And the 20,000 Days on Earth star wants you to submit your banal everyday crap
Remember your first ever gig ticket? The poster that you ripped out from your favourite magazine and stuck on your wall as a kid? The club flyer for the night where you met all your best friends? You know, all the detritus you've accumulated over the course of a human life, now collecting dust somewhere in a shoebox? Turns out there's one person who will appreciate the mundane crap that nevertheless means everything to you: Nick Cave.
In conjunction with the release of his new film, 20,000 Days on Earth, the eternally black-haired rock'n'roll god has opened the Museum of Important Shit: a virtual, online-only museum dedicated to "humble signifiers of huge significance". Anybody can submit their item and its story for inclusion, which will then be curated by Cave and directors Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard into digital exhibitions.
"I've been a great collector of stuff from the start, you know, as a child, with my marbles and bits of string in my pocket," Cave explained. "To this day, I keep the writing and photographs and the random ephemera, that over time, unexpectedly, collects meaning and significance... That stuff can unexpectedly reduce you to tears, because unexpected memory has that capacity."
"We all do it, I suppose, collect stuff, we all have our totems and touchstones that anchor us to our past. Stupid shit, in a way, but important shit."
Forsyth and Pollard devised the idea with Cave when the singer told them a story on set about meeting Nina Simone with his friend and bandmate Warren Ellis.
"Simone had been a nightmare backstage at one of her final gigs," the directors said. "But when she walked on and sat down, she took the gum from her mouth and stuck it on the piano, and... transformed." Cave and Ellis were floored by the onstage metamorphosis, and Ellis peeled the wadded-up gum off the keyboard and wrapped it in a white towel for safekeeping. As Cave puts it: "stupid shit but important shit".
Cave himself has submitted a prayer card of a Christian saint (with some of his own hair stuck to it, because why not) and a Kylie Minogue bag he bought while off his face in Manchester. That's not even the weirdest things that have been added to the museum so far – somebody's submitted an umbilical cord. So if you want to contribute to a lovingly curated collection of human ephemera, head here to the Museum of Important Shit.
Watch the trailer for 20,000 Days on Earth below: