Anyone who’s seen Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds in recent months will have noticed how much Cave seems to feed off interacting with his audience, not least in how he welcomes the crowd up onto the stage for the climax of the gig. Now they’ve taken this one further into an online space, with the launch of the Red Hand Files, a website where people can write in and ask the band questions, to which Nick Cave responds with eloquent answers that tbh are a lot more revealing than you sometimes get from interviews by a lot of people in our profession. There are insights into Cave’s relationship with Warren Ellis, a question about pets leads to thoughts on his relationship with the natural world ("My natural world is nature unspoilt, but with a kind of apocalyptic consciousness"), and his relationship with writing since the death of his son and the release of Skeleton Tree. "We all needed to draw ourselves back to a state of wonder," Cave writes; "My way was to write myself there". Someone also asks Cave if the brilliantly feral wrong rock & roll group Grinderman will reform – and gets an intriguing answer.
Apparently Cave and Ellis have discussed the idea. "We both thought the world needed Grinderman, considering its current emotional climate," Cave writes. "I personally felt there was no urgency, and that the older we got, the better Grinderman would be – the more deranged, the more priapic, and the more morally dubious. We both thought that Grinderman appeared to be a lot more popular now than when it existed, and we wondered whether that was simply the band passing into folklore, or whether the world had become, in the last years, more puritanical, less playful, and more hypersensitive, and that there were a lot of people out there, like you Marvin, who just wanted to listen to a band that fucked things up a bit." So nothing concrete, but it might happen. You can check out the Red Hand Files here, ask questions, and subscribe to the Bad Seeds’ responses.
