“Some people deal with death by ignoring it,” Joshua Homme says. “Denying its existence, daring it. Then there are others [who] drag their fingers along the edge. I’ve had a few near-death experiences. I shut my eyes, it’s at my fingertips.”

His friend and sometime-collaborator Iggy Pop calls it “brinkmanship”. “You’re supposed to hang out with your toes on the edge,” Homme says. “And I’ve always had an obsession with brinksmanship myself.”

The past few years have really put this balancing act to the test. Last summer, Homme’s band, Queens of the Stone Age, were on the verge of scratching another long-held itch: becoming the first rock act to officially play the Catacombs under Paris. This 200-mile warren of tunnels has served as a final resting place for generations of Parisians, whose bones were removed from overflowing cemeteries between the late-18th and mid-19th centuries and rearranged here. Public access to this disused quarry – now home to “six million souls”, as Homme puts it – is strictly limited. While a few musicians, artists and even raves have illegally slipped through, permission is incredibly hard to come by.

Homme first read about the Catacombs as a schoolboy, growing up in California’s Palm Desert. The image of the place stuck with him, and when he finally made it to Paris with his band some 20 years ago, he put out some feelers. It was, he reports, “a niche request – too bad the French don’t have a word for niche”. And the cogs of bureaucracy began to very slowly turn.

“The Catacombs became a joke,” the 52-year-old musician says. “I would say, ‘We’re going to Europe again, who wants to go to the Catacombs?’ It seemed as though it would never happen. But I definitely have a knack for not quitting – it might be my only real talent.”

Repeated attempts to manifest it into being made Homme “readdress the nature of how I ask questions. It started with: ‘Can we play the Catacombs?’ – the dumbest American version… By the end, it became, ‘What would make you happy and feel content to give me the chance to perform in this place that you’ve spent a lifetime in and that you care about?’”

Had it happened sooner, or taken less effort, Homme thinks he might not have had the same reverence for the space. “I would’ve messed it up somehow. I’m often moving at the speed of inspiration, but when forced to take 30 minutes to contemplate, I find the idea to be a much more beautifully stinky cheese. It matures into something complex and a little sexier,” he clarifies.

“I’d thought about this for so long,” he says. “What are the chances that, when it would finally occur, I would be so gravely ill that I’d be in serious danger.”

In 2022, Homme successfully received treatment for cancer. (Not his first brush with death; he previously “died on the operating table” during knee surgery in 2010, then taking three months to recover from complications.) However, further illness in 2024 resulted in emergency surgery and Homme spending “seven months in bed”, forcing the band to postpone their European tour. But, against medical advice, their Catacombs session went ahead.

“Once you descend that spiral staircase, it’s more about alive versus not alive,” Homme says. “You’re looking at this wall of skulls and you think these eyes have seen things, these mouths have kissed somebody, these ears have heard. It’s, well, just humbling. I would put my hand on top of one of these skulls, get down on my knees and say, ‘I promise to try as hard as I can’.”

Beneath Paris was like “a casino or a recording studio”. More the latter. “No windows, no clocks, no doors, just creativity. The difference was this did feel like being in the belly of an organic thing. The ceiling’s dripping. The floor’s crunching. The Catacombs were so much bigger than we were.” And the band didn’t want to “wake up the dragon,” he says.

Given these unique conditions, and without electricity, they reworked a clutch of songs, stripped down, played alongside a three-piece string section. For Homme – who has spent 30 years changing up his band’s setlist and “done that Rubik’s Cube as many times as I can” – this was a chance to showcase some of their back catalogue’s quieter moments. “I get tired of loud sometimes,” he says. “We have so much stuff that’s introspective. You have to tend to the whole garden.”

The resulting film, Alive In The Catacombs, neatly juxtaposes the band’s thoughtful set underneath Paris with their frantic live show for living souls above ground.

“You’re left thinking: I’m in a rare moment,” Homme says. “I’m not ahead or behind in my life. [This is] the dead centre of where we’re supposed to be. And it’s been a very strange feeling that’s lasted about a year, that’s still going.

“I’ve worked so tirelessly for so long I never stopped. Now, I just want to enjoy it instead of racing through it.” This includes at home, with his three children. “Frankly, I love the little people that live in my house so much – they keep me grounded.”

That feeling has come on road with him, too. “I’ve relearnt that all my pre-phone years’ routines are the ones that matter,” Homme says. “If you want to maintain your mental health, get out of your room, get out in the sun. If you’re on tour, see the place, watch the people.” In Europe, he enjoys walking everywhere. “The cities are made first, the cars second,” he notes.

“I like to sew on the bus when I’m bored,” he says when asked about the patch on his sweatshirt – another activity that keeps him present. “Yeah, just sew things on. It’s not good for the fingertips as you bounce around the planet.”

It sounds like an unlikely hobby for the 6ft 4in frontman of one of the world’s biggest rock bands. But the way he tells it, it makes perfect sense. “I was going to a new school at 13 and was on my way to a wood-shop class. I passed a classroom full of all girls. I said, ‘What was that?’ The vice-principal told me that was home economics – sewing. So, I said, ‘I want that’. And I spent a year learning to sew.”

This evolved into “a punk-rock kid putting studs on things. You had your favourite shirt, but it got ripped, so you cut it out and made it into a back patch on a jean jacket.”

Homme says he was also influenced by his grandfather, Cap, who customised his own sweaters. “[He] was a very snappy dresser.” Homme has the nicknames of both his grandfathers, Cap and Cam, tattooed on his knuckles and still wears their rings.

“I have a core aesthetic that’s Southwestern greaser,” Homme says. “Between The Wild One, the cowboy one and the drunk one. Matt Dillon in Rumble Fish, James Dean, Clint Eastwood in The Good, The Bad And The Ugly. Brown belt, black jeans, brown shoes: they allow for the dust of life to be kicked around, but you still cut a sleek figure.”

Homme’s best style advice? “The key is always a great tailor,” he says (he has a guy in Burbank). Or, failing that, get to know a great designer.

Homme modelled for SAINT LAURENT during its Hedi Slimane era, and Slimane went on to design the outfits for Homme when he toured with Iggy Pop in 2016. “I told Hedi about the movie Hail! Hail! Rock ’N’ Roll, which is Keith Richards in Chuck Berry’s backing band,” Homme says. “That shark-skin, cheetah-print, reflective sort of cocktail jacket. Only magicians reinvent the tuxedo – to their own detriment. When it’s time for black-tie dress up, fucking look classy. But at a cocktail party at the end of the year… now you can go ahead and hit it.

“With Iggy, you knew it was coming off,” Homme says of the bespoke jacket. He’s in awe of Pop’s singular style. “Iggy made the mullet look cool. You fucking try that. It’s not easy.”

As well as Pop, Homme has played alongside Dave Grohl and John Paul Jones in Them Crooked Vultures. His long-running Desert Sessions series has pulled in everyone from PJ Harvey to Jake Shears of Scissor Sisters, while Trent Reznor, Alex Turner and Sir Elton John have all made guest appearances on Queens of the Stone Age albums. Homme has even appeared in the comedy series Portlandia and in Toast Of London, playing himself as Matt Berry’s love rival.