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

In the past nine years, the musician and artist has lost two sons – an experience he explores in a shocking, deeply personal new ceramics project. He discusses mercy, forgiveness, making and meaning

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.

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