Feature via Another Magazine

While on the road with The Bad Seeds, Nick Cave saw a new form of rock reportage developing on Instagram. A stream of fan photos that tapped into something beyond performance, touching on an almost divine experience…

The Bad Seeds did a tour last year that started in Australia, went on to North America and ended finally in Europe and Israel. The tour seemed to reach beyond what the band had experienced before. There was a profound spiritual exchange between the audience and the band that felt strange and new. We were taken completely by surprise. It felt religious and epic, as if we were all calling forth the spirits of community. We felt we were inside something that was unknown; at least it was to me. People also had their smartphones. Now many performers complain about the emergence of iPhones (I do myself at times) and the obvious difficulties of performing to a bank of little screens, but mostly I feel that it is a huge privilege to perform under any circumstances and you just go with what you are given. That’s what performing is. The great thing we started to see when looking at the fan posts online was the incredible pictures that were being taken. This was clearly a new form of performance photography, pretty much impossible to reproduce on a professional level, where the audience were acting as one vast camera photographing thousands of images simultaneously – some from inside the maelstrom itself, some taking in the vast scale of the concerts from the back seats and every other manifestation in between. Intimate or frenetic or monumental, these are certainly some of the best Bad Seeds shots I have seen. With their permission we show some of them here. – Nick Cave