The last time Nick Cave visited Israel was in October 2017, on a tour of the album "Skeleton Tree" and at the height of a mourning process.
The tragic death of his son Arthur about two years earlier turned him who was already an intense performer into a different kind of stage animal: a kind of mix between a disturbed rocker, a religious preacher, a cult leader and a mourning father, who uses his large audience and rare connection with him to process the hard feelings Dealing with them, communicating and touching people, and also to say something about pain, love, humanity and death.
For the upcoming show in Israel in August, the Australian musician arrives three months after the death of another son (less close to him), but charged with the energies and charm that characterized that show - even if according to the show he gave last week to the German audience it is a slightly different animal.
Nick Cave takes the stage in Berlin a quarter of an hour before his original time of ascent.
The clear European sky despite the evening gives the feeling that this is a festival performance, but Kyiv does not let the sun and light (not the first things that come to mind when thinking of who was called the "Prince of Darkness") scare him.
"Get Ready to Love" is developed with an aggressiveness that will surprise even those who have previously foreseen a man in action.
Kyiv, his partner Warren Ellis and the Bad Sids band do not take prisoners, and no more than a few seconds into the show shoot on the island of Amphi Waldbuhne pieces of anger, filth, truth and madness, which also continue to "There She Goes My Beautiful World".
The man in the black suit walks on the narrow short walk in front of the stage like a merry-go-round on a rope, in a kind of nightmare circus that gives the feeling that at any given moment he might crash on those standing in the front rows.
But Nick Cave has always remained in control, playing on the seam between delicacy and savagery.
It happens not only between songs but also during them.
Kyiv itself is a player of contrasts.
One moment kicks in the air, screams in front of the stage and lets his believers - in the absence of another definition - sing with him in ecstasy.
In another, for example in "I Need You," he sits down at the piano, exposing a fragile vulnerability and creating a chilling moment of intimacy in all the hustle and bustle.
"It's a beautiful city, it gave me a lot and I remember it," he says at one point, referring to the 1980s, when he lived in divided Berlin.
"The city looks spectacularly screwed," he adds, dedicating the heartbreaking ballad "Waiting for You" to a city that helped shape it at a significant time in his life.
Nick Cave at the Primavera Festival, Photo: EPI, Archive
After a mesmerizing ending in the form of "City of Refuge" and "White Elephant", they return to the stage for the two encores, to the roar of the crowd.
These include, among others, sweeping performances of "Jack The Ripper," "Into My Arms," "Vortex" and "Henry Lee," where one of his backing singers steps into the shoes of P.J. Harvey, in the female role in the song.
After no less than two and a half hours they sign the evening with "Mermaids", and meanwhile say goodbye to a station especially loved by Kyiv.
Perhaps as beloved as Tel Aviv, a city that many still remember the days when he sat at the "pill" bar and walked around the ham of the 90s.
This is not the same performance as the one from four years ago, in which the Menorah Hall was turned into a church with a large religious ceremony for two evenings.
Elements of this exist here as well, but this is a different list of songs that accurately balances new and old.
It is a different experience, but not one that falls from it.
Seeing Nick Cave in this show is a gift that every music lover owes to themselves.
And it comes wrapped in holy pain, passion and rage.
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