Nick Cave

I’ve been thinking a lot about creativity lately—how it so often finds its way into the humblest of places, the most unexpected corners of life. Take air sickness bags, for instance. On a plane, they exist for one purpose: to catch the discomfort of the moment, to hold what can’t be held inside. But for Nick Cave, they become something else entirely. They become a canvas. A small, ephemeral space for thoughts, musings, fragments of self. It’s the kind of quiet transformation that feels both startling and inevitable from an artist like him.

I first encountered his Sick Bags at an exhibition in Montreal, and they stayed with me—not just for their wit and intimacy, but for what they said about the creative impulse itself. How we make art not only because we can, but because we must, wherever we are, with whatever is at hand. These thoughts lingered long enough for me to seek out The Sick Bag Book, a collection of his in-flight scribbles. By luck, or maybe serendipity, a copy was already at home, a gift from a family member who shares my admiration for Cave.

And so, I found myself tracing the words of an artist who has spent decades excavating the human experience through music, through novels, and now through these curious, fragile pages. Known best as the frontman of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds,  his voice has always carried an ache—a kind of yearning to hold the rawness of life in his hands and make sense of it, or at least make something beautiful out of it. That same ache is alive in The Sick Bag Book, but it’s tempered by humor, by a certain self-awareness that softens the edges.

In this book, he reflects on procrastination, isolation, and the restless dance of creativity, but he does so with a lightness that feels like a revelation. He writes about the mundane with the same care he gives to the profound—like the ritual of dyeing his hair in hotel bathrooms. “I mix up dye in a bowl and colour my hair black so it shines like a dark raven’s wing on my tall forehead,” he says. And then, with his characteristic bite, he adds, “I move around to stop looking like Kim Jong-un and start looking more like Johnny Cash.” It’s such a small detail, and yet it says so much—about the ways we construct ourselves, about how even the ordinary can be a performance of sorts.

What I find remarkable about him isn’t just his ability to shift effortlessly between roles—musician, novelist, humorist—but the way he seems to see the world in layers, always searching for what lies beneath. His novels, too, reflect this: And the Ass Saw the Angel plunges into the gothic heart of a town consumed by religious fervor, while The Death of Bunny Munro reveals the absurdity and tragedy of a life lived on the surface. Both works are relentless in their pursuit of truth, even when that truth is uncomfortable, even when it hurts.

And perhaps that’s what draws me most to The Sick Bag Book. For all its wit and playfulness, it’s deeply human—a testament to how creativity can make something meaningful out of even the smallest, most disposable parts of our lives. It reminds me that art doesn’t always have to be grand to be profound. Sometimes, it’s enough to take the things we’re given, to pour ourselves into them, and to let them carry a piece of us out into the world.

Nick Cave reminds me that art is, at its heart, an act of compassion—toward ourselves, toward others, and toward the strange, fleeting moments that make up a life. Whether he’s dyeing his hair in harsh hotel light or writing on the backs of sick bags at 30,000 feet, he is, as ever, finding beauty in what others might overlook. And in doing so, he invites us to do the same.

Image: Personal Archive 2022