NICK CAVE'S PENIS, AVRIL LAVIGNE'S VAGINA

I interviewed Nick Cave in Melbourne in April 2009, a few months before the release of his second novel, The Death of Bunny Munro. Part of our two-hour conversation made it into a Good Weekend feature (‘Sowing New Seeds', 8 August 2009) but much cut for reasons of space and good taste. Here are some of the exchanges that were never published…

Cave had just flown in from London, and it was his first interview without a moustache for three years.
Cave: “I shaved it off when I arrived in Australia because I had really bad jetlag, and my wife had been… No, I won't go into that.”

Complaining about the Velcro effect?
“Exactly. Anyway, in a weak moment, I shaved it off.”

What is the function of a moustache?
“It's to balance the face, of course. When you start looking at people who don't have moustaches, from a certain point of view, it looks wrong. We were supposed to have moustaches. We go through this absurd ritual every day to get rid of the beard.”

Do you have a moustache cup?
“I got given two moustache cups. My drummer gave me one, and the mother of my first child gave me one. It's basically a little tea cup with a moustache-shaped lip that goes over the edge, and you drink through a hole.”

Do you use them?
“No, I never had a problem moustache like that. That's for Stalin and co.”

Your character, Bunny Munro, gives a lot of thought to Avril Lavigne's vagina...
“What do I think about Avril Lavigne's vagina? I don't know what it's like, to be honest.”

And yet, you have speculated at some, er, depth.
“So, what do you want me to say about that? What are you asking me there?”

It seem unusual to spend so much time speculating on the vagina of a real person in a book.
“Yeah, it's good, right? It's funny.”

I thought it was funny, but do you think Avril Lavigne will think it's funny?
“I don't know how Avril Lavigne will feel about this book. All I know is if Avril Lavigne wrote a book that centred around Nick Cave's penis, I would be flattered, if not proud. But I do hope she has a sense of humour. I don't know her.”

In your writing, you always note what people are wearing and take care to identify the brands they choose.
“Bunny Munro has an eye for detail and a mind for the general. He's absorbed popular culture and he knows about these sort of things, and he knows the status of these sort of things. But I also like describing clothing, I enjoy describing fabrics. To me, it's important what people wear. By naming one article of clothing, you can pretty much define a person, in this day and age.”

And what's your article?
“Well, I wear a suit. As I am.”

You have an eye for fabrics.
“I think it's a mixture of myself and the character. The character is basically only concerned with the physical appearance of things.”

Because he's shallow?
“I'm not exactly sure that means that he's shallow, he's just attracted to the physicality of things. I personally enjoy describing clothing, and the little things on people's faces, as well.”

Yeah, that crops up a bit.
“Often that's from the child's point of view, as well, and that's how kids see things. You can be sure that kids see the worst of you. You think that they don't, but the kids see…”

Only deformity.
“Absolutely, yeah.”

I thought Bunny's child was described heartbreakingly well, his unfailing admiration for his fucked-up father.
“It was kind of a nice, tragic device. The worse that he gets, the more the child loves him. And, ultimately, even though Bunny Munro is unrepentant, by the end he is redeemed in some way by the love of his kid. ”

The book is firmly anchored in Sussex.
“I've changed the names of hotels and housing estates and stuff like that, mostly because I didn't want to get into a kind of trainspotting thing with the locals about ‘This particular estate has six floors and you've only given it five,' and all that sort of stuff. All the places exist, but a lot of their names have been changed.

Did you move from London to Brighton to be closer to the world-famous Booth Museum?
“That was one of the great pleasures I discovered while I was there, along with the pavilion and the various piers.”

I keep asking questions with food in my mouth.
“That's alright, mate.”

Thank you.
“I don't mind.”

So, the writing process: how long did it take you…
“To write this? Where are you from?”

I lived in Aldershot. Not far from Brighton.
“Right. So you're English? How long have you been here for?”

Twenty years.
“Right, so you're an English person.”

I am an English person.
“You sound like an actor. Keep speaking, go on… I'll tell you in a minute. I keep thinking, ‘He sounds like some actor.' It's not what's-his-name… the Mona Lisa dude?”

Bob Hoskins.
“Yes, you fucking sound like Bob Hoskins!”

Yeah, yeah. And I look like Bob Hoskins.
“So, you've heard that before?”

It's been said. By complete strangers. An Indian guy came up to me in Chile and said, “You look like Bob Hoskins”. Thanks, mate. Yeah.
“No, but you sound like Bob Hoskins.”

I don't mind. I quite like Bob Hoskins.
“He's one of the good ones.”

Looking and sounding like him is cool by me.
“Yeah, yeah. Absolutely.”

You look like Nick Cave. You look a bit like Kevin Bacon.
“And now we've established that…”

The writing process…
“Because you've got that English interviewing style. Because, you know, there is one.”

I didn't, no. What is the “English interviewing style”?
“Well, you haven't done this, but… I know them very well, because I do these interviews for my records, and I sit in a room, and you do the Italian slab. So you do four interviews, right, in the morning. Then you do the German slab. And it's extraordinary, the difference between an Italian interview and a German one. Then you do the English one and it's often very defensive and touchy, and you have to sort of navigate and negotiate you way through the interview. This is more the rock journalists. For example, the last interview I did, I'd just done the Italians, or the Germans, someone like that. And they were like deeply respectful: ‘Mr Cave…' And then the English one comes in with two bloody marys and a fag in his hand, he's all kind of red around the eyes, he sits down and he puts his fag out and hawks a giant oyster and spits it into the ashtray, where it just sort of sits there, wobbling between us, and he launches into the fact that he's really upset because his girlfriend left him last night and der-da-der-da-der, and this is, to me, a very English style of journalism. You're often completely taken away from your comfort zone with the particular journalist. And they can be extremely defensive. And, in fact, the English are very defensive, in general.”

I'm not.
“The English journalist is very defensive.”

You don't allow your songs to be used in advertisements.
“I don't let people use Bad Seeds songs in commercials, but we'll do anything in Grinderman. Grinderman's just a kind of corporate tit-sucking whore of a thing. We'll do anything. I say that with a pinch of salt. We basically just decided we would do everything in a different way with Grinderman. We thought, ‘Fuck it, if someone wants to use our music in advertisements, then be it on their heads.' But no-one has.

Grinderman work in a wholly different way. We write our songs together. We've done more gigs at rock festivals. We've decided Grinderman are a really cool festival act. There was a whole lot about Grinderman that I was learning was impossible to do with the Bad Seeds, through years and years of fallowing the same whatever it is, hoeing the same furrow. After years of doing that, it's difficult for the Bad Seeds to change, and there's no real reason for the Bad Seeds to change. We do change our music a lot, we do different things musically, but there're certain things, like we're with the same record company… and with Grinderman, we can just throw all that stuff away. Grinderman is hugely freeing.”

How long did it take you to write Bunny Munro?
“It took six weeks to write it in longhand, while I was on the last tour with the Bad Seeds. I wrote it on the tour bus, in the hotels at night, in the hotels in the morning, backstage, by longhand in notebooks. Then it took about another six weeks to type the thing into my computer and do an edit on it. It's in three parts. I sent in the first part typed-up, and they said, ‘Write the rest and we're in'.”

Who said that? Your agent or your publisher?
“I don't have an agent. I just went straight to Canongate. They made a very astute edit – which was the editing out of two chapters – and that was like, ‘Why the fuck hadn't I thought of that?' because it was so the right thing to do.”

Did you speak to any other novelists about your writing?
“I'm not in that world at all. I know Will Self, but I'm not gonna sit there and talk novels with him.”

Why not?
“He's too clever.”

So why did you write a novel?
“It was actually an experiment to see if I could write something on tour, and it was only after I had written the three or four chapters of prose that ended up being the start of the book that I kind of realised I was actually writing a book in the first place. I find that very often happens: there's a creative impulse that's much more savvy to what's going on than your rational mind is. I often find that I'm doing things creatively – or that I've prepared myself creatively – for something that happens in the future. There's sometimes a lovely synchronicity about things that happen. If I had've sat down and said, ‘Today, I'm gonna write a novel,' I don't know if I would've really been able to do it in that way.”

Do you do all your business deals without an agent?
“I have a lawyer who deals with everything. I don't have a manager, I just have a lawyer and an accountant, and I have an agent for film scripts. This book was initially a film script.”

There are occasional shot references.
“I tried to use cinematic language through it sometimes: over-cranks and under-cranks and all that sort of stuff – as a sort of surrealistic device about seeing things, and the way his consciousness was altering as the book went on: becoming madder, and his vision of things becoming less trustworthy. And also as a fond nod to my friend John Hillcoat who I wrote the story for initially as a screenplay.”

Set question: how did you find writing a screenplay, as opposed to writing a novel?
“You don't need to know how to write to write a screenplay, because all you're doing is dialogue. I've written three now, and each one is stylistically very different. The first one, The Proposition, is kind of funny if you read it now, because everything is described, like ‘His eye flutters' or ‘He waves a fly away' or something like that. Now I've actually read the way scripts are written, and nothing like that gets in. It's ‘The Indians come over the hill' and that's the end. Basically, I've learned how to write a film script, which is very much about divesting yourself of any literary pretensions, and getting down to the nuts and bolts.”

I wrote a screenplay and it was shit.
“Well, I wrote Gladiator II. I was asked by Ridley Scott and Russell Crowe to write the script, which I did, and that ended up very quickly in the… But I got paid. A lot. It didn't go anywhere. Well, it ended in Vietnam. In the war. There was some time travel stuff going on. Anyway, don't worry about that. It's not gonna get made. I've done a new one for John Hillcoat, which is being put together at the moment, and is temporarily called

The Wettest County in the World, which is a book about three brothers in prohibition times in West Virginia, working in the illegal liquor business. To answer your question, which you've forgotten what it was…”

I've no idea what it was.
“…which is the difference between writing a script and writing a novel, is that in fact they have the same effect on me. I can sit down and write a script and just rocket forward with the whole thing, because there's just this one idea, this one story to tell, and it's all so much easier than writing songs.”

What are you not comfortable with talking about? What's the most boring thing for you?
“I don't like to talk about my personal life very much. I'm slowly working out how not to do that.”

How?
“Well, you just don't do it. I guess you learn to value certain aspects of your life and find that having them written about constantly in the press can kind of diminish them in some way. And if you see it in that way, it's quite easy to just close your mouth when you're asked certain things.”

You refer to visions of people forgiving Bunny “because they are human, and so much want to forgive”. Do you believe that?
“The thing about the end is that, apart from a bit being a kind of hallucination… it's one of those visions before you die. And it's just influenced by daytime TV. He's in the hotel room watching one of those kind of confessional talk shows, and it's describing this overweight woman who is a serial adulterer, and her husband coming on and her saying, ‘Please forgive me.' It's just a kind of re-enactment of that kind of thing. Everyone's running around loving each other and forgiving each other. To me, the cheap theatrics of this kind of thing are highly over-rated and kind of nauseating.”

So you don't think that people want to forgive?
“Well, I think that the culture that we're in these days – and I guess this is a religious thing, too – it doesn't matter what you do, as long as you come clean about it and ask for forgiveness, everything's alright. And I don't really buy that myself.”

Bunny Munro spends a lot of his time in hotel rooms, lying back watching daytime TV.
“Totally. I relate very strongly to that central character, and I don't think I could've written that way without relating strongly to him. He has nothing else to balance certain urges. He has a pathological one-track mind. But there's certainly elements of him… you know, you can't write about someone unless you kind of understand them.”

Bunny reminded me of John Self in Money: a sort of cross between John Self and Keith in London Fields.
“Er, yeah, maybe. I love Money. It's a great book.”

I didn't understand drinking until I read that book.
“It's beautiful and it's really funny. Martin Amis is one of the great comic writers. He gave it up, for some reason. It's as if he didn't see that that was an important enough thing to be able to do – to make people laugh. He went somewhere else. It felt to me like he had to look for issues of depth and write about them.”

There's a lot of comedy in the book, but people don't think of Nick Cave as being funny, do they?
“Well, people who know what I do, do. People who don't listen to my records, don't. I don't really mind how people see what I do but, to me, when people say they found the book really funny, I'm really pleased that people laughed out loud when they read it. The main thing I want the book to do is entertain. And the greatest pleasure for me is it doesn't matter what shit you're going through in the day, there's something in the back of your mind that you know you can go back to this book you've been reading that's really good… it buoys me up.”