Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds: Come Noc-ing.

Nocturama is in stores now.

Mick Harvey is a truly droll character. “I’m sitting around in my room waiting for things to happen,” he says from Adelaide where the penultimate Big Day Out for 2003 is under way. “Life on the road is not exactly awe-inspiring.”

He’s one-third of the pared back PJ Harvey band - with Polly Jean and her longtime drummer Rob Ellis - for this tour continuing an association that began with To Bring You My Love (1995) and reached a glorious peak with her last album, Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea, which he co-produced and played all over.

She calls him a ‘musical genius’.

“She would,” he says. “We get on really well. Rob and Polly get on really well so this is quite enjoyable.” Later he admits: “I’ve now been adopted by Polly and she wants me to go on world tours and whatever. It’s like I really didn’t need to be in two bands again. I did that a long time ago and it was big mistake. She doesn’t give up, She’s talked me into doing a couple of weeks of shows in August in Europe. Then she’ll do the next album and then she’ll go on a really long world tour but she knows I won’t be doing it. Musically, I’d love to. It’s fantastic playing with her. She’s a great singer. And she’s got a fantastic presence live.”

Of course, she won’t get him. Mick Harvey is Nick Cave’s man. For 28 years he has - more often than not - steered St Nick’s ship through oft stormy and difficult waters. Nick doesn’t do many interviews these days - the odd major magazine and paper as befits his image and standing - so Harvey does some, as well, when the album involves the Bad Seeds.

“It’s down to how much Nick wants to involve us,” Harvey says. “It’s his choice. Certainly, he directed the last couple himself. The Boatman’s Call was more like a solo album. He could almost have done that with different people if he wanted to or a completely reduced line-up of the Bad Seeds. I think he would have except for the fact we were all there, in London, at the time doing dates and stuff. If he had to invite people in to do it he would probably just have invited three and that would have been it. He had a very strong idea of how he wanted it reduced down and he was exerting a lot of control on the musical side of it.”

“With the stuff for this album, he wrote and structured the songs then basically threw the ball to us to just find a way to play them.” It all sounds very spontaneous and unproduced. “It is. That’s the great thing about music. If you’ve got people together who understand one another and respond to the raw material they’ve been given, you find a feel very quickly. You just play the stuff and if it feels right then...”

Like opening track Wonderful Life.

“Yeah, that’s just the demo version,” Harvey says. “We might have run through it once and then we ran through it again and they pressed the record button. You listen to it and it’s like ‘Why re-record it? What are you going to do? Try and get that feel back again.’ There’s no point. There’s even a few flaws in it. It speeds up a bit now and then but the overall feel is just great. Fortunately, it all got recorded. It’s the kind of thing that happens with demos quite often but you’ve just got them on DAT and you have to try and recreate the feel. That’s very hard because it’s something that is just happening at the time. We deliberately set it up so all of it was being recorded. We did three or four days of demoing songs and half of those became the basic tracks and the other half we worked up a bit more.”

Perhaps, the greatest insight into the collective entity that is Nick and his ‘merry’ men, comes towards the end of the interview. We’re talking about touring. In the past Cave and The Bad Seeds have undertaken rather lengthy jaunts and world tours.

“It’s a fantastic band to be in. We don’t overwork ourselves. Everybody gets treated very well. If you play on a record you get a stake in it. You’re not parcelled off on some weekly wage. It’s open. You can leave if you want and nobody is, so it must be alright.”

“As far as touring goes, we’re just doing some selected public appearances in June. It’s not really like a tour. Six dates in Europe or something: Berlin, Amsterdam, London and Paris. Then we’re doing something similar in North America. It’s a visibility thing, to let people know you’re still out there, but we don’t feel like we need to do 40 shows. Too old and we’ve all got kids.” Mick Harvey bursts out laughing. 

“We are also hoping to record another Bad Seeds album in July. Nick has this program to do an album a year. That’s the concept for what it’s worth. If he’s got the songs we’ll just go in and do it and do another album just like we did this one. Record the songs that are there and keep it spontaneous. Just get some kind of feel about it and do it.”

It is, indeed, a wonderful life.