Nick Cave's wild, dancing poetry interweaves with his memories of the Bad Seeds 2014 tour. My brother and I saw him in Vancouver and it was a top-three, all-time experience. His sick-bag write-up of Vancouver was good but I wish he'd talked about humping my brother's face during Stagger Lee.

Audacious in its imagery and (surprisingly) lucid in its narrative, this book is a must-read. ( )

This is to a travelogue to what Cave's 20,000 days on earth was to documentaries. It's destabilizing but puts you into his world of the realm of mythic and mundane. I truly appreciated the backbone of the boy and the train and the trauma therein as a corollary to his own distance from his wife and on the last page I felt jealous he got to go home when I still felt left in the wilderness.

You again, I say. What are you doing?

I'm flying, she says. Wanna come?

I stare down at the dark, muddy water below.

I said, You're not flying, you're falling. There is a subtle difference in outcome.

Oh yeah? And what do you think you are doing?

...

What am I doing? I don't know, I say. Stalling, I guess.

Sounds about right, she says.

I am working though, I reply.

The girl laughs and says, Yeah, right.
( )

What a ride! This short collection of vignettes, ostensibly written on the backs of airline 'vomit' bags, recounts Cave's 22-city 2014 North American tour. It is a work of delirious imagery and his insights tap into an imagination without limits. As his journey gains momentum, the account takes on a fevered reverie of a mentality running wild! Is there anything that this man cannot do? ( )

Struggling to concisely describe Nick Cave's new work The Sick Bag Song, I have decided to turn to the author himself. On pages 83 to 84, he parodies the whole 'X meets Y' way of describing the concept of a piece of art – and employs a scattergun effect to describe The Sick Bag Song similarly. The Wasteland meets Cocksucker Blues. Nosferatu. Planes, Trains and Automobiles. The Odyssey. PornHub. The Book of Psalms. And so on. From every comparison, you can see where he is coming from: that diversity alone shows just how inscrutable the book can be. But, once you accept its rambling nature, its semi-stream-of-consciousness style, and its occasional pretentiousness, The Sick Bag Song opens itself up to you. Cave is spewing out his thoughts onto the page and, if you keep an open mind, you can marry them to your own to create a peculiar and rewarding reading experience. Approached with an open mind, it will evoke a response.

Addressing the book's many themes (life, longing, memory, leaps of faith, inspiration and influence, self-doubt, isolation in a world full of people) would require a review longer and more detailed than I intend this one to be, but the whole 'X meets Y' conceit does allow one some useful points by which to navigate. It is a chronicle of Nick Cave's tour of North America (Planes, Trains and Automobiles) with his band The Bad Seeds (Cocksucker Blues), combined with diversions into the meaning of life and human endeavour (The Wasteland; The Book of Psalms), and with occasional gothic (Nosferatu) and vulgar (PornHub) stylings. It permeates throughout with Cave's earnest longing to return home to his wife (The Odyssey), a longing which is tempered only when she finally picks up the damn phone.

The book's ambition will make it an interesting read for anyone attracted by the more challenging and experimental fringes of art and literature. Nick Cave has always been an artist in touch with his Muse and, more remarkably, is one uncommonly willing and able to articulate his relationship with her. (I think of a lot of Cave's work as like a one-on-one therapy session with the Muse as the psychiatrist – much like one such scene in his pseudo-documentary 20,000 Days on Earth.) This articulation has, in the past, been direct (Google his impressive lecture on 'The Secret Life of the Love Song') or indirect (see the afore-mentioned 20,000 Days on Earth, an excellent exploration of his artistic process). The Sick Bag Song is certainly more indirect, but no less revealing for being so.

The Sick Bag Song was also a unique experience for me because I read it whilst listening to Cave's own audiobook reading (the first time I have ever done so with a book). I found this to be excellent, which should come as no surprise considering Cave has made a living out of transmuting words into spoken (rather, sung) lyrics. Had I read the book mute, it would have been a four-star experience. Having Cave's voice as a companion throughout allowed me to experience it at the pace and with the interpretation that its author intended, and made The Sick Bag Song a five-star experience.

It is, I admit, a hard sell. Its title is not the most appealing, and the 'sick bag' riffs are occasionally overdone. It is difficult to get to the book's essence (hence my reliance on the 'X meets Y' stuff), though I confess it is nice to read a book which manages to be both approachable and challenging at the same time. Fans of Nick Cave's music will enjoy his lyricism, which is fully evident here, and any misgivings I had about the book's apparent pretentiousness were disarmed by the author's self-conscious humour. This is a writer who is confronting his vanity whilst at the same time indulging in it. It is a tightrope that, remarkably, he walks with considerable poise. ( )