10,000 people each night sprawled between food wagons, picnic tables, two small grandstands, and a wheelchair-friendly platform, with a high stage and video screens that accommodated views from just about anywhere. So, what did our returning musical hunters bring to this village? And what did the village do for them?
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds played two huge Friday and Saturday concerts here across a long weekend that culminated in Australia Day on Monday 26 January. It had been barely more than a month since the antisemitic terrorist attack at Bondi Beach on 14 December. A muted Christmas and New Year had come and gone, followed by a National Day of Mourning on 22 January. In the aftermath of all this, there was an atmosphere of both serenity and vulnerability at The Domain: an unmistakeable yearning for a gathering that would be positive, perhaps even healing.
When the Bad Seeds began, there was a huge tide of applause for Cave’s “Sunday Morning Coming Down” song, “Frogs.” It was followed by “Wild God” and soon we were on our way into another world—hyper-alive and eerily embodied—accompanying him in spirit as he walks his wife home from church in the rain while “the frogs are jumping in the gutters” before he sang his hallucinogenic and humourously self-referential story about an old man who “flew through the city like a prehistoric bird.”
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