Mick Harvey Leaves The Bad Seeds

Can't say I didn't see this coming. It seems that Warren Ellis is Nick's new right hand man, for better or worse.

http://drownedinsound.com/community/boards/music/4157790

I dimly recall he'd stepped aside once or twice before, though?

fuck. i was always aware that nick developed extremely close working relationships with certain people (blixa, warren ellis etc.), but always figured mick was comfortable with that dynamic, and happy to bring solidarity to the group in his own inimitable way. that said, 25 years is a long period of time...

xpost: when exactly?

That's what I'm trying to remember. I could be confusing it with when Blixa wasn't on a tour in 1994 and James Johnston stepped in.

i remember a lot of volatility around 94-ish, but not so much with mick.

i'm really quite sorry i missed the ATP headlining slot now. didn't quite predict this, but happy to have seen the band, with the harvey backbone, numerous times.

i remember reading somewhere that Harvey was insulted that he he wasnt involved in the Grinderman project.

Yeah I can imagine that played a strong part

25 years is a long period of time...

― Charlie Howard, Thursday, January 22, 2009 3:35 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

35 years if you take into account the Boys Next Door band.

hmmm true that. in fact, i can't even comprehend 35 years.

How is this going to affect Ellis's comics????????????????????

????????

cannot imagine the Bad Seeds without Mick Harvey.

I think that, at least for now, Nick is embracing his "aging rocker" persona and Warren Ellis is the perfect foil for something like that. I also think the advent of Grinderman had something to do with that. I saw the NYC show last Autumn and, besides Nick, Warren Ellis was the star. Mick Harvey was taking a backseat, relgated to playing his guitar, far stage right.

I love "Dig Lazarus Dig" and the new raucous Bad Seeds. What I worry about is when Nick wants to slow things down a bit and do some brooding. That's when I fear we will miss Mick Harvey the most.

hopefully he won't slow things down again, three albums of brodding piano sookery was enough

this isn't much of a surprise at this stage; Mick has been on the outer more and more in recent years, and was always criminally taken for granted by Cave. last week after the three-drummer opening, he looked like a spare prick at a wedding while Cave and Ellis cavorted drunkenly stage right.

would probably be appropriate to knock it on the head and focus properly on Grinderman now.

rowland should fill in

[i]three albums of brodding piano sookery was enough<i/>

xpost "The Good Son", "The Boatman's Call" but, what's the third?

I was thinking the Boatmans -> No More -> everything on Nocturama except Bring It On and Babe run.

RIP

How could anyone leave the Bad Seeds, Nick seems like such a nice man and in no way a cantankerous old douchebag

how could anyone leave the Bad Seeds...

i think we'll leave it at that ;)

I was bummed when Blixa left, but they've made a couple of their best albums since (in my opinion), so... I guess I'm not bummed about this.

Does Mick still work with PJ Harvey at all?

replacement is... ed kuepper!

for euro dates over the northern summer, at least.

He should open for them as well.

Mega 3-part audio interview with Mick Harvey over on MeltingPod podcast: http://meltingpod.free.fr/ (scroll down a bit0

anyway, Mick tells all about the split. Lots of things come into play, but it irked him that Cave was content with playing live shows as if it was a bog standard rock show w/o any of the arrangements.

I don't get this sentence (i know i could just listen to the podcast but I'm at work). He left the band cuz he felt the live shows were sub-standard?

excerpt here:

Mick Harvey: A lot of the songs the band were playing were short-cut simplified versions of favorite songs of ours that were just an easy way to play them live … and they weren’t testing or making the band work hard to create a great piece of music anymore … It was just like, we can just bash out Deanna like that and everyone will love it anyway, so who gives a fuck? I did not like that attitude. I thought it was really poor… I understand it’s difficult when you’re in a really really big 5,000 stadium to do subtle music … well then, fuck it, we shouldn’t be playing in 5,000 capacity stadiums we should be playing in smaller venues where we can play the music properly. And you don’t just start doing shit versions of the songs because you can’t be bothered and it’s not worth it anyway. That’s really a death to me…
… and the attitude about my feeling like that was that I should just shut up.
(Mick Harvey, Paris, March 1, 2010)

thx Elvis.

cave pretty clearly wanted to return to a stripped down sound with grinderman (which harvey was not invited to work on); although oddly I don't think his actual songwriting changed that much, the band makeup was just leaner. Maybe he felt harvey-influenced bad seeds were just getting bloated.

did harvey quit or get axed?

Too bad they didn't reunite the Birthday Party when they were still able to.

in 1986?

I hate hating but Bad Seeds with Mick Harvey way better than Grinderman any day of the week

I kind of hate the recent Nick Cave "rock" stuff which leads me to believe that a Birthday Party reunion would not be as awesome as it sounds

That's an interesting quote and very spot on. I did notice during the last NYC show how shambolic things had gotten.

It sounds like Mick didn't want to bring the rock.

Maybe he felt harvey-influenced bad seeds were just getting bloated.

This sounds like a possibility.

no point in a birthday party reunion without tracy pew no matter what

i saw the last Nick Cave US tour and it was a good time for the most part. Though the mellow stuff really didn't work with the heavier stuff -- after strutting around like Iggy Pop for an hour, Cave played "Love Letter" and it was ... weird.

xpost. Absolutely. I don't like the idea of a Birthday Party reunion without Tracy.

The SF show in 08 was great but the older material felt rote...my nostalgia makes it great but performance wise I had seen better in the 90's. He was throwing us a bone, but I didn't get the same intensity from him that I got from his performances of the new material.

As far as Nick/Mick... Mick is a walking musical encyclopedia. Mick as arranger...that's where the holes will really show. I have this fear that without Mick there to provide some kind of counterpoint, that there's nothing mooring Nick down...simplicity's his enemy and i just have visions of triple albums and egomania agogo. Not that he hasn't been like that lately anyway, but it'll be worse. I love Nick to death, but no Blixa, now no Mick, the Bad Seeds will sound more and more like Nick's faithful disciples and less like the kind of alchemy they had from combining so many differing points of view.

except for 'no pussy blues' i don't really think grinderman is that different from any other bad seeds album, there are plenty of ballads on it, it's just not as well produced or doesn't sound as fussed over. basically it sounds just like the bad seeds with no mick harvey. which is, you know, whatever; I know plenty of people who think abbatoir and stuff was treacley, pretentious twaddle.

was harvey even on lazarus? I thought he'd left before that actually.

I'm not sure how it'll affect Nick's records so much, or how much I even care about that to be honest - I'm more just kinda sad to see two guys who've been playing together so long part ways. Who else who started out playing together in 1973 (according to Wiki) are still in a band together?

It's weird to think Nick and Mick have been in bands together almost as long as the dudes in Rush.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHK2p9l7dCM

Today Mick Harvey & Amanda Acevedo have shared the latest track from their forthcoming collaborative album, Phantasmagoria in Blue, that is due out on vinyl, CD and digitally on September 1st, 2023 via Mute.

Acevedo is from Mexico