Nick Cave Says Dark Novel “Bunny Munro” Inspired by Avril Lavigne and Kylie Minogue’s Hot Pants

September 17th, 2009 by Rob Sheffield Leave a reply »

Photo: James/WireImage

Nick Cave has always been one literary rock star. Even when he was howling “Release The Bats” with the Birthday Party, the goth-punk visionary was scribbling poems and one-act plays for fanzines. (Sample title: “The Stoning Of Ruby Von Monster.”) He’s taken inspiration from pulp novels, Faulkner, the Bible and Greek mythology. But for his new novel The Death of Bunny Munro, inspiration came in an unlikely form: Kylie Minogue. “There’s a particular video for ‘Spinning Around’ that captured the minds of all Britain for a year,” Cave explains. “Kylie’s hot pants were all the tabloids could talk about. I think she has to take a certain responsibility for this novel, by wearing those hot pants.”

The Death of Bunny Munro is awash in sex, violence and sleaze, a bleakly hilarious trip through the sordid life of a traveling salesman. Like most people you’d meet in a Nick Cave song, Bunny is a disturbing character. He cheats on his wife until she commits suicide, then he takes his nine-year-old son on the road, selling beauty products and trying to hustle the customers. He has depraved fantasies about Minogue as well as Avril Lavinge. “Bunny’s obsessed with sex,” Cave says. “Yet he’s not actually that good at it.”

Cave published his first novel, And The Ass Saw The Angel, in 1989, and wrote the screenplay for the 2005 film The Proposition. Says Cave, “Bunny Munro was initially a screenplay for John Hillcoat, who I wrote The Proposition for. He wanted it to be about a traveling salesmen, so I interviewed some of these guys, and they revealed this sort of underworld they live in: drug-taking, alcohol-drinking, womanizing.” The results turned into a novel. “Writing in songs, you only have four verses to tell a story or describe some action, so you use archetypes, like Stagger Lee or Orpheus. You c...

Article Source: Rolling Stone : Rock and Roll Daily

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