About the Author

Nick Cave has been performing music for more than fifty years and is best known as the songwriter and lead singer of Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, whose latest album, Wild God, was nominated for two Grammy Awards and ranked as the best album of 2024 by Uncut. Cave's body of work also covers a wider range of media and modes of expression including film score composition and writing of novels. His recent Conversations events and Red Hand Files website have seen Cave exploring deeper and more direct relationships with his fans.

Reviews

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
* * The Age * *