RED RIGHT HAND by NICK CAVE and THE BAD SEEDS. Reflection by Rijn Collins.

Ballan, 2024

‘Snakes. Icelandic sagas. Feminist punk. Hieronymous Bosch.’

The interviewer had asked what fed my creativity. So many choices!

‘Gothic horror. Berlin.’

A song connected to that city came immediately to mind, one of my first Stereo Stories.

‘And Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.’

I was still learning the publicity game; what to share, when to hold back. At one literary festival, panel members were discussing their writing routines.

‘Oh, mine’s pretty mundane,’ I answered. ‘For my novel I sat under the open wings of a taxidermy snow goose and listened to the blues, often while my baby snake slept in my bra.’

I immediately recognised from aghast expressions that this was not, in fact, mundane. I don’t know how many potential readers I lost through that…or perhaps gained.

My catalogue of Stereo Stories speaks volumes about my creative inspiration. My first story was in 2014: the bruising punk of Babes in Toyland, and their role in helping me recover from agoraphobia. My second was Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, with ‘The Mercy Seat’ the soundtrack to my nine trips to Berlin.

In truth, there are many Nick Cave songs I could write about.

‘Up Jumped the Devil,’ which I painstakingly transcribed phonetically for a linguistic degree, hunched over the recording equipment of my musician boyfriend. It was the first time I’d ever written in a university assignment ‘Blacker than the chambers of a dead nun’s heart.’

Or ‘Breathless,’ the Cave song I walked down the aisle to in a red velvet dress, on my Winter Solstice wedding. Or ‘New Morning,’ the song I’ve selected for my funeral. Once a goth, always a goth, hey?

In a forest village in Finland on a month-long writing residency, I wandered into a bar with a strange vibe and staring men. They heard my accent and ushered me towards a laptop Choose something Australian, they urged. My fingers hovered, aware of the responsibility. Would they want Kylie? AC/DC? I almost panicked, and hit TISM.

But after a sip of cloudberry wine, I saw the perfect song, and pressed play on ‘Red Right Hand’.

‘Red Right Hand’ is the most well-known Nick Cave song. It’s been played in the X-Files and covered by Iggy Pop, PJ Harvey and Snoop Dog. It was the theme song to the Peaky Blinders series. It inspired a Tony Birch story. Cave himself says the song follows him around like a junkyard dog; it is iconic Bad Seeds.

The Finnish men loved it. Oddly enough though, I left with a different story that night. A man played melancholy guitar, the lyrics in Finnish. I recognised it…Kris Kristofferson! ‘Sunday Morning Coming Down’, a song of my childhood. This time I caught the plaintive regret and longing in the lyrics.

Eleven years; eighteen stories. Evacuating from a hurricane in New Orleans to Jackson, Mississippi, purely for the Johnny Cash song. Leonard Cohen’s ‘Undertow’ tells of falling in love with my husband, with salt mines and bird beaks. He drove us through a snowstorm in far northern Iceland with Etta James’ soothing heartbeat of ‘Crawlin’ King Snake’ keeping us calm. All of these I’ve had the privilege of performing with the amazing Stereo Stories band. Even my curveball of a Nordic punk song, Martina sang in beautiful Icelandic. I think I’ve even written the only anti-Stereo Story, of my incandescent loathing of a certain Van Morrison song.

Nick Cave and U-Bahns, Tom Waits and taxidermy, Sinead O’Connor and solidarity. There are so many more in me, and my notebook.

Music is emotion, nostalgia, hope. So is storytelling.

A song. A place. A time.

What’s your Stereo Story?

Stereo Story 864

Rijn and the Stereo Stories band presented this story at Write Around the Murray in Albury on 12 September 2025.

All of Rijn’s stories.

Photos courtesy of Write Around the Murray 2025.