How The Red Hand Files have fundamentally changed Nick Cave
If Nick Cave from back in the day met the Nick Cave of today, the wild punk meeting the wise sage, his younger self would be both baffled and blown away. No one would have guessed that the man who was once part of a group deemed the ‘most violent band in the world’ would become a kind of agony aunt to the masses as his newsletter, which began as a forum to ask Cave questions about his work, became more of a group therapy column as he responds to the various dilemmas, crises and outpourings from his fans. But as he’s opened up, week upon week, it seems that his newsletter has been transformational. As Cave himself said, “The Red Hand Files have changed me hugely, for better or worse, I don’t know.”
The Red Hand Files started in 2018, and the idea was simple. The website has a question box for fans to send their queries. They go straight to Cave, as he makes clear on the site: “The Red Hand Files has no moderator, and it is not monetized, and I am the only one who has access to the questions that sit patiently waiting to be answered.”
It might be expected that the questions would all be about Cave as an artist, wanting to know about his process, the inspiration behind certain songs or even his personal life. Plenty of the entries are that, in fact, as he’s peeled back the veil on everything from songs, rehearsals and past relationships. But quickly, the newsletter became bigger than him. Or really, it felt somehow separate from him. Quickly, people weren’t asking questions about Cave but were simply asking Cave their own questions, sharing their own personal stories or wonderments and merely wanting the musician to share his thoughts, advice, experiences or perspective. People send him pieces of art, songs from other artists, poems to read, scriptures to contemplate and beyond. People entrust Cave with incredibly vulnerable information about their lives as, over time, The Red Hand Files turned the old punk into a compassionate sounding board or even a therapist as they ask for his wisdom on grief, love, heartbreak, life’s purpose, creativity and beyond.
“It’s a very strange thing what’s happened with The Red Hand Files in particular,” Cave said at a Q&A event where even a discussion of his latest album, Wild God, found its way onto the topic. While fans might have gotten into his music first or his writing, his newsletter has become a unique fixture of his career, keeping him present in the lives of his followers. “They have become a sort of central pin in my life in a way that everything else revolves around because it’s week after week, these fucking questions come in and I write these letters,” he said.
“You can’t do that without it changing you fundamentally,” he admitted. The files have changed him because they changed his life. It feels like they changed the public perception of Cave. Suddenly, as he let people into his inner world through these letters, he was no longer a scary, unapproachable punk. Just as his music too was becoming more emotive and more vulnerable, changed by the impact of the loss of his son and the way the shattering of his personal life became public knowledge, the decision to start this project and engage with his fans more felt like an active and purposeful move to open up to the world. In turn, the world has opened to Cave as the files have led to a series of beautiful interactions both online and offline.
“It’s placed me in a strange position. It’s weird. I go out, and people come to me for advice all the time,” he said, recounting times when strangers have approached him to reveal they’ve just suffered heartbreak or asking his advice on handling grief or something. In the archives of the files, there is no end of questions like that as Cave attempts to respond to tales of devastating losses or tries to compassionately talk fans off the ledge of various letdowns, crises of faith or existential spirals about the point of it all.
“The Red Hand Files are really difficult to write in the sense that they require me to work out a compassionate way to approach this person’s particular question,” he explained of the exercise of the project, “This doesn’t actually come naturally to me, so it’s become this mad project that’s sort of weirdly taken over my life.”
But despite the scale and difficulty of the undertaking, the moment of beauty and connection make it worth it. In each email, there is a palpable feeling of gratitude from Cave as he’s is regularly and clearly deeply moved by the messages he receives. In one instance, especially, a question from a fan affected him so deeply that it stuck with him. In 2018, back at the start of the files, a woman called Cynthia wrote in:
“I have experienced the death of my father, my sister and my first love in the past few years and feel that I have some communication with them, mostly through dreams. They are helping me. Are you and Susie feeling that your son Arthur is with you and communicating in some way?”
As Cave wrote his response, he was struck by the complexity with which he now thought about grief. He said of the task, “Letters like Cynthia’s are so important and have helped bring me and many others back to the world.” He later recorded his response on vinyl, which he read alongside music composed by himself and Warren Ellis. In this way, The Red Hand Files have not only become a cornerstone of Cave’s career as a weekly task to do but clearly feed into everything else, serving as a deeply special and inspirational catalyst to his compassion and creativity.
“I’ve looked into the souls of my fans I would say,” he said as the Red Hand Files have created a connection between Cave and his followers that no past version of himself would ever have expected.
