Nick Cave in a scene from the film 20,000 Days on Earth. Cave disparaged the town where he lived until the age of 13 (when he was expelled from the local high school) at the New York debut of a film about him, 20,000 Days on Earth. "[Wangaratta] definitely had a huge impact on the kind of environments in my songs," Cave said.



"The idea of a river and open space and a small town... this invariably comes from living in that horrible town. It was a difficult place to grow up, there, because it had a very robust police force and they kind of made everyone's life f---ing misery." Mr McPhie, who has lived in Wangaratta since 1996, said Wangaratta was a nice town which has progressed a lot in the past few decades. "I think he's living in the caveman times," he said. "It's central to Melbourne, the snowfields and the Murray River... It's a great town and people say it's the ultimate in livability."

Mr McPhie said Mr Cave needs to come back to Wangaratta to see how great the town is now. "If he left in 1980 he has no idea what he's talking about." Cave, speaking to a sold-out theatre off New York's Times Square, said his Australian origins hurt his initial reception in London and that he found freedom to develop as an artist when the band moved to West Berlin. The British press "didn't understand at the time, way back then, that an Australian band could play music that was even remotely original. They figured that we spent a lot of time with the indigenous population," he said. Despite the religious overtones of much of his work, Cave said in the film that he had a "weird relationship with the idea of God."

"Within my songwriting, well, some kind of being like that exists. Someone's taking score, let's say," he is shown telling a therapist. "In the real world, I don't believe in such a thing. When I had a real interest in religion was when I was taking a lot of drugs." The film defies narrative styles, starting by showing Cave on a seemingly banal 20,000th day of his life - when he was between 54 and 55 years old. (He turned 57 on Monday.) Cave is seen driving his Jaguar through Brighton, England, where he now lives with his wife, model Susie Bick. He speaks, as if a taxi driver, to backseat passenger Kylie Minogue - a fellow Australian with whom he recorded the hit Where The Wild Roses Grow - and she appreciates Cave's fear of being forgotten.

The film - which premiered at the Sundance and Berlin festivals - shows Cave sharing pizza with his twin sons while watching a violent movie and lunching over eel with longtime collaborator Warren Ellis. In the film, Ellis conducts French schoolchildren as they sing the operatic title track of the band's latest album, Push The Sky Away. Cave - whose second novel, The Death of Bunny Munro and many songs are dripping with sex - dryly tells his therapist about his first sexual experience and how his father read to him from Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. He describes meeting Bick as the culmination of his life's "never-ending drip-feed of erotic data." Iain Forsyth, the film's co-director with Jane Pollard, said they deliberately sought to avoid music documentaries' frequent "obsession with trying to strip away the man to reveal the real character - the real 'man behind the rock star.'"

"The mythology is as much a part of the story as anything else. In fact, it is the story," Forsyth said. with AFP