Cave 'inspired by Nabokov, Amis, Roeg'

Nick Cave has revealed the literary influences on his second novel The Death Of Bunny Munro.

The musician and writer told thelondonpaper that the book was initially planned as a screenplay after director John Hillcoat suggested he write another film after their 2005 collaboration The Proposition.

Cave said: "I was influenced by literary stylists like Vladimir Nabokov and Martin Amis. It's not particularly fashionable, but I love that heady, slightly hallucinatory style of writing, where no-one just gets up from the table.

"The Nicolas Roeg film Walkabout also inspired me. It starts off with a traumatic incident involving a father and two children walking across the Australian outback. For some obscure reason that had a huge impact on me."

He added: "I wrote it in six weeks. I wrote it on the road on tour with the Bad Seeds. It was very different from my first novel And the Ass Saw The Angel. That took three years and was quite a destructive exercise. This was enjoyable and relatively easy.

"I based the form of the novel on the Gospel of Mark, in the sense that it's not really interested in the life of Christ, but rockets forward breathlessly to get to his death."

The Death Of Bunny Munro is available now in hardback, as an iPhone application and as an audiobook with a soundtrack written by Cave with Warren Ellis.