Introduction

Nick Cave's The Red Hand Files are weekly email letter responses to questions that he has received from fans. The emails are laid out on what resembles cream-coloured watermarked paper, while the chosen Cambria font looks like it has been written on a typewriter by Cave's fingers and hands. The letters generally contain a central image, either a photograph or painting, that pictorially, if abstractly, anchors the questions and responses. There is a material, embodied intimacy to not only the way the letters appear, like they are scented analogue exchanges in a dematerialized digital world, but in their imagined two-wayness, as if fan and Cave are privately writing to one another.

The questions and responses ignite the flames of closeness. Topics range from religion, death, love, loss, and longing to the taste distinctions that one might make over art, literature, music, and poetry. Cave responds personally, poetically, drawing on his own life experiences to answer biographical, metaphysical, and existential questions. He signs the letter ‘with love’, ‘love’, or ‘much love, Nick’, and a kiss, creating the sense that his response is not only authentic, written to and for ‘you’, but one drawn from the heart.

There is, of course, a long history of fan letters being written and of star and celebrity responses. The entertainment industries energized such exchanges, most notably through fan magazines, during the Hollywood studio system. In the contemporary celebrity marketplace the social media have become a series of connective zones where these star and fan exchanges increasingly occur.