Nick Cave’s Bad Seeds resurrect “Train Long-Suffering” after 1989, then debut “Rainy Night in Soho”

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds opened their 2026 European tour in Dublin on Wednesday June 10 at Malahide Castle, and the setlist did what the best live sets do: it created instant scarcity. After not playing “Train Long-Suffering” since 1989, Cave and the Bad Seeds brought it back on the opening night, right alongside a Pogues cover that lands in two places at once, musically and emotionally.

That emotional double-impact is “A Rainy Night in Soho,” which Cave covered with The Bad Seeds for the first time since 1997. The choice was not random, because the show was in Dublin, where Pogues frontman Shane McGowan passed away in 2023. The source also notes Cave’s longtime friendship with McGowan, including their collaboration on the 1992 cover of “What A Wonderful World.” Cave even performed “A Rainy Night In Soho” at McGowan’s funeral, and he hailed him as “the greatest songwriter of his generation.” So when the band plays the song on a Dublin stage, it is both a crowd-pleaser and a quiet public bookmark in music history.

But the tour opener was more than one heartfelt moment. It started fast and thick with back-to-back renditions of “Get Ready For Love,” “From Her To Eternity,” and “Wild God.” Then the band stacked the rest of the night with fan favourites and deep-cuts that had not shown up in years, a reminder of why Cave’s live audience is so obsessive. Rare picks included “Hiding All Away / White Elephant,” aired out live for the first time since 2013, and “Stranger Than Kindness,” which returned for the first time since 2015.

The setlist also shows how The Bad Seeds keep their live identity intact while still making the evening feel newly engineered. Opening with major-era material, then shifting into rarities, creates a shape that fans recognize but do not fully expect. Even the strange little details were there for the die-hards: “Carnage” features Nick Cave & Warren Ellis cover credits, and the source says Cave substituted the line “Listening to Sinead O'Connor” for “Reading Flannery O'Connor.” In the live market, these micro-variants matter because they generate conversation, clip-able moments, and second wave audience interest, especially for people who might otherwise wait for the next city.

To close out the gig, Cave covered “A Rainy Night in Soho,” explicitly the first time he has played it with The Bad Seeds since 1997. After that, the article positions this show as the first date of Cave’s planned European run: their first UK and European tour since 2024. That context matters, because tour gaps tend to turn into demand spikes. The source frames the overall program as a “stacked 24-song setlist” that mixes staples with “rarely-played deep-cuts,” and that combination is basically the live-entertainment version of product-market fit. It reassures casual attendees with recognizable anchors, while giving hardcore fans reason to keep buying for the next stop.

From a broader live industry perspective, this is also the kind of itinerary that feeds repeat exposure across geographies. The tour continues with a show at Open Air an der Emslandarena in Germany on June 16, followed by stops in Denmark, Austria, Belgium, and Italy throughout the month. More shows in Europe continue through the rest of summer, with festival appearances at NOS Alive and Rock En Seine, among others. UK shows include a date at Preston Park on July 31. The source even lists a full run of 2026 dates: June 16 through June 30 across Germany and Denmark and Prague, then late June and early July through Greece, Austria, Belgium, Berlin, and Germany again, before Portugal, France, and the UK hit in mid-July, and the later summer schedule continues in Germany, Croatia, Serbia, Romania, Norway, Lithuania, France, and beyond.

For executives and operators watching culture as a business, these details signal something practical. A setlist that resurrects a song last performed in 1989, plus a Pogues cover with a 1997-with-Bad-Seeds gap, becomes more than nostalgia. It is a headline generator that turns ticket demand into an event, not just a calendar entry. In the live economy, that kind of “earned urgency” is harder to manufacture with ads and easier to sustain with the actual product on stage. And for boards and investors tracking market momentum, the lesson is simple but useful: when scarcity is real, not manufactured, attention compounds. The rest of the summer, including NOS Alive, Rock En Seine, and UK dates like Preston Park, will test whether this Dublin opener’s mix of rarity, relevance, and spectacle carries across markets.

If you want the immediate next layer, the article also ties the tour to Cave’s recent studio runway. It notes the 2026 dates follow a homecoming tour in Australia in support of the Bad Seeds’ acclaimed 2024 album “Wild God.” The source says that album was given four stars when it was released, quoting NME on how Cave’s music stayed “gothic doom and gloom” but also included flashes of freedom and energy. It adds that last month, Cave revealed The Bad Seeds were “messing around” in the studio with a “vague idea of making a new record,” naming Bad Seeds members Martyn P. Casey, Thomas Wydler, Jim Sclavunos, and Warren Ellis. That matters for why the live show continues to feel alive: the band’s creative pipeline is still moving, not just recycling the past.