Nick Cave on love, art and the loss of his sons: ‘It’s against nature to bury your children’

Nick Cave has a touch of Dr Frankenstein about him – long, white lab coat, inscrutable smile, unnerving intensity.

He introduces me to his two assistants, the identical twins Liv and Dom Cave-Sutherland, who are helping to glaze his ceramics series, The Devil – A Life.

Cave, 66, is one of the world’s great singer-songwriters – from the howling post-punk of the Birthday Party and the Bad Seeds to the lugubrious lyricism of his love songs ( Into My Arms, Straight to You and a million others I adore) and the haunted grief of recent albums such as Skeleton Tree, Ghosteen and Carnage.

He is also a fine author (see his apocalyptic novel And the Ass Saw the Angel), thinker (his book of conversations with the Observer journalist Sean O’Hagan, Faith, Hope and Carnage), agony uncle (at his website, the Red Hand Files), screenwriter ( The Proposition) and now visual artist.

Cave became famous as one of the bad boys of rock – a ghoulish junkie with a feral live act, equally fixated by the Bible and Beelzebub.

It is hard to imagine the old Cave curating the Red Hand Files, a website in which he invites fans to ask questions about anything they want, many of them profoundly personal.