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The Sick Bag Song

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The Sick Bag Song

By: Nick Cave
Narrated by: Nick Cave
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About this listen

The Sick Bag Song chronicles Cave's journey with his band, the Bad Seeds, on a 22-day North American tour. Inspired by John Berryman's Dream Songs, it is an epic exploration of inspiration, creativity, loss, love and death.

The book blends poetry, lyrics, memories, musings, flights of fancy and journal entries. The Sick Bag Song began life scribbled onto airline sick bags acquired during the internal flights taken by Cave during the tour. To some degree a companion piece to his feature doc 20,000 Days on Earth, The Sick Bag Song further explores and develops the mystique of Nick Cave.

©2016 Nick Cave (P)2016 Canongate Books Ltd Music Entertainment

Critic 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)
"The Sick Bag Song provides a window on Cave's honesty...Part tour diary and part free-ranging rumination on the business of performance. Capture[s] the mind-frazzling disorientation of 'the road'" (Guardian)
All stars
Most relevant
You could say that I love anything Nick Cave does so maybe I’m not the right person to take a review from! This was a poetic journey in to the delirium of being on the road. The joy and the loneliness, the exhilaration and the exhaustion. I can imagine Nick scribbling on the sick bags. I’ve done it also. It feels more important than typing it in to notes, like it’s very important and must be written on paper urgently.
This book was also the perfect length. Long enough to feel substantial but short enough to easily listen to again, which I will do very soon!

Loved it

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A view into the room of a genius, brilliantly written poetry of a life away from love.

Meandering magic

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One for the sycophants. I eat up anything Nick excretes, but not without critique. It’s pretty much flowery ramblings with unnecessary swearing. He hasn’t put much work into this one, but he delivers it with the confidence of Trump. Nick says he doesn’t like Bukowski, but he closer than ever in this account.

Pretty boring

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