Mick Harvey Pt 1: ‘I Wanted To Do Something Substantial’

What ostensibly began as a chat about Mick Harvey’s new album ‘Sketches From The Book of Dead’ turned into a discussion about the UK music press, online message boards and a Jungian analysis of David Lynch. In the first installment of this two-part interview, RENÉ SCHAEFER talks to the legendary Boys Next Door founder and former Bad Seed about his Serge Gainsbourg tribute, his work with PJ Harvey and his songwriting process. Studio photo by René.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] I’m wandering down a dark back alley in North Melbourne, looking for Mick Harvey’s studio, having only received the vaguest of directions. I’m just about to call the publicist who helped arrange this rendezvous, when a metal gate beside me squeaks open and Harvey’s silver-haired head pops out. “What are you doing, lurking out there? Come in!” Meeting your musical heroes is always a risk. More likely than not, they will not be able to live up to whatever romantic preconceptions one has built up of them over the years. This encounter is off to a shaky start. Harvey looks at me quizzically. “So, where’s your camera crew?” Errr … what camera crew?

It turns out there has been a bit of miscommunication and my interview subject has grossly over-estimated the budget and technical capabilities of this particular online publication. Corrected on the scope of our imminent chat, Harvey ushers me through into the rehearsal space, where Rosie Westbrook is just packing up her double bass after a run-through of material from Harvey’s new album Sketches From The Book Of The Dead, in preparation for a series of launches around the country.

As he shifts around amps, microphones and instruments, and climbs on a chair to adjust some spotlights, I recall the somewhat uneasy relationship The Birthday Party and Bad Seeds have always enjoyed with the press. Tales of vendettas and threats of physical injury to unsympathetic journalists replay in my head. Luckily, the venerable musician does not automatically regard me as the enemy and turns out to be friendly and accommodating in conversation. Still, the topic having been raised, the role of the rock critic is on Harvey’s mind. When I turn on my recorder, he first of all asks me to explain the modus operandi of M+N. Prompted like this, all I can offer in the way of an explanation is that the website is dedicated purely to exploring Australian music, because the writers are enthusiastic about it, not because it’s a career. Harvey picks up the thread:

"I guess most people start writing about music because they love it, or it’s an interest they have, except in England, where that doesn’t appear to be the case. There it always seemed to be a move for people to establish themselves as a personality in their own right. It used to be a big thing, and it was very dreary. There were all these celebrity writers, and I’d always think, 'Just get out of my fucking kitchen, you wanker!' I’ve known quite a few of those career writers, actually. Nick Kent used to hang around us for a while. He predates us a bit, but he came to some of the recording sessions The Bad Seeds did for ‘The Mercy Seat’."

Oh yeah? What was he doing there?
He just sensed that there was a vibe going on, I think. It might have had something to do with drugs. [Laughs] He was really nice, actually. He didn’t have that pretentiousness or one-upmanship. Biba Kopf [real name Chris Bohn] was another nice guy. He’s an old friend. Ian Penman was good as well, but there has been a whole new generation of writers since then, who came along with the whole Brit-pop thing.

English music journalism seemed to die in the arse around that time.
They tried really desperately to keep some kind of hype going. That was the whole point about that Stone Roses thing. The music press was desperately trying to make something out of what was going on, because they could benefit from it. It was completely ridiculous.

The credibility of the actual music they were promoting suffered from the hype, I felt.
Probably because people weren’t able to trust what they were told. That hype thing doesn’t really happen here. I don’t think it can happen here, because there are always enthusiast radio stations, where you can actually hear stuff. That makes a huge difference. When we were in England in the early ’80s, you couldn’t really hear any of the music that was being written about, except maybe on John Peel’s show. But a lot of the things that were being written about, John Peel wouldn’t play, so people had no idea what these bands actually sounded like. It was a complete beat-up.

Along with Nick Cave, Phill Calvert and Tracy Pew, Harvey founded The Boys Next Door in the Melbourne suburb of Caulfield in the late-’70s. Energised by punk, and with guitarist Rowland S Howard completing the classic line-up that eventually became known as The Birthday Party, the high school covers band mutated into one of the fiercest and most individualistic groups to ever confound audiences. In the process, they left rock’n’roll, punk or any other easy pigeon holes far behind.

A gifted multi-instrumentalist, by nature as much as by the necessity of dealing with the erratic nature of his band mates, Harvey took on the mantle of musical director from an early age. He expanded on this role in The Bad Seeds, the band for which he was recruited by Cave after the dissolution of their previous outfit. Their collaboration continued until last year – an amazingly long time in the fickle universe of semi-popular music.

Concurrently, Harvey established himself as a producer, arranger, composer of numerous film and television scores, and collaborator with many other gifted musicians. As a member of Crime And The City Solution and Rowland S Howard’s band he maintained his underground credibility, while in recent years he has been writing and recording with alternative superstar PJ Harvey (no relation), with whom he currently spends a lot of time touring overseas.

His first solo project consisted of two highly influential albums of Serge Gainsbourg songs, adapted to his own musical sensibility and translated into English, Intoxicated Man (1995) and Pink Elephants (1997). On three subsequent albums, he developed a winning formula of mixing his own material with off-beat cover versions of classic songwriters with those of his musical contemporaries. The last of these discs, Two Of Diamonds, was released in 2007.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.]

It seems like quite a jump from this mix-and-match approach to his new release Sketches From The Book Of The Dead. Not only is this the first time Harvey has written all the tracks himself, but it is also a highly personal collection of songs, adding up to a fully-fledged concept album. And, of course, this emergence of Mick Harvey as a fully-fledged songwriter is something that hasn’t escaped the attention of critics and fans. When I put this to him, Harvey grins sardonically:

Yes, everybody seems to have noticed that. It’s the first album where I have written all the songs. It’s a lot more personal in nature and content than other things I’ve done, especially considering the subject matter, but oddly I don’t feel a stronger personal connection to this project. Whatever project I get involved with, I feel completely devoted to, whether I’m doing an album of other people’s songs, or my own, or a mixture of things. For example, I have a strong personal connection to Polly’s [PJ Harvey] recent album [Let England Shake] because of the work that I contributed to it and the amount of time I spent immersed in that. The difference isn’t that great.

[Historical embedded media is withheld pending rights review.] Mick Harvey - How Would I Leave You by Mute UK

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] So you feel the same way about the two albums of Serge Gainsbourg interpretations you did?
I’m quite distant from that now, actually. It feels very different from anything else I’ve touched, in a way. I poured a lot of energy into those records at the time, but unlike One Man’s Treasure (2005) for example, where I felt a deep personal connection to the songs I was interpreting, the Gainsbourg project was more like an intellectual exercise. I’ve come to think of it as very separate to my other work.

I was just wondering, because those albums still mean a lot to people, because they were their introduction to Gainsbourg’s music.
That’s great, but when I made those albums, the potential of them serving that purpose was really a side issue that was beyond my control. It’s nice though, that this was an indirectly intended consequence. When I looked at Gainsbourg’s work I felt it was very under-exposed. Especially in America, those albums played an important role, where Gainsbourg has got more of a profile now. [Gainsbourg’s ex-partner and frequent collaborator] Jane Birkin said to me that without those albums raising awareness levels, she definitely wouldn’t have been able to tour here. That was a nice side effect, I guess.

What prompted you to concentrate more on your own songwriting then?
It’s not something I ever really wanted to do. It’s not like I sat down and thought I’d better start being a songwriter because that is the valid thing to do. It’s really quite incidental in a way. When I came out of The Bad Seeds, I had four different projects that I could have started working on right away. After a few months I thought, well, I better just concentrate on one of them, otherwise I could be tinkering around with all of them for a really long time and not really get anywhere.

There was one album that I had already demoed and laid out in its entirety, which was similar to albums that I had already done, in so far that it was a mixture of originals and other people’s material. Also, by the time I left The Bad Seeds I had written four or five songs for Book Of The Dead. Then there was another sideline project, which could have been quite fun and throw-away. Lastly there was a documentary, which was not a musical project at all. Deciding which one I would immerse myself in, I thought that Book Of The Dead would be the most challenging and send the best message as to where my head was at. If I had done the throw-away rock project, people would have gone, “Oh, is this what he’s come up with?” I really wanted to do something that was a bit more substantial and a big challenge.

Did you feel you were under any pressure to do something substantial?
Not particularly. It just happened to be something I had already been working on. I didn’t necessarily want to send the message that now I’m a songwriter. I don’t think it’s what I’ll keep doing, either. It was just the specific nature of the album concept that it required me to write all the songs.

So, how does one make oneself write songs?
I think a lot of songwriters do this – they write songs with a particular theme in mind. They might have a few songs that have just popped up naturally and then they set about writing for that project. By having a theme, I was able to make a list of subject matter that I wanted to write about. The first few songs were just ideas about specific people. I wasn’t plotting anything, but there must have been an idea already to write songs about people who were long gone, but were still present in my life. I didn’t really have an idea of how I was going to use these songs at the time. I remember thinking about how they would fit in with my next album, and then I realised that they just wouldn’t.

“Whatever project I get involved with, I feel completely devoted to, whether I’m doing an album of other people’s songs, or my own, or a mixture of things.

Which songs were those?
There were ‘The Ballad Of Jay Givens’, ‘Frankie T’ and ‘A Place Called Passion’. Those were the earliest, and once they were written, I just needed to find a context for them. My approach was not too dissimilar to some of the songwriters I’ve worked with in the past. When Nick [Cave] sits down to write, once he’s got a starting point, he can just write hundreds of songs around that theme. For Murder Ballads, he would just sit there all day and write hundreds of verses for certain songs. The version of ‘O’Malley’s Bar’ on B-Sides and Outtakes has got completely different lyrics to the album, and I’m sure he would have had even more. Unbelievable!

Then there’s Polly’s most recent work. She wanted to write an album on a particular theme, which was war, and she just started out with that in mind. It’s a focused process, rather than just waiting for inspiration. The point is that the inspiration is already there. The little flashes of inspiration that come along the way just add fuel to the general theme.

You don’t see that much of this approach these days.
I don’t know how other people work, but most of them seem to be just doodling stuff about how they feel about their girlfriend. I’m not very interested in writing songs like that. [Laughs]

PART TWO: Harvey on airing his dirty personal laundry in public, his decision to leave The Bad Seeds and the song he wrote about Rowland S Howard.

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‘Sketches From The Book Of The Dead’ is out now on Mute via EMI.