As any star on tour can attest, all the glamour and affirmation of those fleeting hours on stage must be weighed against the inevitable longueurs of grinding, city-to-city travel. Not for Nick Cave, though, the distractions of Travel Scrabble, Angry Birds or the in-flight magazine.
As the photographs prefacing each chapter of his new book show, The Sick Bag Song began life as a wide-ranging collection of pensées scribbled on those white-paper sacks airlines customarily supply to passengers. It's easy to picture Cave, a man sometimes dubbed Old Nick, seizing upon this modus operandi with devilish glee. What a perfect way, you can imagine the veteran provocateur thinking, of ribbing those who find my work nauseous.
The 57-year-old, Australian-born singer has said that he was initially trying to write song lyrics, but The Sick Bag Song soon evolved into an epic prose poem inspired by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' travels on their 2014 North American tour.
There are also flashbacks to Cave meeting Bob Dylan backstage at the Glastonbury Festival in 1998, and to him and his wife Susie Bick visiting Bryan Ferry and his wife at their West Sussex mansion (when Cave falls asleep in a poolside sunlounger, he awakes to find Bryan in his swimming trunks, while Bick, a model who was pregnant with her and Cave’s twin sons Arthur and Earl at the time, is described as “a beautiful elephant of woe”).
The vampiric nature of creativity is one of the book’s key riffs, and at one point Cave, enduring Godfather of Goth, describes his own ongoing stabs at metamorphosis: “I carefully concoct a paste in a bowl and I paint my hair black, so that it sits like a sleek, inky raven’s wing on top of my multistorey forehead … The bathroom light is brutal. I reposition my face so that I stop looking like Kim Jong-un and start looking more like Johnny Cash.”
Cave's dry, often black sense of humour has long been a useful tool for him. His 1996 duet with Kylie Minogue (Charlene from Neighbours as folks back in Oz still thought of her) on the murder ballad Where the Wild Roses Grow was played at least partly for laughs. Similarly, when Disney star Hannah Montana cropped up unexpectedly in the lyric of Higgs Boson Blues, a song from Cave and the Bad Seeds' 2013 album Push the Sky Away, one had to smile.
"What my songwriting is about these days is pushing what can be sung … what you can actually get away with singing," Cave told Australian newspaper The Age last week, and Mermaids, the mesmerising standout track from Push the Sky Away, certainly bore that out: "I believe in God / I believe in mermaids too", offers Cave at one point. Elsewhere on the record he name checks Wikipedia and drops into text-message speak for We No Who U R.
These are busy times for the singer. So busy, in fact, that, following BMG's 2013 acquisition of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' Mute Recordings imprint, he delegated supervision of the remastering of their back catalogue to trusted former bandmate Mick Harvey. All 14 of the Bad Seeds' albums prior to Push the Sky Away have since been reissued on 180-gram vinyl, another small gambit in Cave's flagrant quest for artistic immortality.
As a musician, not a poet, he is about to release another soundtrack album with fellow Bad Seed and current chief foil Warren Ellis. Director David Oelhoffen's Loin Des Hommes (Far From Men), a tale of divided loyalties and colonialist violence set during the Algerian War of Independence, was a triple prize-winner at the 2014 Venice Film Festival. Cave and Ellis's score of "mesmeric drones, pointillist piano jabs, weeping strings and nerve-jangling electronics" undoubtedly played its part.
The pair have been amassing prestigious soundtrack commissions since 2005, when they scored fellow Australian John Hillcoat's brutish outback western, The Proposition (Cave also penned the script). It was in 2007 that Hollywood came calling, Cave and Ellis scoring Andrew Dominik's anti-western, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, which starred Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck, and saw Cave play a cameo role as a saloon-bar minstrel.
Other Cave/Ellis soundtracks have included that of Everardo Valerio Gout's Mexican crime thriller Days of Grace (2011), and John Hillcoat's The Road, a 2009 adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's apocalyptic novel. Factor in the life that numerous songs from Cave's back catalogue have enjoyed in film – People Ain't No Good from 1997's The Boatman's Call was used in Shrek 2; Red Right Hand from 1994's Let Love In cropped up in The X-Files, Dumb & Dumber and Scream – and Cave's relationship with the silver screen starts to look very healthy indeed.
His insider understanding of the film industry might also partly explain why 2014's 20,000 Days on Earth, Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard's acclaimed documentary about Cave – a work for which the singer retained final cut approval and which screened at last year's ADFF – was essentially the stuff of playful artifice. There was never any chance that Cave might be filmed lounging in jogging pants à la Ozzy in The Osbournes. Instead, he is beautifully lit and suavely suited-and-booted throughout, and the scenes in which he talks to his therapist, or drives his Jaguar around Brighton, or muses upon his daily lyric-writing stints, are all designed to cement his image as a louche and enigmatic man of letters.
The vast conceit of 20,000 Days on Earth would doubtless have been palpable to Cave, but what use is a rock star without an ego, or a showman without an act? Crucially, the film also has enough black humour and inherent daftness to keep us on Cave's side. When he sits down for some family viewing with his aforementioned sons, it isn't The X Factor they watch, it's the gory climax of the movie Scarface.
That the singer’s last will and testament reportedly calls for the establishment of The Nick Cave Memorial Museum is funny, and deliberately so. Ditto his 2009 claim that he would like to see a gold statue of himself “naked on a rearing horse” save for a “modest loincloth” erected in his hometown of Warracknabeal, Victoria. Still, while cracking gags like these or dryly telling interviewers: “Contrary to what some people believe, I’m not really a vampire, you know”, notions of immortality never seem too far from Cave’s mind.
That he is hungry to enter that elite coterie of highly poetic singer-songwriters which includes his heroes Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen and Johnny Cash seems obvious. That's why it was so thrilling for Cave when Cash recorded The Mercy Seat, Cave's 1988 song concerning a man about to be executed in the electric chair, on his album American III: Solitary Man. And that's why Cave still gets into his writing chair every day to stare down the blank page.
The myth-making, meanwhile, seems to be important to Cave for two reasons. First, because it generates a kind of self-belief and momentum, and second, because Cave's own heroes still have a potent and recyclable mythic power for him. When the website Vice interviewed the singer recently aboard a stationary 747 about The Sick Bag Song, the writer John Doran asked him if curating the Nick Cave myth had become easier over the years, moreover, Cave's speedy recourse to smoke and mirrors was impressive: "[Your use of] the word myth suggests that it's not real," he responded, "[but] if you invest enough time and attention into something you become that thing. There's no going back."
• The Sick Bag Song was published by Canongate on Wednesday. Nick Cave and Warren Ellis’s original soundtrack for Loin Des Hommes is released by Goliath Enterprises on May 18.
James McNair writes for Mojo magazine and The Independent.
