"There is a war coming"

Friday night saw me once again enduring with gritted teeth the inane banalities of no-necked ivory-tinkling tosser Jools Holland, as well as the extraordinary dullness of Manic Street Preachers and Kings Of Leon, to revel in the delights of the new Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds material.

For the show Cave concentrated on material from Abattoir Blues, the louder half of the marvellous new double album, which is their first since the departure of guitarist Blixa Bargeld. Single 'Nature Boy' I expected, but not the brooding title track and its thumping drumbeat, nor a fabulous rendition of 'There She Goes, My Beautiful World', hammered out with furious gusto to bring the programme to an end.

Abattoir Blues / The Lyre Of Orpheus is unremarkable in the context of the Cave canon, but then that canon is almost uniformly awesome. A trademark collision of love, beauty, despair, violence and apocalyptic visions, the album also finds Cave indulging in the rich vein of humour so often ignored in his work - he frequently pricks his own tendency towards pomposity with lyrics which tend towards the absurd rather than the sublime.

All of which means I'm now salivating in anticipation of this coming Sunday's Wolverhampton show...