Description

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.

Publisher Review

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 * *