20,000 Days on Earth Page #6

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# Can you feel my heartbeat?

# Can you feel my heartbeat?

# Can you feel my heartbeat?

# Mama ate the pygmy

# The pygmy ate the monkey

# The monkey's got a gift, man

# And he's sending it out to you

# A little bit of smallpox

# A little bit of flu

Here come the missionary

# He's saving them savages

with the Higgs boson blues

# Yeah

# But can you feel my heartbeat?

# Yeah, can you feel my heartbeat?

# Can you feel my heartbeat?

# Yeah, I'm driving my car

# I wanna feel your heartbeat

# I kiss your lips

# I kiss your lips

# Feel you deep inside

# Waiting for me in Geneva... #

Ssh!

# Waiting in Geneva

# Waiting for me in Geneva... #

OK.

Ssh!

# Ah, let the damn day break

# Rainy days always make me sad... #

Ssh!

# Miley Cyrus floats in a swimming pool

in Toluca Lake

# And you're the best girl I ever had

# I can't remember anything at all. #

NICK:
Who knows their own story?

Certainly, it makes no sense

when we are living in the midst of it.

It's all just clamour and confusion.

It only becomes a story

when we tell it and retell it.

Our small precious recollections

that we speak again and again

to ourselves or to others.

First, creating the narrative of our lives

and then keeping the story

from dissolving into darkness.

- Hello?

- JANINE:
We're over here.

Hi. What are we doing?

Do you mind if we go through some

of the photos your mother just sent us?

- Hey, are you in this picture?

- Where are you?

- We...we can't actually identify you.

- Well...

- Can you...

- Yeah, I can see me.

See that one with the ears,

singing their little heart out?

- JANINE:
What, this kid?

- NICK:
Yeah.

The one that's got "star"

written all over him.

(THEY LAUGH)

JANINE:
What else has Dawn sent over?

I'm that guy with the beard

and the dog collar.

JANINE:
Is that you there?

NICK:
Yeah. Gloomy, gloomy, gloomy.

(JANINE LAUGHS)

Yeah, I think that's from the high school

- where I lived in the country town...

- Right, so Wangaratta.

- Wangaratta High School, yeah...

- Northern Caulfield, yeah.

...and we had this barber

that my mother used to f***ing hate

and, er...we all used to have this...

get the same haircut.

He used to out everyone

in Wangaratta's hair the same.

He used to cut an angled fringe like that,

because he thought you'd flick it back.

But everyone just walked around

with these things, and my mother...

we used to come back and my mother

used to rage against this barber.

That's me as a...I don't know,

a teenager or something.

I was not really into sport

and stuff like that,

and there was a bunch of us that did art,

which basically became

The Boys Next Door.

Oh!

That's, um...Mick Harvey.

That's back when he had good hair,

and that's, um...

that's me in the middle there with them.

That's Tracy Pew.

Tracy was one of those kind of guys

that come out fully formed,

very much like Rowland Howard as well.

You know, they just

sort of appeared, complete.

But he was an amazing bass player,

that guy,

and really the heart and soul

of The Birthday Party.

There he is there.

That's Mick, Rowland.

That's a beautiful photograph, that one.

There's a great photograph of Tracy

being urinated on. Do you have that?

Yeah, we do have that somewhere, don't we?

OK, now, that is a concert

in Cologne in 1981

and I don't know if you can see,

but this guy here is a German person,

and he... That is Mick Harvey,

you can see that classic profile,

and he's...actually,

we're playing King Ink

- because he's playing, er...the drums.

- Snare drum.

He would play the snare drum in that song

and this man here is urinating

and you can see the stream of urine

kind of arcing gracefully down

into the, er...right-hand side

of that picture.

- Can you...can you show

the next picture? -Sure.

And there...there he is urinating.

There is the stream of urine,

and Tracy, noticing that

the German person is urinating

and moving towards the German person.

Can you...

Now Tracy is, er...deciding

to push this person away.

Mick is still playing away over here.

Next.

There you have Mick

still playing away there.

Rowland over there

oblivious to what's going on.

Tracy's stopped playing the bass

altogether and is now punching the guy

and the guy's flying backwards

off the stage.

Yeah, it says a lot about the kind of gigs

that we were doing

with The Birthday Party at that stage,

because we were billed

by some promoter as

the most violent live band in the world.

So, what that meant was

that every skinhead and biker

and general kind of lowlife

and, er...psychopath

came along to these concerts.

It seemed to us,

towards the end of The Birthday Party,

that it had very little to do

with the music any more,

and just people coming along to see

what would happen at that particular gig,

and, er...

we were kind of getting some sort

of joy out of disappointing everybody

by just basically playing

with our backs to the audience

and hunker down together and do these

shows towards...towards the very end.

My last will and testament.

OK, it seems like I wanted all my money,

which was nothing,

I would say, at that time...

(JANINE CHUCKLES)

...to go to the Nick Cave

Memorial Museum...

(LAUGHTER)

...a small but adequate room or rooms

that will serve

as the Nick Cave Memorial Museum.

Yeah, I was always a kind of...

ostentatious bastard.

- JANINE:
Do you remember writing it?

- No.

It was...'87 was a, er...

it was a difficult year to remember, '87.

Eighty-anything was difficult

to remember, to be honest.

You know, I shifted around continuously.

I never really had my own place

till quite late in the picture

and I would kind of wear out

my welcome wherever I was staying.

But I would always have a table or a desk

and kind of sweep it off

and stick it in a box.

I guess that's why

there is actually an archive.

That is my bedroom in Berlin

and this room

is just a kind of crawl space, actually,

cos you have to climb up a little ladder

to get into this thing.

You can't actually stand up in here.

So, it was just this wonderful

kind of womb-like space,

which had a mattress where I could sleep,

and this is where I was writing

And The Ass Saw The Angel.

I spent quite a lot of time

at the Berlin flea market,

which happened every Saturday morning,

and I got an incredible kind of collection

of, um...pornography

and religious art and icons in general,

and I came across this chocolate box...

...and opened it up, and inside the

chocolate box, wrapped in tissue paper,

were these three locks,

very long, of hair,

and they were, um...

from different heads, I think,

and that's actually it in the...hanging

there in the photograph there, right?

And hair like this has always been

something that I come

back to all the time

in songwriting, actually.

Do you know what this stuff here is?

Are these torn-out pages

or is this your handwriting?

I think they're ripped out of a book

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