Colin Greenwood plays Pompei and Rome with Nick Cave

Colin Greenwood and Nick Cave played the first of two nights at Rome's Auditorium Parco della Musica on 21 July, and by “Push the Sky Away” half the audience was on the stage with them. In the encore Greenwood took a bass solo in T. Rex's “Cosmic Dancer”. The second Rome night, tonight, ends the Italian week on which he has been Cave's only accompanist.

Mantova joined the tour only in March, with a concert in Piazza Sordello on 16 July that ran over two hours and 21 songs. The next night Lucca's Piazza Napoleone held about 5,000 people, the Lucca Summer Festival's only sell-out of the summer. It was Cave's third visit to the festival, each time with a different line-up.

At Pompei on Saturday 19 July the pair played in the amphitheatre among the ruins, with no stage set and no big screens, to a crowd from all over Europe. After the opening “Girl in Amber” Cave explained the tour, as he had in Hamburg. He had come out of the depths of the Bad Seeds tour and wanted to rise back to the surface slowly, looking for the truth at the heart of a song before the band take hold of it. He offered “Balcony Man” to the people up in the Roman stands, then told the floor to shut the fuck up, to a roar of laughter. When a baby cried during his introduction to “O Children”, he praised its timing, and at the end, when fans came down under the stage, he told security it was fine.

The Walk of Fame gave Greenwood a special mention at Pompei for his double bass, sometimes plucked and sometimes bowed, and Rolling Stone Italia said it added weight under Cave's left hand. Mescalina's reviewer dissented, and thought the show would stand perfectly well without him.

In Rome, in the Cavea, Greenwood walked out first, and the standing ovation began the moment Cave appeared. The 3,000 there heard 23 songs over two and a half hours. Simon Godley of God Is in the TV thought Cave played “Watching Alice”, a rarity from 1988's Tender Prey, as if in answer to a request from a bearded man in the stalls, though it had been in the Pompei set too. Both covers in the encore went to their late writers, “Shivers” to Rowland S. Howard and “Cosmic Dancer” to Marc Bolan. The night ended at about a quarter to midnight with “Into My Arms”, which Greenwood left Cave to play alone.

The Italian nights