Kirin J Callinan on the ketamine overdose and heartbreak that made his ‘most truthful’ new album

‘I’m a far more introspective person than the shameless extrovert I might have once been’: Kirin J Callinan. Photograph: Jessica Hromas/The Guardian

Kirin J Callinan might be cursed. It’s a Friday afternoon in January and the 38-year-old musician and longtime pop provocateur is lounging on a craggy outpost just off Bondi beach when a wave lurches upwards and arcs towards him with terrifying speed. He waits for the inevitable impact. Thud! We are drenched with salt and sand.

“I have a superstition,” he confesses a second later. “Whenever I go into the water or near the water, it seems to rise up. It feels like Poseidon is enraged, or salutes me – or it’s a warning.”