The Sick Bag Song

The Sick Bag Song is an exploration of love, inspiration and memory shaped around the events of Cave's 2014 tour of North America. It began life scribbled on airline sick bags during Cave's 22-city tour of North America in 2014. It soon grew into a restless full-length contemporary epic.

Spurred by encounters with modern day North America, and racked by romantic longing and exhaustion, Cave teases out the significant moments, the people, the books and the music that have influenced and inspired him, and drops them into his Sick Bag.

The Sick Bag Song blends poetry, lyrics, memories, musings, flights of fancy and journal entries. Both mythic and contemporary, it lies somewhere between The Wasteland and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and explores and develops the imaginative universe of Nick Cave.

The sumptuous physical edition reproduces in full colour twenty-two sick bags, each hand-customised by Nick, that are integrated throughout the text.