Photo: WENN
"The man dyes his hair, who knew?" chuckles our presenter at London's Porchester Hall, before a much longer-faced Nick Cave bounds on the stage with a vampiric menace. Artists like Cave aren't supposed to come across as human, not this towering scythe, slicing through the mundane with tales of horror. However, as he stands on stage tonight, open to ribbing as he leafs through his latest book, The Sick Bag Song, we see Nick Cave as a man - but only through a very typically bewildering filter of fiction and fantasy.
Cave tells us that the book was born of the forced conviction to write 10 songs for his next record while touring Push The Sky Away around the US with the Bad Seeds, 'frogmarching the muse' as someone puts it. With his thoughts, worries, considerations and inspirations written on the back of airline sick bags, the result was not an album but a body of work that is instead part poetry, part blues, part travel diary, part fiction, part waking realisation, part fever dream, part memory bank - but entirely the threads of Nick Cave's psyche.
Naturally it gives great inside his creative process, but more often than not it's a bewildering and wild ride through the things that pass through Cave's mind. "Everything goes into the Sick Bag," he tells us.
The journey begins backstage at Bonnaroo. "It's a fucking horrible place," Cave tells London. "I think there was some money involved."
From there, the Sick Bag Song begins, as an angel of inspiration tells him "you must walk the first step alone". From the isolated walls of Cave's mind, we enjoy a trip that takes in haunting childhood memories, the clash of the honour of meeting Bob Dylan against the failure of Nocturama, a vivid tale of Bryan Ferry in blue swimming trunks telling Cave of his suffering from writers block (which in turn feeds his own creative urge and making him feel like 'a fucking vampire) and the anxiety he feels being apart from his wife and muse, Suzie.
The fever dream does meet some success, mind - namely the writing of poem and song 'The Beekeepers' Wife' (written purely to be shaped like a hive), and the exquisitely idiosyncratic 'King-Sized Nick Cave Blues' - an immaculately mindtwisting biopic in which Cave admits he "was born in a puddle of blood wanting everything" but that "wanting everything is the thing that eventually tears you apart". He artfully adds "I spend my days pushing Elvis Presley's belly up a series of steep hills...wanting everything is the everything that eventually kills..."
While he admits that "it's our lack of longing that gets us in the end", Cave's quest to create such a total and complete artistic world and ultimately have it all is admirable - and across his career is something he's truly achieved. It's a realm of the personal, the pain, the romance, the rituals, the murder, the misery, the ins, the outs, the ups, the downs and the everything of all human existence.
It's all here in this book, and whatever you love about Nick Cave, you'll find it in the sick bag:
"The Sick Bag Song is the leavings,
The Sick Bag Song is the scrapings,
The Sick Bag Song is the shavings,
The Sick Bag Song is the last vestiges,
The Sick Bag Song is the bile and the tripe,
The Sick Bag Song is the remnants and the residue,
The Sick Bag Song is the leftovers and the throwbacks,
The Sick Bag Song is the barrel's greddy bottoms,
The Sick Bag Song is the rejectementa, disgorged -
So that we can move forward tomorrow and leap differently"
The Sick Bag Song by Nick Cave (Canongate) is out now. Order it here.
Meanwhile, Nick Cave's remaining UK and EU tour dates are below. For tickets and information, visit here.
May
2 - London Hammersmith Eventim Apollo*
3 - London Royal Albert Hall
6 - Berlin Friedrichstadtpalast
7 - Stuttgart Liederhalle
9 - Brussels Cirque Royal
10 - Brussels Cirque Royal
12 - Copenhagen Koncertsalen
13 - Copenhagen Koncertsalen
14 - Stockholm Waterfront
16 - The Hague World Forum
17 - The Hague World Forum
18 - Paris Grand Rex
21 - Barcelona Auditori Forum
22 - Madrid Palacio Congresos
25 - Moscow Crokus City Hall
26 - St. Petersburg BKZO
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