Nick Cave paid tribute to his late friend Shane MacGowan with a touching performance in Ireland.
As per Rolling Stone, Cave performed “A Rainy Night in Soho”, a classic song by The Pogues, MacGowan’s old band, during a show at Malahide Castle & Gardens in the country earlier this week.
Cave, backed by the Bad Seeds, played piano during the performance, with Warren Ellis adding a violin section during a break from the solemn lyrics.
“Wow, all right,” was all Cave could muster with a slight laugh after the cover ended.
Watch the cover below.
Cave and the Bad Seeds aren’t the first big name to cover “A Rainy Night in Soho” following MacGowan’s death in 2023.
Shortly after his passing, U2 performed the song during their Sphere residency in Las Vegas; Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band more recently recorded their own version of the song for an upcoming MacGowan tribute album.
“Shane was one of my all-time favorite writers,” Springsteen previously said after MacGowan’s death. “The passion and deep intensity of his music and lyrics is unmatched by all but the very best in the rock & roll canon.”
Cave’s current tour setlist has included other notable songs, including the first performance by the Bad Seeds of “Train Long-Suffering”, taken from The Firstborn Is Dead, since 1989. They’ve also performed “Stranger Than Kindness”, from Your Funeral… My Trial, for the first time since 2015.
Cave wrapped up a headline Australian tour with The Bad Seeds earlier this year, which was given a five-star review by Rolling Stone AU/NZ.
“He’s a serious man but Cave is also self-effacing. ‘This is an old song. Ancient. It’s coming to you in a Zimmer frame. It’s mid-period Nick Cave,’ he said at one point. What followed was the beatific cautionary tale, ‘O Children’. Emerging from out of his seat, Warren Ellis launched into a lilting, loving violin solo that entwined with the harmonies of the backing vocalists,” the review read.
“They are all worlds within a world, Cave’s world, and so it was fitting that he signed off alone at the piano for the ever-evocative ‘Into My Arms’ before wandering off away into the night.”
