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Like many people, I am a compulsive doodler. Some people doodle eyeballs or Eiffel Towers or swastikas or whatever, but I doodle naked women and have done so since I was eleven-years-old. In fact, I got into so much trouble for it at school that I had to take preventative measures by binding my right hand with rubber bands. This is how I learned to do pretty good drawings of naked women with my left hand. I prefer, but not always draw, back views - arse in the air, legs spread, with head averted or hidden in a helix of hair. I have no interest in drawing from 'life' because I don't like people being around when I draw, just as I don't like people being around when I write songs.

Nick Cave, 'Get It On' and '(I Don't Need You to) Set Me Free' 2007

Churchill has his black dogs and Kafka his white mice - enemies of creation taking animal form. Well, I get the Baboons. The Baboons occur with reasonable, but not unmanageable regularity. They are not exactly depression, rather a state of anti-inspiration and are often accompanied by the Hyenas - a cluster-fuck of dog things that sits in the back stalls of the psyche and makes inane, unhelpful and super-critical remarks.

The Baboons and Hyenas can, in time, be vanquished by a certain, secret 'trick of the mind'.

But the one you don't want to mess with is the Moose. The Moose doesn't come often (he is trapped in a stairwell with his ridiculous antlers), but when he does you can hear his low, hopeless bellowing reverberating around the house and my wife collecting up the children and going, 'Hush now boys, daddy's got the Moose...

Corin Johnson, The sculpture, 2007
I've been trying to get this off the ground for about twenty years. I think the idea sprung from the novel I was writing, And the Ass Saw the Angel (1989), which centres around a statue of an angel that is erected in the town square... I met the sculptor, Corin Johnson, who had worked on the Princess Di memorial at Althorp, and he was keen to actually make the thing - you know, a statue of me on a horse... The whole idea, really, was to turn up in Warracknabeal with this statue - a wonderful gift, an act of sublime generosity - and try and leave it there; you know, give something back to the community into which I was born. And if they wanted it, well good; and if they didn't, well fuck them. I'd drive it into the desert and dump it there.

Nick Cave, 'O'Malley's Bar, c. 1996
Well, you know, 'O'Malley's Bar' was written over many months, presenting itself in stages, verses piling up, as they do, endlessly. But the initial idea and preliminary writing was done lying on my back, in my suit, on a banana lounge, around the hotel pool in one of those faceless German cities - maybe Stuttgart or Essen. It was incredibly hot, I remember, and early in the morning and I had a hangover you would not believe, and nearby there was a group of German holiday-makers who were having a good time, or something, so I began, one by one, to describe them (in verse), then name them, and finally and systematically, execute them, you know, on the page. Wonderful things, hangovers - a great creative tool (any artist will tell you), sadly denied to me these days.

Tony Clark, Sections from Clark's Myriorama, 1997
I asked Tony Clark to come up with a landscape for the cover of the Best Of album that reflected the music of The Bad Seeds, and three days later Tony brought to my home an extraordinary triptych of six crippled olive trees blasted by a bloody red light. It was the Garden of Gethsemane as seen through the conflagrating prism of the Australian outback. A beautiful, beautiful painting. A seminal influence over a number of young Melburnians, Tony continues to work closely with the band...

This article appears in excerpted form. You can read the entire article and view the images discussed in Art & Australia's Spring 2008 issue.