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Mick Harvey.
A short time ago I had been listening to the brilliant Boys
Next Door album 'Door, Door' to and from work each day, had
a tribute album to Serge Gainsbourg, entitled 'Intoxicated Man'
on high rotation in my household and had Happy Birthday
by The Birthday Party stuck in my head at the precise moment
I was asked to interview the man that links all of them all
together: Mick Harvey. I asked him what he made of it. "That
I've made too many albums."
Well, he admits that he's been quite busy over the last thirty years or so. "I've got a big box of my collection. I try and have a copy of everything I've released, only to discover ten years down the line there's huge holes in my collection. And they're gonna be hard to get in ten years, I guess. It's a very big box. And that's just the CDs: I gave all the vinyl to the archives."
He's recently added another piece to his very big box: 'One Man's Treasure': a collection of a dozen songs, two of which Harvey has penned himself. But while 'One Man's Treasure' could be viewed as a covers collection, Harvey has branded each song with his own trademark style and panache. Harvey himself views it in a different light to his Serge Gainsbourg tributes, 'Intoxicated Man' and 'Pink Elephants'. "It's a really nice new development for me to be making my own album like 'One Man's Treasure'. It's a whole new set of possibilities for me there, rather than being tied up in other people's careers," he says, alluding to his main gig as Nick Cave's long-standing foil in The Bad Seeds.
"It becomes a whole thing you can get caught up in. Being in a band you don't really have complete control over all the aspects of it. You just get caught up in the juggernaut: you start out playing some music and you end up this enormous snowball of career and business stuff. Now I can just do whatever the hell I want. I can do nothing if I feel like it. I can go back and record another album in two weeks. It's a bit of a revelation actually."
Admittedly, I had heard very few of the songs that Harvey has
chosen to pay tribute to. Thankfully, though, it seems I'm not
alone: "Europe hardly knows any of them. Australians are kinda
privileged in that they'd at least recognise a few of the other
songs on there. In Europe they only really ever mention the
Gun Club song, Mother Of Earth and the Tim Buckley song
[The River]. The rest of the stuff they just don't know.
Not even the Lee Hazlewood song [First St. Blues]."
This catches me by surprise, as I thought Hazlewood had a devout following. "It's from a really obscure album. A really early, obscure album, before he even had a moustache. It hasn't been put on CD. Hazlewood's got a lot of stuff like that."
The songs are only credited to the composers by their surnames, so it makes it a little difficult to pinpoint their origin without prior knowledge. I hazard a guess at the composer of Louise: Scott Walker?
"No, it's Don Walker, it's on the Tex, Don and Charlie album, the first one," Harvey corrects me, sounding perhaps a little disappointed with my ignorance. "I dragged out a few old Aussie classics. And it's something that one can continue to do: there's a lot of great songs written by Australian songwriters. I can empathise with the mood and the sentiment of a lot of songs written by Australians. As well as which, many of them remain quite obscure, even in Australia, and totally obscure to be on an album getting released in Europe and America."
Okay, how about Demon Alcohol, credited to 'Savage'?
Surely that must be fellow Bad Seed Conway Savage, right?
"It's a Bambi Lee Savage song. A lot of people think that it's Conway!" he laughs "She's even more obscure. That song hasn't even been released. She's got an album but that particular song came from a demo cassette she sent me."
By this point in the interview, I was flailing desperately but
Harvey reassures me that I'm not the only one. Finally I reach
my personal favourite from the album, Man Without A Home,
which is credited to 'Harvey'. "Please tell me that's you,"
I implore.
"Yeah, it is. I had a bit of a running joke about that," he laughs "No! No! It's Alex Harvey! It's PJ Harvey!"
D. Stuart Gravestock
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'One Man's Treasure' is out now through Mute/EMI.
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