The Return Of The Bard Seed As Cave Pens Another Book

Sydney Morning Herald

Tuesday January 6, 2009

Bernard Zuel

The dark prophet Nick has written his second book in 20 years - an experience he found less tortuous this time around, writes Bernard Zuel.

THE first time Nick Cave wrote a book he was a heroin addict, rake-thin, mangy of hair and fired with a kind of mania only partly attributed to his long-suppressed desire to merge William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor and the more extravagant elements of the Old Testament.

When he wasn't performing with his often cataclysmic rock band the Bad Seeds he went home to his dank Berlin apartment and wrote in what has been described as a 24-hour artistic and creative maelstrom. This went on for years.

According to the more lurid rumours he used his own blood when he couldn't afford ink. But even the less lurid stories describe a man for whom there was no line between life and art. And neither could be said to be pretty.

The result was the book And The Ass Saw The Angel, a tale of three decades in a mythical valley town in the American Deep South where a deformed mute boy, Euchrid Euchrow, guides us through violent deaths, revenge and holy hell.

Twenty years later Cave, now a dapper father of four, still the main Bad Seed but also occasional commentator on the Bible and the nature of love, screenwriter and director of arts festivals (including All Tomorrow's Parties, part of this month's Sydney Festival), is set to release his second novel. There are a few differences.

For a start, the book came quickly and relatively painlessly. In late 2007 Cave told me that an exhibition of artefacts from his life and career had him "getting ready to write", although the most visible non-music activity he engaged in then was not writing but narrating the animated film The Cat Piano about a city of singing cats preyed upon by a shadowy figure. If that sounds incongruous, it shouldn't. Cave has long been a fan of Louis Wain, the Edwardian artist who became well known in the 1800s for his paintings of cats (see breakout).

The film delayed the book, but by 2008 it was finished. Translation rights are being finalised, and a mid-2009 publication date has been set.

"And it's really good," says Cave of the novel, The Death Of Bunny Munro. "It was funny that [speed], because I had no intention of writing one, I mean no real intention. I hadn't really thought about it beyond making some remarks in interviews, and then it kind of happened pretty much one day to the next. I suggested to [publishers] Canongate that I might write them a book, and they said send us the first part of it, to see if he can write, and I sat down and wrote this really quickly. In fact I wrote it on the tour bus.

"It has been 20 years since the last one, and since [then] I've learned a lot about writing, about what you can write and what you can get away with and what you can't get away with in regard to language."

The final push came with Penguin's plan to publish a slightly edited version of And the Ass Saw The Angel, though the subject matter could not be more different, nor the circumstances of its writing, with Cave declaring "it was an absolute joy to write this thing".

"It's about a door-to-door salesman who works the south coast of England. And it's funny and it's sad," Cave says. "There is a grandfather, father and son and they are actually all called Bunny Munro, so there is a slight question as to which one is going to get it [he laughs]. Well, you kind of find out in the first line, actually."

What was so pleasurable about writing this time compared with the tortuous path its predecessor took?

"It's kind of what I do naturally. Something that is very natural to me is to sit down and write. I don't have any kind of psychological obstacles in the way, as I do when for example I'm writing a song. Writing a song is excruciating, really difficult and way more challenging on every level . . . So to write prose I am freed of a lot of constraints I battle against to write a song.

"And there was also the feeling that it didn't really matter. If it turns out to be a pile of shit it didn't matter because I'm not going to live or die by whether this book is any good. So I felt hugely free about what I wrote."

© 2009 Sydney Morning Herald

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