The sick bag song - Nick Cave

The Sick Bag Song is an exploration of love, inspiration and memory. It began life scribbled on airline sick bags during Cave's 22-city journey around North America in 2014. It soon grew into a restless full-length contemporary epic.

Spurred by encounters with modern day North America, and 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 lead singer of The Birthday Party, The Bad Seeds and Grinderman,
Cave has been performing music for more than 30 years. He has
collaborated with Kylie Minogue, PJ Harvey and many others. As well as
working with Warren Ellis on the soundtrack for the film of The Road by Cormac McCarthy and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, he also wrote the screenplay for the film The Proposition. His debut novel, And the Ass Saw the Angel, was published in 1989 and was followed by the internationally bestselling The Death of Bunny Munro in 2009.

Born in Australia, Cave now lives in Brighton.

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
The Age - Jason Steger

The stories twist and turn like mad dash through the dark forest that is Nick Caves imagination. It's very revealing, but I guess it's too dreamlike to be called a diary or journal, and yet I came away understanding more about Nick Cave than ever
Tom Odell