Nick Cave - live webchat - 3/9/2009

The lead singer of The Birthday Party, The Bad Seeds and Grinderman, Nick Cave has been performing music for more than 30 years. He has collaborated with Kylie Minogue, PJ Harvey and many others. As well as working with Warren Ellis on the soundtrack for the film of The Road by Cormac McCarthy and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, he also wrote the screenplay for the film The Proposition. His debut novel And the Ass Saw the Angel was published in 1989. Born in Australia, Cave now lives in Brighton. His latest book is The Death of Bunny Munro.

About The Death of Bunny Munro:

The Death of Bunny Munro recounts the last journey of a salesman in search of a soul. Following the suicide of his wife, Bunny, a door-to-door salesman and lothario, takes his son on a trip along the south coast of England. He is about to discover that his days are numbered. With a daring hellride of a plot The Death of Bunny Munro is also a modern morality tale of sorts, a stylish, furious, funny, truthful and tender account of one man's descent and judgement.

"Put Cormac McCarthy, Franz Kafka and Benny Hill together in a Brighton seaside guesthouse and they might just come up with Bunny Munro. A compulsive read possessing all Nick Cave's trademark horror and humanity, often thinly disguised in a galloping, playful romp.".

Irvine Welsh

Read more about Nick on his author page

***PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS IS A BOOK-RELATED DISCUSSION AND NOT A MUSIC FORUM. QUESTIONS NOT RELEVANT TO THE DISCUSSION WILL NOT BE PUBLISHED ON THE BLOG***

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Comments

[nick cave]

Dear All, thanks for you questions. I'm off...NICK CAVE

[nick cave]

Dear Suzy

Emily Dickinson
Valerie Solanas
Mark
Ovid
Strindberg (Occult Diaries)
Rothenburg Poetry Anthologies
John Berryman
Herman Melville
Auden
Miles Davis (70's)
and many more besides

[nick cave]

Dear Peter, thanks for your kind words about The Ass. Actually despite what people may write about me, I do try to keep a distance between what I write about and my personal issues. I certainly do not use writing to process my particular "issues", what ever they may be. When I write it is an escape from myself, more than anything else - a flight into the absurd, extreme and illogical imaginative world where anything can happen. The last thing I want to write about is myself.

[Suzy Benz]

Hey Nick,

which authors/artists would you say have influenced your own work?

[Beatriz Martinez Sosa]

I love your work. I'd like to know how did you star writing this novel? I mean, how the idea came into your mind?

[nick cave]

Dear Oscar, I want to write more books, for sure. The near future? I don't know.

[nick cave]

Dearest Marleen, I finished the novel by a swimming pool in Italy somewhere. (An enforced holiday) My first mission was to ingratiate myself back in to the life of my family.

[Peter]

Your first novel "And the Ass Saw the Angel" was breathtaking, darkly humorous but also very depressive. I read somewhere, that you filtered a lot of your own personal issues through it. Do you still feel haunted by so many things that urge you to write more dark stuff? What is your main target when writing new material? Influence the readers, share knowledge or asking questions?

[Oscar S]

I've read that the writing And The Ass Saw The Angel was more about proving something to yourself than anything else, with so many years between books, is the inspiration for this book similar? Or can we expect another book in the near future?

[nick cave]

Dear Bec, yeah, well I have been busy. But the truth is it took me twenty years to recover from the writing of the last one. As it turned out writing Bunny Munro was a joyful experience. You can see that in the book. The joy.

[Marleen Jansen]

Dear Nick,

First: Please, write more books.

Now my question: What was the first thing you did after you wrote the last words of your book?

[Bec]

It's been 20 years since you wrote And the Ass Saw the Angel - have you been too busy with music and film projects to find the time for writing another book? Or was it a conscious decision to leave it for a while to develop ideas? Or was it something else...?

[nick cave]

Dear Tom, Bunny Munro was originally a film script. It's all work, you know, song-writing, script writing, novel writing. Each has it's own problems but in the end, you've just got to put your head down and do it.

[nick cave]

Dear Andy, when we thought about writing J. Hillcoat's new film we thought we should do something "out the front door" so that we didn't have to travel to make it. (JH also lives in Brighton).

[Tom]

Hi Nick

I was hugely impressed by your script for the Proposition - an amazing film with a simple and powerful story. Bunny Munro is a completely different kind of narrative - much more experimental. When you write a story for a film and when you write a story for a book, is it a completely different thought process? What inspired you to write two such different stories? Do the two mediums appeal to you in different ways? What's your next written project? lots of questions!!
thanks
Tom

[nick cave]

Dear Iain, do people write about rock stars? Not very well, usually, although you should check out the Bret Easton Ellis short story in The Informers about a rock star, which is beautifully and convincingly done. I know people want to BE rock stars, and I can understand why, it being a truly great job.

[Andy]

Hi Nick,

Most of your writing (songs and literature) deals with quite high concepts or historically significant subjects. Was it a conscious decision to make bunny a pretty ordinary bloke in modern Brighton?

[nick cave]

Dear Charlotte, thanks for kind words. What I would like to do with Bunny is turn it into a three-part TV series - Cocksman, Salesman and Deadman. Ray Winstone loved the screenplay, so he would probably get a crack at it, if he was up for it.

[nick cave]

Dear Dominic, the poet John Berryman. I've got a few questions I'd like to ask him.

[Iain]

What drew you to the world of the travelling salesman? Is it the same sort of desire to vicariously explore how 'the other half lives' which makes some people write about rock stars?

[nick cave]

Dearest Nadine, I never read anything back. I wrote it by hand, on tour, brought the note books back to London and spent some weeks typing the bloody thing into the computer. As you can see by the time it takes for me to answer these questions it was a laborious task. It was during this process that I looked a little closer at the writing.Also I had a very clever editor, Francis Bickmore, help me in the final draft.

[Charlotte]

Your book is very lyric (sounds like "Les chants de Maldoror" by Lautréamont sometimes) and so cinematographic :

Have you think about it when you wrote Bunny's story ?
And if it will become a film (hope so !)which director would you choose?
And which actor would play Bunny ?

BTW, thank you very much for all of your creation !

[Dominic Kennerk]

If you could meet any fellow writer, living or dead, who would it be and why?

[nick cave]

Dear David, that's funny. I'll tell him that.

[Nadine Kemeling]

Dear Sir Cave,

First i want to thank you for share your genius way of writing. You are an example for me.

Now the question,

During the writing process of the novel you finished a chapter and read it back later on.

Is there a moment when you must say to yourself "this chapter is finished and you won't change a part anymore?

Or is there always something that you want to change and is somebody helping you out?

Oh dear two questions ;-)

I could ask so many more things but these are the main questions so,
Have a nice chat session and see you next week in London.

Kind regards,

Nadine Kemeling
Holland.

[nick cave]

Dear Beatriz, I was approached by john Hillcoat, the director of The Proposition to write another screenplay. he wanted me to write a script about a traveling salesman that had somewhere in it a scene in 70's Butlins. The first thing that came to mind was to have a scene where the central character dies beside a swimming pool, with his feet in the water. Once I had the end the rest was relatively simple.

[nick cave]

Dear Joanne, actually I the pleasure of spending a fair amount of time with Ray Winstone on the set of The Proposition. He is a raconteur par excellence. When I wrote the screenplay for Bunny Munro - the script was designed essentially as vehicle for Ray. Ray is a great actor and as a person, one of the good ones. The character in the novel though has changed, I think, physically and psychologically.

[David J. Hurfurt]

Hi Nick,

Warren Ellis worked with you on the music for the audio version of The Death of Bunny Munro.
I was wondering if the two of you were amused by the Bunny-Warren connection?

[Beatriz Martínez Sosa]

I'm love your work. I have a particular question, Do you remember the moment when the idea for your novel ignites into your mind? Could you say something about that moment?

[Joanne Harvey]

Did you have Ray Winstone in mind when writing your novel? I certainly had him in mind when I read it. By that I mean I can see him in the role of Bunny, not that he is your typical Kylie-Avril-fancying sex-obsessed middle aged man!

[nick cave]

Dear Rosie, you should check out some of the seafront hotels, with there heart-shaped beds and mirrored ceilings - especially designed for our unhappy Lothario.I suspect there are Bunny's everywhere. You may even be married to one.

[Peter]

When I read bunny Munro, I couldn't stop thinking about cormac McCarthy's The Road. whilst very different, the similarities of a father and son on a road trip to hell struck me. Then I found out you were working in the soundtrack to the film of the road. Is there any direct relationship here or, as a father, is the shared question of paternal responsibility just a coincidence?

[rosie]

Hi Nick. I lived in Brighton for several years and have to say, I never met anyone quite like Bunny. I think bunny has feminism, and he's at a very advanced stage. Was he based on someone you know?

[nick cave]

The thing about And The ass was that it took about three years to write. So obviously certain themes and turns of phrases leaked into my songs. Bunny Munro, I wrote relatively quickly, in a couple of months, so I feel the themes of new novel stand apart from what I am writing song-wise these days.

[nick cave]

Dear Valerie, I find writing songs on the whole, extremely difficult. I don't feel they come naturally actually, and have no control over them. They just make themselves apparent when they want to. Writing the novel, on the other hand, I found relatively easy. The book just blazed out of me. Sorry this has taken so long but technology proving problematic!

[Simon Webb]

To what extent does your literature and songwriting influence each other? A lot of the themes and ideas in your first novel - And the Ass Saw the Angel - seemed to have been worked out in advance (at least in part) through songs such as Swampland. Was that the case with The Death of Bunny Munro either in terms of it influencing songs we have already heard from Dig Lazarus Dig, or Grinderman or indeed songs that have yet to be released?

[Valerie]

How does your creative process differ between writing fiction and writing music? Which do you find more challenging? Satisfying?