Colin Greenwood's Bad Seeds tour ends with a first “Hollywood”

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds ended their North American tour on Saturday with a nine-song headline set at the Cruel World festival in Pasadena, and closed it with “Hollywood”, the last track on Ghosteen, which the band had never played before. Cave dedicated it to Los Angeles, with the lyrics projected on the screen behind them. He and Warren Ellis played it often as a duo on the 2021 Carnage tour, but this was its first Bad Seeds performance, with Colin Greenwood on bass. The tour proper had ended in San Francisco on Wednesday.

The tour, for last year's Wild God, was the band's first in North America since 2018. On the opening night, at Agganis Arena in Boston on 15 April, the first encore brought back “Skeleton Tree”, also unheard live since 2018. Reviewing Portland and Seattle for Spectrum Culture, David Harris found shows of nearly three hours, 23 songs with eight from the new album, and a set that barely changed from night to night beyond the encore.

Cave confirmed Greenwood for the tour in late January, with the regular bassist, Martyn Casey, still unable to tour through illness. Greenwood had first stood in for him on the UK and European leg last autumn, plays on Wild God, and had played Cave's solo shows and some of the Carnage dates with Cave and Ellis.

Greenwood brought his book, How to Disappear: A Portrait of Radiohead, and said he would sign it at independent shops on the way. He signed at Rough Trade NYC on 16 April, between the Boston and Brooklyn shows, and in Columbus, Ohio, on the day of the Palace Theatre show, he dropped in unannounced at Spoonful Records.

Last year, writing a tour diary for the New Statesman, Greenwood said the biggest change from Radiohead was the Bad Seeds' dress code, a rack of pressed suits and starched shirts in the dressing room every night. If his mother were alive, he wrote, she would finally approve of me, playing for the Bad Seeds, looking smart in a navy suit and black brogues after years of double denim in Radiohead.⁵

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, North America 2025