Which is why 10th studio album The Boatman's Call (1997) stands alone. Far from being a collection of vivid tales conjured up to document Cave's lifelong affair with such fascinations, it is a spare and startlingly honest record of real-life emotional turmoil.
It marks the slow-dawning realisation that love alone does not sustain a relationship - a truth that Cave had been confronted with countless times, but had avoided in his eagerness to find salvation.
Cave spurns the tempestuous gothic rock that has carried him to this point, instead framing each song with the measured intimacy that piano, accordion, lightly brushed drums and acoustic instruments provide.
His voice is central, exposed as both a wonderfully rich poetic vehicle and a flawed, limited instrument. The overall vibe is calm, reflective and, at times, resigned.
There's no doubting that two figures dominate the landscape of The Boatman's Call: Viviane Carneiro, Cave's estranged lover and the mother of his son Luke, and Polly Jean Harvey, the English singer-songwriter with whom he had a brief affair in the mid-'90s.
But to seek to attach either woman, or any other, too directly to Cave's lyrics is to miss the opportunity to explore the joy, the pain, the clarity and the confusion that is universal to the rise and fall of relationships.
Songs such as Into My Arms, Lime-Tree Arbour, (Are You) The One That I've Been Waiting For, Where Do We Go But Nowhere?, Idiot Prayer and Far From Me are among Cave's finest.
The album is unflagging in its quality and, in his canon, is unparalleled in its beauty, suggesting that it is Cave himself who is the richest figure among his carnivalesque cast of characters.
