Notes and news:

• I have the CD already and I love it:
  Bleak Musician Nick Cave Turns Hand to Movies
  By REUTERS

  NEW YORK (Reuters) – Australian cult musician Nick Cave is best known for his violent lyrics and legions of black-clad fans but his latest incarnation is as screenwriter of a gritty Australian western.

  But when Cave sat down to write “The Proposition,” he never actually thought it would get made.

  Cave, who lives in England with his wife and 5-year-old twin sons, said he wrote the script in three weeks with nothing more to go on than the basic scenario of the film.

  “I was determined not to spend inordinate amounts of time on something I felt would fundamentally never get made,” Cave said in an interview in New York before the film was screened at the Sundance Film Festival this week.

  “I just sat down and banged it out in the spirit of those old Hollywood guys,” said Cave, who studied art before turning to music in the 1980s and becoming the archetypal Goth singer with his bands the Birthday Party and later the Bad Seeds.

  The film ultimately did get made after director John Hillcoat, a veteran maker of music videos for the likes of INXS and Depeche Mode as well as Cave, was able to piece together financing for the project.

  “The Proposition” stars Guy Pearce as outlaw Charlie Burns who is captured with his 14-year-old brother Mikey. He is told by the local police captain the only way to save Mikey from the gallows is to track down and kill their older brother Arthur, a psychotic renegade wanted for rape and murder.

  The movie opens in U.S. theaters in May.

  Though one of his most successful albums was the dark 1996 ”Murder Ballads” and his 1989 novel “And the Ass Saw the Angel” is replete with the gory violence that populates many of his songs, Cave says he doesn’t mean to be taken too seriously.

  “My songs certainly aren’t designed to depress people, they’re supposed to hopefully inspire people, make people feel better,” he said, sporting a mustache that adds a devilish note to his lanky figure dressed in a trademark black suit.

  “But I am a kind of middle-rung rock star and rock stars are supposed to be cartoon characters,” he added. “That’s what we’re supposed to be. All the good ones are.”

  BLOOD-AND-THUNDER AUSSIE WESTERN

  “The Proposition” also stars British actor Ray Winstone and Oscar nominee Emily Watson as the police chief and his wife, a loving and well-intentioned couple whose relationship is in stark contrast to their harsh surroundings.

  A grizzled John Hurt makes an appearance as a bounty-hunter in the fly-ridden desert of central Australia in the 1880s where English and Irish newcomers are trying to impose themselves on the Aboriginal population.

  In a positive review, Variety described the film as “the first genuine, blood-and-thunder Aussie Western” but said its appeal could be limited by its “unremittingly bleak tone and bouts of graphic violence.”

  Cave said a film about the colonizing of Australia would inevitably be a brutal story and the violence in the film while graphic — a man’s head is blown away in one scene — was used judiciously rather than piled up in scene after scene.

  “When the violence comes it’s very direct, short, sharp. It’s not ritualistic or done in slow motion or balletic or all those things that most violence is that you see these days,” he said, distancing it from the likes of Quentin Tarantino.

  “What makes the violence more shocking is that it’s up against a lot of tenderness and quietness and stillness and melancholy and there are these sudden outbursts of it,” he said. “The film doesn’t numb you with its violence.”

  Cave said he was planning to record a new album soon, though he has no idea how it will turn out until he sits down on the appointed day to start writing.

  “I kind of sit there with absolutely nothing in my head, just this kind of vacuum, and start piecing together tiny little threads of ideas,” he said, adding that it was much more difficult than writing a screenplay on a given theme.

  Cave has already written another film which he describes as an English seaside drama set in the southern town of Brighton, where he lives.

  “It’s pretty grim,” he said. “But there’s no violence in it. It’s a sort of British sex romp. Without much sex in it. And not a hell of a lot of romping either,” he added with a wry smile, dragging on a hand-rolled cigarette.

  Though he has dabbled in acting, most notably in the Wim Wenders’ 1987 film “Wings of Desire,” Cave says he’s realized acting is an “embarrassing” experience and not his forte.

  But he added: “There’s possibly a small role in this new film which I might be able to handle. It’s the devil. It’s a guy who thinks he’s the devil. I shouldn’t go too much into it, but he actually is the devil.”

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• Betty LaVette plays tonight