As he approached 50, Nick Cave began to hear a voice. And what it said was ...
wholly unprintable. “I noticed that there is a running sexual commentary in
my head. When you see a woman, your initial reactions are ... certain
thoughts go through your mind. It’s automatic, instinctual — it’s part of
what we are. You don’t act out on them. Or you do.”
The 51-year-old Australian singer-songwriter is grappling with his sexual
demons to explain the genesis of his second novel, The Death of Bunny
Munro, which will be published next week, 20 years after his debut, And
the Ass Saw the Angel. Bunny Munro is a travelling salesman whose
singleminded, blankly amoral pursuit of sex has damned him to death. He is
the Duracell Bunny; a fornication machine. His wife, despairing of her
husband, commits suicide: at her funeral Bunny is so turned on by one of her
friends that he sees her pudenda “hovering before his eyes like a holy
apparition” and has to rush out to the public toilet to masturbate. Later
that night, wasted on Scotch and cocaine, he has sex with his best friend’s
girlfriend on the sofa while his nine-year-old son lies in bed. Bunny and
his son — who, despite everything, loves his father — then go on a debauched
road trip that takes in a visit to a purgatorial Butlins. There are more
genitalia in Cave’s novel than in most gynaecology manuals. It’s possibly
the filthiest book I’ve ever read. But it’s also funny, horrifying and
moving, and wrapped up in rich and restless prose.
How much of Bunny is there in Cave? Sharply suited, Seventies-style striped
shirt unbuttoned to his chest and dyed black hair combed thinly over his
head, there is definitely something of the slick, unreconstructed salesman
about him. The hard-living rock star is present, too, in the shades, jagged
pendant and big, black and red-jewelled rings. But there’s also the fretful,
analytical writer: his long, thin limbs folded into a plush chair in a
seafront suite at a Brighton hotel, Cave picks his words carefully, with
pauses so long that the seagulls and sirens from outside seep in through the
windows and fill the room, as the tea in our china cups slowly cools.
“Bunny Munro is very much part of the male character; he just has a Tannoy
system on his head. He acts on his urges. I don’t. But there’s a part of
that character that I admire.” Which part? “I’m getting myself into a real .
. .” Cave breaks off with an exasperated laugh. “He’s pure id. He don’t give
a f*** about his kid. He don’t give a f*** about anything.” Picturing that
in print, he leaps to his own defence: “That sounds like I don’t give a f***
about my kids, which is completely untrue. I’m saying this as a man who’s
happily married with kids that I love.”
There was a time when not giving a f*** was Cave’s forte. This is the man who
staggered around drunk in a loincloth with the word “Hell” daubed on his
chest for a music video, who punched a journalist in the face when upset by
his sensationalist line of questioning, whose heroin intake in the 1980s was
prodigious and unapologetic.
But Cave’s talent was significant enough not to be overshadowed by his wild
lifestyle. His songs, with the darkly anarchic Birthday Party, the
fire-and-brimstone Bad Seeds and the scuzzy Grinderman, can be brutal and
unforgiving — as in The Mercy Seat, written in the voice of a
prisoner awaiting execution, and later covered by his hero Johnny Cash — or
beautifully tender, as in the simple, piano-led Into My Arms. His
lyrics plumb the age-old depths of religious doubt and romantic despair. He
is one of the few writers outside folk music to do “story songs” — with Murder
Ballads, he produced a whole album of them, including duets with P. J.
Harvey (with whom he had an intense affair) and Kylie Minogue (with whom he
didn’t).
The Death of Bunny Munro could easily be a Nick Cave song title. In
fact it started life as a screenplay, commissioned by his friend John
Hillcoat, who had previously directed Cave’s bloody revenge story The
Proposition. “John said, ‘I want these elements: a door-to-door salesman,
Butlins, and an after-death experience’. I wrote it in three weeks. When I’m
writing a script for somebody I don’t feel responsible for it. And that’s an
enormously freeing experience. When I’m writing a song I’m fully responsible
for the outcome and so they’re agonising things to write. Writing songs is
like f***ing pulling teeth.”
The Bunny Munro screenplay was deemed too expensive to make, joining Cave’s
Gladiator II script (written at the request of his friend Russell Crowe) on
the reject pile. Until, that is, a friend suggested that Cave turn it into a
novel. Much has been made of Cave’s “nine-to-five” work ethic: he writes
songs in an office in the basement of his house on the seafront in Hove,
where he lives with his wife, the model Susie Bick, and their nine-year-old
twins, Arthur and Earl. But ironically the novel was hammered out (to begin
with, on an iPhone) in the “exhaustion and hysteria” of a Bad Seeds tour, on
the bus and after late-night parties. The slapdash schedule and degenerate
tour-bus dialogue suited the book perfectly: “Half the time I only had to
keep my ears open.” If sex was in the air, though, you can’t help thinking
that writing a novel about a depraved serial shagger must be a pretty
effective diversion. “After finishing it,” he admits, “I felt I’d been
turned off the whole subject of sex for ever.”
In a gesture that would be difficult to interpret as particularly romantic,
the book is dedicated to his wife. Has she read it? “I’m guessing . . .”
There’s a long pause, in which Cave, his imposing forehead wrinkled, runs
through the possible answers. Then he gives up, and laughs. “I’m not sure
yet. I have presented it to her. I think she’s getting round to it.” Oh
dear. Is it important that she likes it? “Yeah. Very. Hugely.”
If the book is not a great advertisement for marriage, though, it’s an even
worse one for fatherhood. “What makes Bunny monstrous, and what makes him
sad, is that he’s on an epic flight from love,” Cave says. “His greatest
adversary is the boy sitting in the car — because he loves his dad, no
matter what this guy does.” It’s the boy’s love, in the end, that redeems
Bunny. And it’s Cave’s love for his sons that seems to have redeemed him.
“One of the things I love most in the world is being a father. There was a
time when all the other things — lover, son — I didn’t think I was
particularly good at, but I always felt that I had an instinctual style of
fathering that was good for the kids.”
Cave hasn’t always been a model dad. As well as Arthur and Earl, he has two
18-year-old boys, from different relationships: Luke, whose mother Viviane
Carneiro — a Brazilian art director — Cave met at a gig in São Paulo, and
Jethro, who grew up with his Australian mother, Beau Lazenby, and now works
as a model. He is a hands-on parent to Luke, but has admitted, to his
“eternal regret”, that he “didn’t make much contact with Jethro in the early
years” — though they now have a good relationship.
Cave’s father died in a car crash when he was 19 — an event that seems to
haunt Bunny Munro. Cave heard the news at a police station, having been
charged with vandalism and being drunk and disorderly. His mother was, not
for the first time, bailing him out. “My artistic life has centred around an
attempt to articulate an almost palpable sense of loss,” he later wrote. “A
great, gaping hole was blasted out of my world by the unexpected death of my
father.”
It marked the end of what had been a happy, if rebellious, Australian
childhood. Growing up in rural Victoria, with his teacher father, librarian
mother and three siblings, there was “enormous freedom that you can’t even
imagine now ... When I was about 12 my friend Eddie’s father used to drive
us out into the bush, where we were given a shotgun each and a six-pack of
beer. ‘F*** off and enjoy yourselves’. We shot bunnies — blind ones,
unfortunately, because myxomatosis was rampant. I’m not sure that it’s the
greatest piece of parenting ever, but I did have a really good time.”
A house full of books allowed Cave to discover the joys of language. “I
remember very clearly — I must have been 9 — reading Edgar Rice Burroughs’s
Tarzan, and finding this line about a lion sitting in the forest and waving
its tail spasmodically. And I remember getting a kind of chemical thrill
from this particular word.” Recognising his son’s sensitivity to language,
Colin Cave introduced him to “real” literature. “My father obviously had a
wicked sense of humour: at 12, he was reading me Titus Andronicus and
Lolita. But I’m exactly the same with my kids. There’s nothing we like more
than watching a hugely inappropriate DVD — something that just scares the
shit out of them. It’s a bonding experience.”
By the time Colin Cave died, Nick was a dedicated trouble-seeker. Expelled
from high school at 13 for trying to pull down the knickers of an older
girl, he was sent to boarding school in Melbourne, where he got into fights,
fell in with an arty crowd and formed a band. At 20, Cave was injecting
heroin and speed, joyriding and fronting the punk band the Boys Next Door,
which would later morph into the Birthday Party, and, in 1983, be replaced
by the Bad Seeds.
In the late 1980s, living in squalor in West Berlin, Cave’s thoughts returned
to his father. Almost constantly wired on speed, he set about writing a book
that would be published as And the Ass Saw the Angel in 1989: a pungent,
baroque work of southern Gothic that tells the story of the mute Euchrid
Euchrow, born — or rather “jettisoned from the boozy curds of gestation” —
to a disturbed father and alcoholic mother. “My father had a certain
literary snobbishness, and there’s a huge need to impress with language in
the book. It’s a sort of garbled story, from child to father, with thesaurus
in hand. I wasn’t in showroom condition while I was writing it.” The novel,
which took three years to complete, so put Cave off the process that he
didn’t feel brave enough to attempt another until now.
Cave was brought up an Anglican and God is always somehow present in his work:
a shadowy figure, sometimes comforting, sometimes malign. The clearest
insights come from Cave’s own prose. His foreword to Mark’s Gospel reveals
that when he first read the Bible, the Old Testament gripped him, speaking
to the young man who “railed and hissed and spat at the world”. Reading Mark
changed that: “The Christ that emerges from Mark, tramping through the
haphazard events of His life, had a ringing intensity about Him ... it was
through His example that He gave our imaginations the freedom to rise and to
fly.”
There is something Christ-like about the survival of Bunny Munro’s son, just
as there is in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (Cave is writing the soundtrack to
Hillcoat’s forthcoming film adaptation). But it was the literary template of
Mark’s Gospel that was a direct influence: “Mark just wants to get to the
death. It’s done with such urgency.” That, and SCUM Manifesto (Society for
Cutting Up Men) by Valerie Solanas, the woman who shot Andy Warhol in 1968.
“It is the most beautiful but hate-filled rant against maleness, and it’s
Bunny Munro — this knuckle-dragging, drooling lump of id.” The Gospel of
Mark and SCUM Manifesto: who else would make that combination? It’s
quintessentially Cave.
He enjoyed writing Bunny Munro so much that, “unless it all goes down in
flames”, he’d like to do another. It arrives amid a perfect storm of Cave
activity: White Lunar, a collection of film scores created with bandmate
Warren Ellis; and the first in a series of remastered Bad Seeds albums. He
has also recently finished recording a second record with Grinderman, a
stripped-down incarnation of the Bad Seeds.
The eternal teenager in Cave clearly relishes the group’s perversity: “What
Grinderman are really trying to do is to make the confounding, disappointing
second album. The problem with the bottom falling out of the music industry
is that everyone has to play the game safer and safer. But with Grinderman
we can do whatever we like.” Cave smiles, the soul-searching writer fading,
the roguish rock star taking his place. “We don’t give a f***.”
The Death of Bunny Munro is published by Canongate on September 10 at
£16.99. To buy it for £15.29 call 0845 2712134 or visit timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst
Your Comments
Order By: