20,000 Days on Earth Page #7

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and kind of written into. I don't know.

Um...I don't know.

It's just sh*t, isn't it?

But important sh*t...for me, at the time.

I'll tell you an amazing thing

that happened with that room.

I used to leave the door open

and...and I was on the second floor,

and there was this guy called Chris,

he lived on the top floor,

and one day I was writing away at the desk

and...and sort of looked up

and he's standing,

and I could see he was kind of

fascinated by what was on the walls

and he said, "Do you wanna

come up to my room

"and have a look what

I've got upstairs?" Right?

And I said, "Yeah, all right."

And so we went up to his, um...

to this little flat he had up the top

and he opened it up,

we went into the living room,

and everywhere there was,

er...nativity stuff from Christmas.

He would make a star and he would

cut it out of fluorescent cardboard,

and then he would cut

another little tiny one out of that

and then another tiny one out of that.

It must have taken an hour or something

to make one of these tiny little...

these little stars,

and there were f***ing thousands of them

all over the wall,

and I'm like, "F***, man,

this is unbelievable.

"This is like the most beautiful thing,

er...I can imagine."

And he had all these

sort of glass-topped tables

and he kind of said, "Check this out,"

like that, and I'm like, "Mm."

And he turns off the main lights

and then shines these other ones

that come up from the floor

and they cast light

all up through the tables,

er...which have

these pictures of Jesus

- and baby Jesus and all that.

- Yeah.

So, suddenly these pictures

of Jesus disappear

and then it's all just these kind of

page three girls all kind of going...

- Wow, yeah.

- Kind of soft porn,

kind of Playboy stuff, which had

obviously attracted him when he...

- KIRK:
Yeah.

- ...looked in my room,

and suddenly this whole room

had changed into this thing,

and it was the most incredible

kind of moving sort of thing

- that this lonely guy had...

- Yeah.

...had been working on for...

for years and years, you know...

- Yeah.

- ...it must have taken him to do this,

and this sort of stuff that I have here

- pales in significance...

- Yeah.

...to the kind of monomania

of this incredible room.

It really stayed with me, that kind

of power to transform yourself...

Yeah.

...by what you can do

with the imagination.

Yeah.

Anyway, I always remember that guy.

(SYNTHESISER PLAYS)

- NICK:
Er...Woz?

- WARREN:
Yeah?

You're starting it off

with the, er...backward fourth, right?

- Yeah.

- Like am I doing that...

- # I was wrong... #

- Yeah, you are doing that.

When...when do you come in?

When does Marty come in?

WARREN:
After your little thing

and it goes...

(SYNTHESISER PLAYS)

# I was riding, I was riding

# Over the hills

# Yeah

# The sun, the sun, the sun

# It was rising up over the hills

# Yeah

# I got a feeling I just can't shake

# I got a feeling

# It just won't go away

# You've gotta just

# Keep on pushing

# Push the sky away

# Some people say

that it's just rock'n'roll

# Oh, but it gets you

right down to your soul

# You've gotta just keep on pushing

# Keep on pushing

# Push the sky away

# You've gotta just keep on pushing

# Keep on pushing

# Push the sky away... #

(MUSIC STOPS)

KIRK:
One of the things we

wanted to find out more about

was the weather diaries.

Well, basically, this is

a daily inventory of the weather,

and what really happened was that

I was an Australian living in England...

- KIRK:
Yeah.

- ...and was becoming increasingly upset

by the relentless miserable weather

that...that, you know...

that...that England has.

As a way of kind of taking control

of that in some way...

...or turning it to my advantage,

I decided to write about it,

and because bad weather is

much more interesting to write about

- than good weather...

- KIRK:
Yeah.

...I was quite happy

when I would wake up

and it was a miserable, stormy...

- KIRK:
Yeah.

- ...cold, windy day.

NICK:
The entries sort of grew

into other things as well,

and Susie was heavily pregnant

at the time, with the twins.

So, she features in it a lot.

There's a sequence where you see

two men in a van very briefly,

and you say you forgot to write

about them until five days later.

But you think about them all the time

and you question yourself in here

as to whether it's because

you're thinking about twins.

NICK:
Ah, well, you know, on one level,

I'm a very practical kind of person

about the way I go about certain things.

But, er...there's another side that's very

superstitious, and I can tend towards

seeing sort of things in things,

especially if the basic day,

which...which this is,

is starting to be kind of churned

in the mill of the imagination,

and that's what's happening

with, er...the weather.

The weather is becoming not real,

it's becoming fictitious

because I'm writing about it.

- The weather is becoming a lie...

- KIRK:
OK.

...and what's going on is...

My day-to-day life is becoming a lie,

because it's...it's becoming

an imaginative exercise,

and I think on some level I was

very frightened about having the twins.

You know, I think that I was,

er...scared out of my wits.

And then it stops in June 2000

and restarts in August 2001.

- NICK:
Right.

- Do you know why there's...

- NICK:
No.

- ...a gap?

I don't know.

Maybe because we had the babies.

KIRK:
It's a beautiful last line

to end on.

"The sky out of my window

has gone real blue now."

NICK:
The sky in Brighton

is unlike anything I've ever seen.

Living by the sea,

looking out my windows,

I feel like I'm part

of the weather itself.

Sometimes the sky is so blue

and the reflection of the sea so dazzling

you can't even look at it,

and other times, great black

thunderheads roll across the ocean

and you feel like

you're inside the storm itself.

What I fear most is nature.

Now that it's sent its weather

to exact revenge,

we're all in for it now.

Soon the weather

is gonna put on a real show.

Funnily enough, the more I write about

the weather, the worse it seems to get

and the more interesting it becomes

and the more it moulds itself

to the narrative I have set for it.

You know, I can control

the weather with my moods.

I just can't control my moods is all.

That's me and Kylie.

I'm wearing shorts there.

JANINE:
What happened with Kylie, Nick?

I'd just written this song,

Where The Wild Roses Grow,

and wanted her to sing on it

and we were just trying

to find out how to get to Kylie

and she had management

that was very protective of her

and protective of her image...

- JANINE:
Yeah.

- ...and all of that sort of thing.

But she happened to be going out

with Michael Hutchence.

So...we managed to get hold of Michael

and she was sitting next to him

when...when we rang.

We said, "Can you ask Kylie

if she'll come in and sing a song for us?

"We have this song."

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