Canongate Books
Nick Cave | The Sick Bag Song
9781782117933
PB
117 pages
“Don't let them make you feel stupid, just because you are happy to play down in the dark with your flashlight. The mystical world depends on you and your tolerance for the absurd. Be strong, my darling ones, and believe!”
Romantic, poetic and heartfelt, Nick Cave’s Sick Bag Song is a contemporary epic, somewhere between Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and The Wasteland
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.
“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