I moved from Dublin to London a little over ten years ago. My head was full of poetry, music, art and anxiety. I loved writing and I loved writers. While I have a hard time remembering my last few months in Ireland, one event, driven by this passion, sticks out: seeing Nick Cave twice in one day.
The lanky, deep-voiced Australian artist was in Dublin on the lecture circuit, delivering his treatise on the relationship between creativity, poetry, life, and love. He held an afternoon chat, during which he would occasionally break away to play the odd tune on a grand piano. I recall his stripped-down version of “West County Girl,” with its dramatic, low-roaring ending of “then purrrrrs… AGAIN” sent chills down my spine. He talked about saudade. He talked about owning grief. He talked about Jesus, creation, the Old Testament, the New, an the relationship of art -of writing -to each. Fancying myself a true writer, I was in love with Cave’s dramatic, deeply-felt works, even if I didn’t quite have the life experience to fully understand them. And a writer talking about writing… was manna from heaven. Verging on broke, I took what little I had and bought another ticket for the same talk happening that evening. I filled an entire journal with notes hastily scribbled during his chat, and once I’d run out of ink, I sat, silent and pie-eyed, hoping to someday be half the writer Cave was -and indeed, still is.
Cave has never shied away from showing his writerly streak, in all its flagrant glory. Part of this, for those who know his work, comes from his early exposure to literature courtesy of his English teacher-father, who died when Cave was still quite young. Known for his work with the Bad Seeds, Cave also published And the Ass Saw The Angel (Harper Collins) in 1989, a wildly surreal, violent, bizarre work that was equally potent, poetic, and memorable. He’s always worn his love for the written word proudly on his sleeve. He says (in the clip above) that his work has always been “bursting at the seams with lyrical information” -which is putting it mildly in terms of his own gift with words. As befits a rock and roll guy with a poetic streak, he credits music for giving life to his words, noting there’s “a musical rhythm to the language.” But his heart’s still firmly with those words, just as much as it is with tones, sounds, and rhythms.
The Death Of Bunny Munro (Harper Collins) is Nick Cave’s latest novel. While I’m not the biggest fan of some of his more recent music (Grinderman being the exception), I admit that the novel is deeply intriguing. It’s as if, in embracing his literary side, he’s also embracing the aggressively male side that characterized at least a portion of his work in the 1990s with the Bad Seeds (the stuff I particularly adored then, natch); it’s like Cave is exercising (not exorcising) that still-remnant Bad Seed, the one that’s been at least outwardly tamed by domestic responsibility. He can live in the squalid, dark corners of his imagination through writing, without robbing the his other creative pursuits of their pungency.
I’m really glad to see Cave still writing, and still exploring this important side of his artistry. And I’m glad he’s being honest about it, in traveling through this kind of dark, non-cuddly terrain. Artists worth their salt shouldn’t, by their nature, always release likable, easily-digestible stuff. The artists I happen to love the most, that tend to stay with me longest, often release work that is challenging, thought-provoking, hard -and distinctly non-nice. Record companies may not always like their artists’ extra-curricular creative activities, but… balls, I do, and some of them enjoy doing it, too. Sometimes it’s the only thing that keeps sanity intact for artist and audience alike.
That doesn’t mean sales don’t matter, though. As if to underline this, Bunny Munro was itself released in three formats: hardcover, audio book, and iPhone application. The audio book version includes a score by Dirty Three member/Bad Seed/scary-lookin’ dude Warren Ellis. The audio book intrigues because you get Cave’s deep voice giving a deeply-dramatic rendering of his own words (I remember in Dublin he called them “children,” which I was chuffed at, referring as I did then to my own work in the exact same way); in addition, you get Ellis’ intuitive musical underscoring, creating an eerie, atmospheric complement. If you have an iPhone, you can partly-read, partly-listen, using the specially-designed app. Who would’ve thought books would be so easy, so multi-faceted, so … octopus-like in reach, scope, presentation and marketing? I don’t buy the whole romantic notion of “simple appeal” even though I do enjoy the sensual appeal of the tangible (I mean hell, I love cooking, right?). I love how technology and tradition have married with The Death Of Bunny Munro, and I love that Nick Cave is so very open to it. He says he wrote the first chapter on his iPhone, and the rest in longhand. And yet he equally admits that sitting down with a book is probably more intimate.
This balance between tradition and technology is really refreshing; its equal embrace by an artist of Cave’s calibre is downright inspiring. I haven’t decided which format I’ll get yet, but I’m leaning at the audio book -if only to hear that dramatic voice reading words rendered by mind, heart, and those long, elegant fingers. I ran into Cave -by accident or some grand intelligent design -several time after I moved from Dublin to London. He was in Toronto recently to read from Bunny Munro and do a raft of interviews as well as a book signing. When I heard his voice on the radio, I smiled. My romantic ideas around writing have totally vanished, but Cave’s respect for his art is a boon to me still. And I can’t wait to be corrupted by Bunny.