Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds delivered a live cover of The Pogues' 'A Rainy Night In Soho' on the opening night of their European Tour at Dublin's Malahide Castle.
The show which took place on Wednesday (June 10), saw the band perform a 24 song setlist, a mixture of fan favourites and rarely played deep cuts. This also marked the beginning of their first UK and European Tour since 2024.
Having treated fans to live performances of ‘Get Ready For Love’, ‘From Her To Eternity’ and ‘Wild God’, Nick Cave & The Seeds also played 'Train Long-Suffering', for the first time since 1989.
Elsewhere, Cave's band also performed 'Hiding All Away' for the first time since 2013, as well as 'Stranger Than Kindness' for the first time in 11 years. They also played 'Red Right Hand', the theme song for Netflix hit, Peaky Blinders.
Closing out the gig, and given the fact they were on Irish soil, it was appropriate that Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds covered The Pogues' 'A Rainy Night In Soho', which is also the first time the singer played this song live with The Bad Seeds since 1997.
According to reports from Hot Press, the cover was dedicated to both Pogues legend, Shane MacGowan, as well as the late Fontaines D.C. manager, Trevor Dietz, who sadly passed away last weekend.
Check out Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds' rendition of 'A Rainy Night In Soho' below.
See Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds' show in Malahide Castle below.
Shane MacGowan passed away in November 2023, before being laid to rest in Nenagh, Co Tipperary in early December. He was 57 years old.
At the time, Nick Cave paid a moving tribute to his long time friend and fellow musician Shane MacGowan, calling him “a true friend and the greatest songwriter of his generation,” while saying that his death marked “a very sad day".
The pair also performed music together over the years, including a beautiful joint cover of Louis Armstrong's, 'What A Wonderful World' in 1992. See that cover and Cave's tribute in full here.
In December 2023, Nick Cave also shared a new obituary to Shane MacGowan.
While acknowledging MacGowan's alcohol and substance issues, Nick Cave paid tribute to the Pogues' frontman's remarkable ability when it came to creative song writing.
He recalled one time when MacGowan was not writing, adding that he “crawled across the floor and started rooting in the pile of rubbish until he found a scrap of paper”.
According to Cave, MacGowan wrote the words to 'St John of Gods' on this paper, which featured on his 1997 album 'The Crock of Gold', an album he co wrote with the Popes.
“To me, his songs were such precious things, deep works of art, really, but he didn’t treat them like that,” Cave explained.
“While I laboured away at my desk, day after day, to produce what I could, Shane’s words were delivered to him on a beer tray with a whiskey chaser".
