“What is a witch’s hat?” Gene Simmons is asking with no mild consternation, midway through our interview. I am baffled: does he mean a traffic cone?

“Exactly! A traffic cone! Why do you guys call it a witch’s hat?”

“Because it looks just like a witch’s hat.”

“Oh, really?” he says. “And when was the last time you saw a witch?”

To talk with Gene Simmons, co-founder and co-frontman of Kiss for the last 50 years, is to be quite delightfully entangled. Across our 30-minute chat – a playful and divergent conversation – we cover such topics as witches, monogamy, the Beatles and fatherhood. The week we speak, he is preparing for his upcoming 74th birthday party, at a bowling alley; it will end up raising more than $100,000 for kids who can’t afford surgical care they need. This is someone who never entirely outgrew their youthful dream to be either a rabbi or a school teacher, if the rock star thing did not work out.

Of course it did work out, which is why Simmons is doing interviews: Kiss are back in Australia for a final time, just 14 months since the last time they were back in Australia for a final time. The people demanded it. And it also fell conveniently in time to play the AFL grand final entertainment show. But this, we are assured, is the actual last, honest-to-Satan last, last time. And it’s been a long time coming.

The first Kiss show was in 1973 at a tiny dive bar in New York, the Popcorn Club. Only 10 people turned up, almost half of them their then girlfriends.

“I can remember the smell of that place, still,” Simmons says. “There was almost nobody there. We had makeup on of sorts, a little bit different. I remember looking across the stage and thinking, ‘Wow!’ … We were playing these songs that we wrote.”

Now, of course, Simmons is on the other side of one of the most successful careers in rock history. “I have been so, so lucky in life,” he says. “I have no idea what I did to deserve any of it.”

Simmons was born in Haifa, Israel, the only child to a Holocaust survivor mother and a father who abandoned his young family when Simmons was six. He grew up so poor that as a kid, he and his cousin sold fallen oranges they collected in the streets. Emigrating to the US soon after instilled in him a fervent drive for success and material safety that later only pinball machines, mini-golf courses, c(k)ondoms and Super-Spicy Chili Tomato Meat Buns bearing his world-famous band’s name could quell.

For those millions who have been lucky enough to see one, a Kiss show is a life-affirming encounter with the ridiculous and the sublime. It is every excuse to give into the overwhelming urge to sing often extremely silly words extremely loudly with several thousand people at once. Each time I see the band play, I take someone different with me on the promise they will love it – and that if they don’t, we can no longer be friends. Simmons laughs happily to hear that so far, I haven’t lost anyone.

“Our job for those precious few hours on stage is to provide some wonderment,” he says. “Life is short and there are enough things to get you down. Wars, racism, political polarity. What is the meaning of life? I have no idea! No one on stage knows. You’re just here and hopefully you’re enjoying life and then it’s over.”

Throughout their five decades – featuring admission to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, a beloved soundtrack to Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey and (criminally!!!!) zero Grammys – Kiss has weathered no small number of lineup changes. But Simmons and Paul Stanley have remained the driving creative force, co-writing the bulk of the band’s laundry list of hits. Their relationship – and the healthy competition between them – was the bedrock on which their quest for rock dominance was built.

“Paul’s like the brother I never had,” Simmons says. “I wouldn’t have been able to do anything on the level that I’ve been able to do on my own without Paul. And I’d like to think it’s the same the other way around. You can’t do it all yourself, you’re just not as good.

“The biggest ever influence on me was the Beatles, and clearly Lennon and McCartney were so much better together than when they each went solo … Having someone around who’s questioning and taking things apart is what really makes things better.”

Stanley echoed the sentiment in an email. “Seeing someone in the best and worst situations shows you over the years who they are. Gene is my brother through thick and thin … He is family and his family is part of my family.”

Simmons came to global fame at a time in history when rock star appetites could be generously described as libertine. As someone who named their autobiography Sex Money Kiss, he is not shy about his past in which he famously – or infamously, depending on your view – slept with, he reckoned, more than 4,000 women.

“Listen,” he says with the surety of someone who would know. “Men are idiots. There isn’t enough blood to power two heads at once, so a lot of really stupid decisions can get made when that little head takes over.

“When you’re a woman and you see a man, and he’s big and he’s got a hairy chest and he’s good-looking, and you see that, what you’re seeing is a mirage. That’s actually a 14-year-old horny kid. Just still young, dumb and full of cum. We can’t even think straight when we see you. I don’t say this as a defence, because I stand guilty as charged of everything.”

Through this, his union with his wife, Shannon Tweed, has been enormously successful. Together for 40 years, monogamy didn’t play a part in what makes it work.

“Would I ever leave if Shannon dilly-dallied like I had? No. Absolutely not, that will never happen. This will be the only marriage I ever have because my definition of marriage isn’t based on that stuff, it’s based on somebody who in a real sense will give their life for you. And we’ve proved it in creating two new, wonderful, amazing forms of life; our kids. Nobody else can do that,” he says with affection. “At the end of the day my life will be judged by Shannon, and [their children] Nick and Sophie.”

Kiss would continue forever if it weren’t for the inconvenient path of time’s arrow – although, as Simmons puts it: “As long as your schmeckle works, you feel immortal.” But soon there will be no more adoring crowds, clamouring legions of the Kiss Army; no more hearing their songs booming back at them over stadiums full of pumping fists: the time to rock and roll all night and party every day must come to its end, as all of life’s great journeys will.

The last Kiss show ever will be at Madison Square Garden in December. (“That it took us 50 years to get 10 blocks from where we started playing seems right for us.”) By that time, Stanley and Simmons will have spent more than two-thirds of their lives together in Kiss, while having played almost 3,000 shows across the globe and selling over 100m albums. Who will Gene Simmons, God of Thunder, be when he is no longer that person on stage?

“I can verbalise it now, but emotions are different from words, they’re beyond that. It will be a tsunami of emotions,” he says. “When the confetti starts to fall that last time, and everybody is going nuts in the audience, everybody’s going to be crying. I know we are. It’s going to be a lot.

“What an amazing journey … I can’t stress enough, how blessed we are – whether you’re religious or not, that’s the word. I am the luckiest man on two legs who ever walked the face of the planet.”

  • Kiss are playing Accor Stadium, Sydney on 7 October, before final dates in the US and Canada – and a last-ever show (allegedly) at Madison Square Garden