The Nick Cave connection involves queries and keyboard

It’s a vulnerable setting: just musical storyteller and a piano, a show that consists of taking questions and playing songs.

Nick Cave played songs from across his career. Picture: Daniel Boud

Nick Cave looked into the audience and answered another question about creativity and the business of writing songs. Then came a voice from the back of the Concert Hall. “You used to be addicted to heroin, right?”

One of the world’s most intriguing musical storytellers, Cave is touring Australia with his most intimate, revelatory show to date. It’s a vulnerable setting: just him and a piano, a show that consists of taking questions and playing songs. Very few artists could pull this off.

Cave calls it “an experiment in connection”, encouraging an honest, open dialogue with his fans. No subject was off-limits, so there he was, facing a 25-year-old asking for advice about staying clean. Cave recommended Narcotics Anonymous, and mentioned how Barry Humphries had identified the humour to be found in ­sobriety, the way “life opens up” in unexpected ways.

“It’s very difficult for me to tell you what to do, but you should try NA,” Cave said, before pausing to take stock of what was happening. “I really never would have thought that I would stand on a stage and say that.”

It was a full house at the Opera House on Tuesday night, with a handful of fans even sitting at ­tables on the stage, lending a salon atmosphere to the proceedings. Two years had passed since Cave was last seen in Sydney, when he gave an electrifying show across town with the Bad Seeds.

But this was different. There was no band, and no moderator. There was no plan, either. Cave had come to talk, and to sing, and to deal with whatever was thrown his way. His answers were both hilarious and profoundly serious.

He took questions about faith and mortality, his favourite songs and his collaborators, and the experience of working under the radar of an indifferent music industry. He expressed admiration for Brett Whiteley. He spoke about the addictive terror of live performance.

He also reflected on the possibilities for beauty after trauma — in particular, the death of his son in 2015. “The terrible truth of this question,” he said, “is that great beauty can actually come out of the most tragic of circumstances.”

Questions frequently centred on inspiration: specifically, where to find it and how to harness it. He opened up about the “great thrill of the creative process” but said: “I’m not so sure inspiration’s really got much to do with things for me. I don’t work when I’m inspired or not inspired. I just work.”

His answers were interspersed with songs from across his career, from Mermaids and The Mercy Seat to Into My Arms, West Country Girl and God is in the House. (The sound quality of the piano, though, has rarely sounded worse in this venue.) He also discussed his influences, including Leonard Cohen, and played Cohen’s Avalanche. “The big problem with songs is that their meaning is too clear,” he said. “The more things can abstract themselves, the more meaning they hold in it because they become kind of porous and allow ourselves into it and our imaginations into it.”

For a show such as this to really work, a lot depends on the audience. Diehard fans were everywhere, which meant plenty of rambling questions that went nowhere, and topics raised that already had been discussed. Early on, Cave agreed to sign the foot of a fan as well. The evening dragged past two hours, and there was a sense that more thoughtful questions could have led to a deeper engagement. But that, of course, is the nature of the experience.

This tour is also a physical extension of sorts to Cave’s new website, The Red Hand Files, on which he answers questions from fans around the world with disarming honesty and insight.

In Sydney, he explained that he had been humbled by the volume of correspondence he had received and the quality of interactions that had been taking place.

“I feel more and more,” he said, “that the exercise of life is really about community in some way and about connection, and I think this is what I’m trying to do with the Red Hand Files and to do here tonight.”

Conversations with Nick Cave. Concert Hall, Sydney Opera House, January 8. Gold Coast, tomorrow; Brisbane, Saturday; Melbourne, January 19; Adelaide, January 22; Perth, January 23.