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Bad Seed makes good

Going solo, Mick Harvey plays his trump card

By Marika Ley
For The Prague Post
May 2nd, 2007 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
On Two of Diamonds, Harvey continues to explore songs that "suggest ideas."
A beautiful melancholia migrated from the depths of down under in the form of The Birthday Party and later The Bad Seeds. While Nick Cave was the highly public front man for both bands, it was composer and multi-instrumentalist Mick Harvey who was the unsung hero of their sound and ennui-ridden, dramatic style. Seeping onto the English music scene in the early 1980s with dark ballads and a soundscape giving the impression of a carnival run by solemn gangsters gone broodingly mad, Harvey provided the atmosphere and audio landscape in which the crooner Cave could crucify the crowd with blood-curdling tales and wails.
“I actually find songs more interesting that suggest ideas.” Harvey says over the phone from Berlin, where he started the current tour promoting his second solo album, Two of Diamonds. “That’s quite a hard thing to achieve, but I find it more interesting than story songs. “
Mick Harvey

When: May 10 at 8
Where: Lucerna Music Bar
Tickets: 450 Kč through Ticketpro and at the venue

Harvey, perhaps regretfully, proved himself a worthy balladeer over a decade ago re-recording two albums (Pink Elephants and Intoxicated Man) of the celebrated and sensational French composer Serge Gainsbourg. “I don’t like talking about it that much,” he says. “I did that 12 years ago. In those interviews you’d spend half the day talking about somebody else’s stuff.”
However much it may be abhorrent for Harvey, he’s excellent at improving and expounding upon “somebody else’s stuff,” having scored many film soundtracks, such as Uli Schueppel’s Vaterland and Lucian Segura’s Alta Marea. Working with several other bands for these films gave Harvey a natural progression and a complementary extension to what he had been previously doing with Cave and Blixa Bargeld (of The Bad Seeds and Einstürzende Neubauten, respectively), both of whom he has worked with on film scores. He’s proven particularly adept at using a geographic location’s indigenous music to extract the perfect sound.  
“One of the interesting things about film is that sometimes you have to go into areas of music that you wouldn’t normally enter.” notes Harvey. “Certainly there are areas that I wouldn’t normally do, like classical or, God forbid, semiethnic-toned things. But sometimes that’s what the film needs. You’re put in the position of being adaptable, which is interesting. And kind of weird.”
Two of Diamonds follows Harvey’s first solo release, One Man’s Treasure (2005). On both albums, his characteristically beautiful, wistful melodies, soft lyricism and intricate atmospheric qualities show through in pining spades.
“I tinkered away with things for a long time, and I finally decided to move toward completing [that sound],” he says. “I didn’t want [the first solo record] to be seen as a sort of one-off oddity. I knew that if I started it, I wanted to work on it as a venture that I was doing for a while. It just took me a little while to make that step because I could see that it was going to be a lot of commitment.”
Harvey’s touring band includes fellow Bad Seeds James Johnston (on organ and guitar) and Thomas Wydler (on drums). The cavernous, gloomy Lucerna Music Bar should provide a great venue for their sound.

Marika Ley can be reached at features@praguepost.com


Other articles in Night & Day (2/05/2007):

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