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Hardly any other musician is revered by his fan base in such a cultic way as the Australian songwriter Nick Cave.
His songs are mostly gloomy and characterized by a biblical gravity, but his relentless handling of topics such as grief, guilt and atonement seems to have a healing effect on his followers.
The singer values the closeness to his followers and has built an extraordinarily close bond with them over the years.
In addition to the usual cycle of album and tour, he keeps coming up with unconventional formats in order to enter into a direct exchange with theirs.
He gives solo concerts in medium-sized halls, where he sits at the edge of the stage and answers questions from the audience.
Cult object: necklace with Nick Cave amulet
Source: Morten Bentzon / Cave Things
On his website “The Red Hand Files” he answers selected letters about the background of his texts, but also about more general ideological questions.
When appearances in front of an audience were no longer possible for the time being, the artist, who lives in England, hosted an impressive streaming event in the huge Alexandra Palace in London, where he sat alone at the piano and reinterpreted some of the most beautiful pieces of his 40-year career.
The comforting message of the performance: We are all lonely together.
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Now Nick Cave has come up with a new way of addressing target groups, in the form of fan articles that go far beyond the classic merchandising offerings from t-shirts to hoodies to baseball caps, with which musicians normally add to their tour budget.
In his online shop called “Cave Things” he sells items that he designed himself and that reflect his artistic universe.
Printed with concise lines: pencils from the songwriter
Source: Morten Bentzon / Cave Things
This includes loving reproductions of original manuscripts and pencils that are printed with concise lines of songs, but also small lucky charms in the form of ghosts and self-painted prayer cards that could have come from the Victorian era.
"I'm essentially a songwriter," he explains in a statement on the website.
"But people who understand my stuff know it doesn't stop there." He adds, "Cave Things is a shop that sells playful, therapeutic, mysterious, subversive items that have their very own place."
Cave's designs often move in a gray area between cute and scary.
In addition to a milk can with a devil motif (sold out), the highlights in his range include the "Dread Tiles", a series of tiles that the musician paints with monkeys, ducklings or googly-eyed bats during the lockdown and with catchphrases such as "Dread" or "Despair" (despair) provided.
Lockdown art: Tile painting by Nick Cave from the "Dread Tiles" series
Source: Morten Bentzon / Cave Things
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They are intended to express the feeling of silent hopelessness he felt in times of quarantine, writes Nick Cave in an accompanying note.
A T-shirt with a caricature of his bare torso and the imprint “He's a ghost, he's a God, he's a man, he's a guru” shows that he is capable of self-irony despite all gravitas a god, he's a man, he's a guru.
Its fans will wear it with pride.
But the coffee cup with the label "Suck My Dick" (an invitation to fellatio) is more suitable for the home office than for the open-plan office.