The Sick Bag Song

The Sick Bag Song chronicles Cave's 22-city journey around North America in 2014. Racked by romantic longing and exhaustion, Cave teases out the significant moments - the people, the books and the music - that have influenced and inspired him, and drops them into his sick bag.

The book began its life scribbled onto airline sick bags and later evolves into a restless contemporary epic, exploring love, loss, inspiration and memory.

About as rock'n'roll as you can get . . . [The Sick Bag Song] is shot through with fantasy, fiction, apocalyptic musings and tall stories The Sunday Times
An epic narrative poem about his travels across North America . . . Cave is experimenting with a new literary form - a mash-up of prose, poetry, song lyrics and autobiography New York Times
Part tour diary and part free-ranging rumination on the business of performance. Capture[s] the mind-frazzling disorientation of 'the road' Guardian
A page turning mash up from the prince of darkness Independent
Lyrical, hallucinatory and laced with sly wit, The Sick Bag Song is a revelation and a pleasure -- Hari Kunzru
Nick Cave goes the distance with The Sick Bag Song LA Times
Mad and amazing -- Ian Rankin
Far from your typical diary; snapshots of mundane reality (traffic jams, reading in a park) melt into disturbing visions peppered with flashbacks from his childhood. There are heated exchanges between Cave and his muses, and unsettling encounters with a few of his musical heroes (Bryan Ferry, Bob Dylan) that cause Cave to ponder the "vampiric" nature of creativity Rolling Stone
The narrator's obsessive thoughts about his young self facing death juxtaposed with the illusions of fame . . . offer an interesting perspective on mortality Sunday Herald
Biblical, slightly manic and distinctly berserk; it's also touching, poignant and utterly absorbing -- Jason Steger The Age

Nick Cave has been performing music for more than fifty years and is best known as the songwriter and lead singer of Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, whose latest album, Wild God, was nominated for two Grammy Awards and ranked as the best album of 2024 by Uncut. Cave's body of work also covers a wider range of media and modes of expression including film score composition and writing of novels. His recent Conversations events and Red Hand Files website have seen Cave exploring deeper and more direct relationships with his fans.

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