Self Deluded Cranium Dump

With mounting incredulity, I've realised that Nick Cave had been shortlisted for an award. An award he should not be nominated for. Okay, I'll play my hand. I'm a massive Bad Seeds fan and think that Mr Cave is a great Renaissance name for these bleak and troubled times. So, surely, I should be happy that he's possibly going to win some sort of fantastic trophy? The man already has a mantelpiece groaning under the sheer weight of fantastic concrete embodiments of backslapping, so what will one more achieve?

Well, it's for the Literary Award for Bad Sex, ain't it? Ah, says you, so you're being prissy over a hero of yours being villified. Well, no actually. I realise that his album "The Boatman's Call" was no more than a whiny example of emotional pornography over (admittedly rather lovely) tinkly music. Also, for someone who can turn his hand to (ok, get ready for this) music, soundtracks, novels, film scripts, poetry, festival curating, acting, photography, artwork and peerless duets, I can only expect that the man might stretch himself too thin and, with feet of clay, occasionally trip over.

Having said that, the offending sentence that has been shortlisted for the Bad Sex award is this one.

"Bunny lies on his back on the sofa. He is naked and his clothes sit in sad, little heaps on the living room floor. "

Neither spectacularly bad or, for an erudite and talented musician/novelist, spectacularly good either. However, it does the trick. It gets a message across to the reader quickly. It's certainly not along the plummeting depths of a Dan Brown "novel", memorably satirised by Stewart Lee. It's certainly nowhere near as bad as some of the other 2009 entries for the Bad Sex award either.

Also, if Mr Cave wins this award, he'll be in the same Trivial Pursuit question-and-answer set as Alan Titchmarsh. Ah, says you (again!), so you're being prissy that your highbrow liberal pretensions are being skewed by a concrete embodiment of Middle England, then? Actually, wrong again. I actually rather love the idea of Mr Titchmarsh. There he is, presenting the Chelsea Flower Roadshow, comfortable in the knowledge that he's a Snaily Fail favourite and content to occasionally fuck over that cozy image by churning out the odd bonkbuster. With friendly wink and smile to BBC camera to match, natch. However, check the passage (oo-er) that he was nominated for in the Bad Sex Award and tell me it's nowhere near the sappy screwy written entry by Mr Cave.

"She planted moist, hot kisses all over his body. Beads of sweat began to appear on Guy's forehead as he became more entangled in the lissom limbs of this human boa constrictor. For fully 15 minutes their mutual passion heightened, with groans, sighs and liquid noises."

I know I normally finish off every blog entry with a flourish and a winning argument. However, in this case, just compare and contrast the passages of the two authors (fnar), decide which is worse by using something called your eyesight, before concluding the possibility that Nick Cave should be nominated with a "FUCK THAT!".