Read Write [Hand] is an excellent contribution to the steadily growing wealth of what might yet come to be known as “Cave Studies”. While it firmly acknowledges its intention to bridge the gap between academic writing and journalism, it also manages to take in literature, poetry, visual art and the sonic experience all in one leap. In this sense Kinchin-Smith has collated a truly inter-sensory experience that unpicks many of the inter-related strands that make up Nick Cave’s work.
The articles, ranging from appreciations of Cave’s cinematic aesthetic, his relationship to folk balladry and hard-boiled detective fiction, the articulation of madness and desire in his music videos, his status as an “English” artist, and many more besides, flow and conjoin with a wealth of beautiful illustrations and evocative poetry. Add to this the mixtapes designed to be listened to alongside the writing and one gets a truly immersive experience that not only comments clearly and authoritatively on Nick Cave’s oeuvre, but indeed adds to the Cave canon itself. This is an exceptional anthology, a beautiful piece of art, a serious account of one man’s life work and a great example of the possibilities of new media in the 21st Century.
– Dr Nathan Wiseman-Trowse, University of Northampton, UK
It’s hard not to get too excited about this text because I am. Read Write [Hand] is a blast of fresh intellectual air, both for its innovation with the delivery of material and for the astute exegesis of Nick Cave’s work. The multifarious features of this text (pictures, poems, musical mixtapes, videos, critical interpretations) engage with and capture the ethos of Cave’s imaginative territory. Innovation permeates the text to augment how Cave’s work engages with the maelstrom of contemporary society. I thoroughly enjoyed the experience it presented.
– Dr Paul Lumsden, Grant MacEwan University, USA
…While the project is designedly aimed at a particular audience, one of its strengths is that it also helps address reasons for the traditionally divisive nature of Cave’s work. Despite its rather embarrassingly “Dad-joke” title, Read Write [Hand] is, additionally, an important text, post-Harry Potter VIII, in that it posits the timely question of whether Cave’s reign as the apotheosis of the alternative rock star is over.
Read Write [Hand] is an exciting publishing venture, not only because it makes thoughtful reflection on the meaning of Cave’s oeuvre available to the interested public at a tiny cost, but also because it makes use of new technology to provide a multimedia experience for the reader. Considering that Cave himself long since stormed the often artificially imposed boundaries of music to break into the realms of film, poetry, literature and art, there are few artists for whom this kind of approach could be more apposite. There is also a neat synchronicity in the fact that contributors to the volume similarly cover the spectrum of those likely to be professionally interested in Cave: academics, bloggers, journalists, musicians, students, teachers, visual artists and writers…the text is no doubt in the advance party for much publishing on music to come.
– Dr Karen Welberry, co-editor of Cultural Seeds: Essays on the Work of Nick Cave (Ashgate, 2009)
Read Write [Hand]: A multi-disciplinary Nick Cave reader is a provocative new e-collection of illustrated essays, accompanied by illustrative online mixtapes, which interrogates Nick Cave’s literary undertones and emphases, false-starts and fixations, achievements and overall credentials. Taking as its starting-point the notion that Cave’s work – as both songwriter and Writer – represents an extraordinarily rich nub of musical-literary intersection, this unique volume considers, amongst other things:
- Cave’s formative years;
- Cave’s bible;
- the cinematic Cave;
- Cave in Berlin;
- Cave and the ballad tradition;
- the hard-boiled Cave;
- Cave and poetic scrutiny;
- Cave’s video narratives;
- Cave as Englishman.
Taking in academia and journalism, polemic and poetry, not to mention photography, stop-motion animation, graphic art and collage, Read Write [Hand] represents an attempt to explore Nick Cave’s interdisciplinarity via its own multidisciplinarity. Utilising eBook functionality, as well as Spotify, YouTube and Silkworm Ink’s stunning new website, it features essays by Robert Brokenmouth and Prof. Nick Groom, poetry by Roddy Lumsden and John Clegg, cover artwork by Steve Wacksman and a new version of Cave’s ‘Bring It On’ by Cypress Grove & the Signifiers.
Sam Kinchin-Smith is Silkworms Ink’s music and non-fiction editor.