See the trail­er for a stripped-down con­cert film Nick Cave record­ed under COVID

Of course an artist as tire­less­ly inven­tive as Nick Cave wasn’t going to let a lit­tle thing like a glob­al pan­dem­ic slow him down. A new press release issued today by the musi­cian/writer/­film­mak­er/all-pur­pose cre­ative fount paints a pic­ture of a Cave chaf­ing under the con­fine­ment of quar­an­tine, and using his resources to break through these obstacles.

The uncon­ven­tion­al con­cert film Idiot Prayer finds its sub­ject strip­ping down to the basics, wan­der­ing around an emp­ty Alexan­dra Palace as he recites the lyrics to his songs a cap­pel­la. Cave refers to this new style as a ​“Con­ver­sa­tions” for­mat, clos­er to a poet­ry read­ing than a musi­cal per­for­mance, win­now­ing away every­thing but the words from his own cat­a­logue as well as his songs under the Grin­der­man and Bad Seeds flags.

The release describes an elab­o­rate sys­tem of health pre­cau­tions that enabled Cave to safe­ly shoot in the august Alexan­dra while it’s been closed off to the pub­lic. Work­ing with a crew of essen­tial per­son­nel only (includ­ing cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Rob­bie Ryan, recent­ly of The Favourite), with ​“Covid offi­cers” armed to the teeth with tape mea­sures and ther­mome­ters, with every­one masked and dip­ping into a ​“buck­et” of san­i­tiz­er, they cap­tured haunt­ing footage of Cave in iso­la­tion and repose. As he puts it: ​“Togeth­er we cre­at­ed some­thing very strange and very beau­ti­ful that spoke into this uncer­tain moment, but was in no way bowed by it. ”

The film will stream on 23 July, at three dif­fer­ent show­times depend­ing on time zone, with tick­ets in the UK going for £16. (One tick­et is for North and South Amer­i­ca, anoth­er applies to the UK and the rest of Europe, and a third is for Asia and Aus­tralia.) Cave sees Idiot Prayer as fit­ting into an infor­mal tril­o­gy with his oth­er films 20,000 Days on Earth and One More Time With Feel­ing, all three unit­ed in their dri­ve to chal­lenge the usu­al struc­tures and arche­types of con­cert films.

Cave’s inno­v­a­tive project rais­es the ques­tion of how and when pro­duc­tions will start back up, with no end to the Coro­n­avirus threat in sight. It sounds like he’s tak­en the prop­er mea­sure to ensure that all involved crew will be secure, but this was by the film’s nature a small out­fit. It’s hard to imag­ine a pro­duc­tion of larg­er scale being able to main­tain this assur­ance with a larg­er crew, or a more involved script.

Idiot Prayer will stream online on 23 July.