Excerpt of #ISSUE 37 about „Smoking“…

„A couple of Bad Seeds tours ago, when I was trying to stop smoking, I limited myself to one cigarette a day. After the show, as soon as I came off stage, Jacek, my assistant, would escort me to a solitary chair in the back alley of the venue, where I would sit and roll a cigarette. With immense anticipation, I would light that little white stick of joy and inhale. There, in the Zen-like supremacy of the moment, on the road and adrift in this world, the nicotine would enter my bloodstream and with a blissful rush of pure meaning God would declare Himself to me – just as He did to you, Dee, on your balcony, at 21.49, on that rainy evening in Rosario, Argentina. That five minute interlude, puffing on a cigarette, in the deranged chaos of our lives – you on your balcony and me in some alley in some foreign city – was, to paraphrase Leonard Cohen, the crack where the light came in.“