Nick Cave gave a lengthy interview (sitting in an airplane parked on the tarmac) to John Doran in the latest episode of VICE Meets. Cave’s promoting his new book, The Sick Bag Song, an “road poem slash horror story” that was written on airplane sick bags during a 22 city North American tour, beginning in Nashville and ending in Montreal. (A literary device for a rock star’s book that seems almost Spinal Tap-esque as per Barney Hoskyns in the Guardian’s tepid review.) This is one of the longer Nick Cave interviews of recent vintage—quite a good one, too—and the topics include his dislike of the “dreaded” task of songwriting, if his wife scrutinizes his lyrics, and how much younger crowds showing up at their recent American shows has revitalized the Bad Seeds creatively.
 

 

 
The Sick Bag Song will be published by Canongate on April 8th and is only available online. There will be a signed limited edition of 220 (ten for each city) with customized, one of a kind “fully functional” sick bags in a box set with white vinyl records of Cave reading from the text (that version will set you back just $1,100). Three promotional readings for the book are being held, one at Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre in Los Angeles on April 8, another at the Florence Gould Theater in NYC on the 10th, and an already sold out date at London’s Porchester Hall on the 16th.
 

 
Additionally there will be five videos made for the publication by longtime Cave collaborators Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, the directors of 20,000 Days on Earth, appearing each week at thesickbagsong.com. The first, for Portland, below, features an impressively rambling performance from the author. There’s also a trailer for the book: