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On a solo tour last year, Nick Cave suddenly became self-aware. He built his career performing with bands — the Birthday Party, Grinderman, the Bad Seeds — but here he was with only a piano and Radiohead bassist Colin Greenwood supporting him. As they worked their way through nearly two dozen songs every night, Cave started thinking deeply about his songwriting.

“When I was singing these songs alone at the piano with just the bass — old songs, new songs, over 45 years of songwriting — they spoke their original intent,” he says, thoughtfully choosing his words on a call.

At the end of “Balcony Man,” Nick Cave’s ponderous and playful song about hope, romance, and grief, he sings, “What doesn’t kill you just makes you crazier.” The words are a wry twist on Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous aphorism — but Cave says they’re also an improvement upon it.

“I don’t think Nietzsche’s quote of ‘What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’ is remotely true,” he says. “It is bad, unhelpful information that suggests we are somehow weak if we succumb to our griefs. It lacks compassion.

Back in 1988, Shannon Strong was a scrappy young Denver punk musician playing in a band called the Pagan Cowboys while dreaming of something else. Inspired by the magazine ads of Neve recording consoles she taped on her bedroom wall as a kid and the flashing buttons at the fingertips of Star Trek’s Lieutenant Uhura, she wanted to be behind the recording desk as well as in front of it.

She fled the shackles of Reagan’s America first for London, then, after witnessing a “mindblowing” Einstürzende Neubauten gig, decided to explore Berlin.

Three singers huddle and lean forward, their long, sparkly garments dangling before them as they chant in staccato unison: “Hand-of-God! Hand-of-God! Hand-of-God!” Warren Ellis, meanwhile, sits stationary except for his hands, which run windmills around his Gandalf beard as he closes his eyes tight and chants along with them, completely entranced. All the while, Nick Cave — the rangy leader of this ad-hoc religious sect — leaps from one side of the stage to the other. He crouches, poses in crucifixion stances, and celebrates the might and mysteries of faith like a man possessed.

John Cale Liverpool Sound City, UK Friday 26th May 2017

Fifty years on and it is time to remember one of the most innovative albums ever impressed onto wax. A delicious dark and jagged confection of nihilism and sulky sophistication unlike it's Liverpudlian counterpart Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, also now fifty, but which was sunny, funny and a bit vaudeville. Both represent a pair of wildly different bookends. The Velvet Underground and Nico was then a monumental, commercial flop, whilst the Beatles album sold in the millions. With half a century under its belt of shiny studded leather, the Velvets album now has an arc of influence that continues to reach into the hearts of those who wish to create a positive noise.

There is something incongruous about the weather, it is clammy and warm, and the sun is blinding, and yet the music we await really should be...