Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds have been photographed watching and enjoying The Cure play their headline set at Way Out West.
Both bands were on the bill at the festival in Gothenburg on Friday (August 14), with Cave and co. delivering a two-hour set on the Azalea stage not long before The Cure topped the bill on the Flamingo stage to round out the night with a huge, career-spanning show.
Bad Seeds multi-instrumentalist Warren Ellis later shared a carousel of photos and videos from the night, including one of the Bad Seeds watching The Cure together with their crew.
“Watching The Cure last night,” Ellis wrote. “Band and crew. What a band. What songs. Smithy you’re the best. I saw them in 1984 the first time. And I will see them again and again and again and again and again.”
Check out the post below.
Cave wrote about his own affection for The Cure in June, when responding to a fan question about “the worst thing about having become a really old rockstar” on his blog The Red Hand Files.
He recalled meeting an elderly couple wearing matching Cure T-shirts in Odense, Denmark, who asked him for a selfie but struggled to operate their phone.
“The worst thing about being an old rockstar is that the old rockstar’s old fans don’t know how to work their fucking phones,” he wrote. “The couple stand there, jabbing uselessly at their screens, trying to get them to flip into selfie mode or whatever, saying, ‘I’m not good with phones’ and ‘How does this thing work?’ and ‘Oh, my God’ and ‘I can’t believe it’s Nick Cave’ and I try to help them, but I don’t know how to work their phones either.”
After seeing himself in the resulting photo, Cave concluded that “the only real difference between me and these dentured old fuckers grinning into the camera beside me is that I dye my hair black.”
“I walk back to the hotel to write to you, Daffo,” he finished. “I put on The Cure.”
Cave also discussed his relationship with goth culture in his 2023 interview with NME. “I think the goths have endured in a way,” he said.
“That was the bane of our existence when we were young: that we were called a ‘goth band’. It was the last thing you wanted to be called, because we just weren’t. We were a comedy act! But I do have a weird romance for that and their capacity to endure.”
The Cure’s current festival tour follows the release of their 2024 comeback album ‘Songs Of A Lost World‘, their first studio record in 16 years. It earned them the first Grammys of their career. Smith has since said the follow-up is complete, while another more “poppy” record is also being developed.
They will also play at Manchester’s Wythenshawe Park on Friday (August 21), followed by Edinburgh Summer Sessions on Sunday (August 23). Find more information here.
The Bad Seeds, meanwhile, played for nearly 50,000 people at Brighton’s Preston Park last week, which was “the largest ticketed event in Brighton’s history. It included an appearance from Kylie Minogue on ‘Where The Wild Roses Grow’, while they also played a stripped-back show on the roof of Resident Records earlier in the day.
Their tour continues at Flow Festival in Helsinki tonight (August 16), before concluding in Paris later this month. Cave has also hinted that the group are “messing around” in the studio, with “the vague idea of perhaps making a new record”.
