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nick cave’s notebooks
As a diehard Nick Cave fan, Buchanan found particular delight in examining his handwritten journals from his Berlin years, 1982-88, held in ”flat grey archival boxes” at Melbourne’s Arts Centre. ”Performing arts material is notoriously ephemeral and rarely survives the rigours of the road,” Buchanan explains. But Cave, who began his first novel while living in Berlin, was always serious about recording his thoughts and creative process.
”He had a period around the time of The Boatman’s Call where he switched to computer,” Buchanan says. ”But he then rejected the computer as a way of writing his songs, poems and screenplays because he felt it was too impersonal.
”His notebooks are fascinating items in themselves. There might be a sketch for his screenplay of The Proposition followed by a reminder that one of his children needs to be vaccinated with the address of where he has to take her. The creative and the personal is intertwined.”
Buchanan also relished discovering a fragment of a lyric from an unidentified song Cave had begun to write in 1991: ”Look, this cup of mine is empty/Seems I’ve misplaced my desires/Seems I’m sweeping up the ashes/Of all my former fires.”
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