"Try it on crack! I can just see those words being pulled for the headline tomorrow…"
Well, we'd hate to disappoint Nick Cave. The Australian songwriter-cum-author held court at the Eaton Centre's Indigo outlet last night for a live interview with local radio host Alan Cross, and for what appeared to be — judging by the long line of fans snaking up to the store’s second level — one epic autograph session to promote his new, second novel, The Death of Bunny Munro. But conversation quickly moved away from the plot of the book to the $25 iPhone App currently available in conjunction with it: an elaborate interface that allows you to listen to or watch videos of Cave reading the book, over top an eerie soundtrack performed by his Bad Seeds/Grinderman bandmate Warren Ellis. "It's the mother of all apps," Cave cracks sarcastically, and when Cross claims that using the app yields a hallucinogenic effect, Cave delivers the aforementioned headline-ready quip.
If this were the book tour for Cave's first novel, 1989's grim, southern-gothic odyssey And the Ass Saw the Angel, you might not think he was joking. But where that book was infamously written in a squalid Berlin apartment at the height of Cave's heroin addiction in the mid-'80s, the conditions for Bunny Munro were much less severe: Cave wrote it mostly during the Bad Seeds’ 2008 Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! tour (including, Cave claims, the Toronto stop), and even tapped out its first few chapters out on his iPhone’s Notes program. Cave’s growing stature as a multi-disciplinary celebrity is also reflected in the book’s pop culturally savvy plot, which tells of a modern-day cad — “the worst possible human being on the planet” — with an unhealthy Avril Lavigne obsession.
Gregarious but groggy, Cave doesn’t appear too interested in further explaining plot details or his writing process after a long day of interviews; in fact, this is actually his second interview with Cross today (the first will appear on the Explore Music site). The conversation doesn’t really break out
of standard promo mode until Cross opens the floor to questions, the
first of which is actually directed at Cross himself: “Why can’t I hear
Nick Cave on any radio station in Toronto?” Cross says he’ll see what
he can do; Cave offers to record a cover of “Sk8er Boi” instead. A follow-up query from an over-40 fan about how Cave deals with aging is answered with: “You should know — you’re pretty fucking old yourself!”
Other random revelations: Cave doesn’t actually believe in god, he just likes writing about people who do; he’d bet on Kylie Minogue in a cage match against PJ Harvey; the new Grinderman album will be out early next year; and the awesome porno mustache he’d been sporting for the past two years had fallen victim to a Rohypnol-induced episode executed by his wife, who “cut it off while I was asleep.”
But the evening’s final question isn’t really a query; an overzealous fan simply shouts out “Blixa!” in reference to Einstuerzende Neubauten figurehead and former Bad Seeds guitarist Blixa Bargeld. “Blixa’s been gone for years, man,” Cave replies, before revealing that his old bandmate will be recording a translated reading of Bunny Munro for the German-edition audiobook. Says Cave: “If you think the book is scary now, wait till you hear it then!” Ladies and gents, fire up your glass pipes.