Nick Cave: I used to get a lot of strange stuff, a lot of letters, extraordinary letters, but I don’t get that much anymore. There was a period when my music might have aggravated the darker side of people and they felt they had a kindred spirit in me, and either they have grown older or sorted themselves out or are focusing their obsessions onto some other poor bastard … There were these wonderful letters written by a girl called Barbie. They were certainly publishable. Very beautifully written and very frightening, very frightening. She was around all the time. She was talking about things that were going on with me that were kind of personal, so she was obviously hanging around. She would mention details of small gatherings, things that she could only have known about by witnessing them firsthand. I never found out who she was. She hated other women, she had this homicidal force. [The letters] were regular and very, very creepy and very exciting. They would come sometimes three times a week. How wonderful and handsome I was and how all the songs were about her and she understood that I had to use other names in the songs to keep up appearances—and then they would just explode: “If any of you bitches at Mute (Cave’s European record label) read this, I’ll fucking come around and kill you all.” Really great stuff. And then they just stopped. I don’t know what happened to Barbie, but I hope she’s OK.