There is a tension in 21st-century life that may come close to defining how millions of us now live. Whenever we want to commune with other people, we need only reach for an object the size of a Twix and there they all are: scores of acquaintances and a veritable galaxy of complete strangers, offering insights and opinions on a huge range of subjects. But our online lives too often revolve around a mixture of anger, silliness and superficiality.

Where do we go and who can we find to meaningfully share our thoughts about life’s inescapable fundamentals: love, loss, death, fear, bereavement, regret? To properly do so might require real-world company, which can be an equally big ask. Think about all this, and you will sooner or later collide with something that predates the internet: the long and steady secularisation of life in the west and the vast social holes it has left. Once, for all their in-built hypocrisies – and worse – churches at least offered somewhere to ritualistically consider all of life’s most elemental aspects. Now, beyond communities with high levels of Christian observance, they are largely either empty or woefully underattended.

Which brings me to the singer-songwriter Nick Cave, who has just released a new album, Wild God. In November, he will be playing to huge audiences in a run of British arenas: a relatively new experience for him and his collaborators, which reflects deep changes in his life and his music. In 2015, he suffered the loss of his 15-year-old son Arthur; seven years later, another son, Jethro, died. And in the midst of an unimaginable level of grief, Cave has not only poured his thoughts and feelings into his art, but repeatedly spoken about........

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