
I haven't said anything about all these brown boxes all over the place in
Nick Cave - The Exhibition. You open them and his voice comes flying out of them which are kind of like what is on the pink cards I've talked about before I've found them on
The Victorian Arts Centre's website, a few of them you can listen too:
http://assets.theartscentre.net.au/nickcave/exhibition.html and
http://assets.theartscentre.net.au/nickcave/play_doc.html is the
Documentary which goes with the The Exhibition too.
In a huge glass museum like table thing with Cave's old manual typewriter, which is if you want to know, an almost white maybe light grey
Olivetti Lettera 25. In the same glass thingy is the
Weather Diaries from 2001, a notebook of handwritten dictionary from around 1984 (which used for his first novel) opened on A for the words Anathema, Anchorite, Aneurism, Amuck, Anabolism, Anabranch, Anastomosis, Anabaptist.
The Penguin Dictionary Of Curious and Interesting Words from 1986, with gaffer tape down the spine. Notebooks called
The Sacred and Profane, one open on a page of
Sophia Loren with little plastic envelope of dark hair clippings. 1997 Notebook with
Louis Wain's painting
Singing, 1927 which is three cats, one playing the piano and two standing behind singing. So it's full of different times all mixed up with no reason really. A wood chair is pushed in to this table thingy with
Please Do Not Sit On taped to it so I think it's his chair, maybe.
Unfortunately his Computer is not here but the stories of it is on one of these pink cards. I know he had an
Apple Mac in early 2000's, the story of the computer: "Well, I got a computer in the late 90's and practically all of my note-making stopped. For some years I wrote my songs straight onto the computer, editing on the screen. This served me fine for a while, as I was attempting a more refined, simple, less chaotic form of song writing. But the down-side is that the whole journey to the final creation is lost and in many ways it is this stuff that is the heart and soul of the song. When I started working on the
Grinderman record, I decided that I would forgo the computer altogether and write my stuff either in notebooks or on the typewriter. The great thing about a manual typewriter is that it is so time-consuming to change a line or a verse, as you have to type the whole thing over again and can't simply 'delete', that one develops a renewed respect for the written word. The other thing is that you never really lose anything. One problem with the computer is that you can sit down in front of something you have written in a particularly self-loathing mood and start hitting delete left, right and centre and stuff is consigned undeservedly to oblivion just because you're having a bad hair day. So, I'm back with the notebooks now.
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds'
Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! was written by hand, on paper and this album is absolute haemorrhaging of words a consequence -no delete button- and um, all is well in the garden."
A set of draws painted brown with photos of his family above, Nick with his oldest (is very young in the photo) son
Luke,
Jethro as the fashion model, his wife Susie with their twins
Arthur and Earl, on the other wall is a huge black and white photo of
Susie Bick with 'The story of Susie' on a pink card. In these draws are all sorts of stuff like his
Kylie Minogue bag with 'The story of the Kylie bag',
Marilyn Monroe collages, folios with pictures of Crucifixes with close-ups of feet and hands with what looks like blood or wine dropped on these photos. Photo albums of him with other singers he's met, like
Henry Rollins and
Iggy Pop. Even more notebooks, he's got so many notebooks it's unbelieveable really. At the very bottom of these draws are some photos from mid-70's of him watching
Chris Bailey from the front row of a
The Saints gig.
Grinderman notebooks opened on
No Pussy Blues and
Depth Charge Ethel lyrics and another notebook open with lyrics for
Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! at the end of the exhibition just before a sign with a red hand pointing the way out with small little T.V.'s playing different footage. Cave has done some
Monkey drawings for the for the cover of the album but off course a photo was used. Some more of his drawings of
Naked Women or you could call them his
Pornography drawings on hotel letter writing paper, which was used single covers of
Get It On and
(I Don't Need You To) Set Me Free 7" singles. Also drawings of
Machine Guns seems to be on some of these pages too. In the notebook for the lyrics for
No Pussy Blues there is the line "I played her that song about a big brass bed (
Bob Dylan's
Lay Lady Lay), I played her
Barry White instead" which didn't make it to the final track.
Unfortunately his moustache which “My wife shaved it off while I was sleeping” he amused the audience with the story behind his lost mustache last weekend has not been sent on to this exhibition. His mustache first appeared on his face in 2005 with the motorbike handle bars style kind-off like in the above photo.
Grinderman was promoted with "hairy" being one of the words with "dirty and old enough to know better", which was the image of the band with
Warren Ellis crazy beard,
Jim Sclavunos' goatie and even
Martyn P. Casey growing his hair long like a metal head or something. In the film
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford he sang the old traditional song
Jesse James with this mustache in full glory. He was a judge at the
World Beard and Moustache Championships 2007 with it in Brighton. A smaller or neater mustache appeared at the start of 2008 and joined Cave for
Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! and the tours of Europe, England, America and Australia early this year. So Nick Cave's mustache has been (for time being) put to rest at the very young age of four years old,
Rest In Peace: Nick Cave's Moustache 2005-2009. The photo below all clean shaved was taken early this week on Wednesday at B.F.I. in London. I'll be back soon with the last and final (part 6) next week.
