The musician’s latest show, in which he sings, takes questions and talks about losing his son, left our writer astonished

‘Freewheeling adventures in intimacy where anything can happen.” So say the words on the seat as we wait for Nick Cave to come on stage and sit in it. Who could resist? The man is here to play songs but also to answer questions. “You can ask me anything,” he promises on his Red Hand Files website, which offers one-to-one correspondence with fans. “There will be no moderator. This will be between you and me. Let’s see what happens.”

The resulting tour is “a work in progress” that has grown from the blog, which had become a series of love letters, meditations on loss, and poetry. Cave is “acting on the intuition that something of value” can come from doing it live. He was worried about something he wrote: that social media undermines “both nuance and connectivity”. Here he is trying to deepen the connection, a word he returns to again and again. He comes on suited and booted, immaculate, the knowing elder statesman, the ex-junkie, the writer of murder ballads and the tenderest love songs, the storm-bringer who will somehow shelter us and reassure us that there can be, in that quaint old-fashioned way, “a dialogue”.