He has written novels, hundreds of songs, poems, screenplays, film scores, a libretto, even an introduction to The Gospel According to Mark but Nick Cave has never written anything quite like The Sick Bag Song.
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The extraordinary book – for that is what it is – was born when Cave, embarking on a 22-city tour of North America, began scribbling ideas, images and doodles on the bags that planes provide for passengers with delicate stomachs. As the tour progressed, he photographed the bags and emailed them to a puzzled Jamie Byng, his publisher at Canongate in Edinburgh.
"I didn't know quite what these were," Byng said. "But he had enormous freedom as he was going from one city to another, able to write in a kind of loose way – images and things that those images conjured up, memories of things deeper in his head brought to the surface because of something that happened or he saw something."
What became clear was that the bags were not going to be the book. "They were just kind of gateposts, in a way," Byng said, "springboards from which to write something more significant and substantial, which is what emerged over the subsequent three months."
The finished product is a sort of epic prose poem, illustrated with the sick bags from various cities, that carries Cave through the American urban landscape. It is crammed full of images, metaphors, ruminations, literary references, stories about poets and musicians, laments, self-doubt, jokes at his own expense and personal angst. It's rather biblical, slightly manic and distinctly berserk; it's also touching, poignant and utterly absorbing.
Byng decided that as Cave had produced a different sort of book, so Canongate would publish it in a different way: The Sick Bag Song will be published on April 8 and be available only from a website that launches today.
There will be two editions: a hardback costing £30 ($58) that also has a download of Cave reading it and an ebook; a 220-copies limited edition costing £750 includes a "fully functional sickbag, signed and personally customised" by Cave (but not previously used for its designated purpose), a signed and numbered copy of the hardback, a white vinyl double LP of him reading the book, plus a copy of the unlimited edition. On the site will also be five Sick Bag Song films, directed by Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, who made 20,000 Days on Earth about Cave.
Byng said publishing The Sick Bag Song in this way would help reach a new audience. "That blurring of formats is something that is going to happen more and more. It is something the music industry is more comfortable with and has done more of in the last few years than the publishing industry has."
