Posted
Mick Harvey, one of the founding members of Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds, is leaving the group.
After a quarter of a century with the award-winning Australian band, Harvey says he has decided to pursue other projects.
"For a variety of personal and professional reasons I have chosen to discontinue my ongoing involvement with Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds," he said in a statement.
"After 25 years I feel I am leaving the band as it experiences one of its many peaks; in very healthy condition and with fantastic prospects for the future.
"I'm confident Nick will continue to be a creative force and that this is the right time to pass on my artistic and managerial role to what has become a tremendous group of people who can support him in his endeavours, both musically and organisationally."
Harvey and Cave formed the band in 1983. While the group has been through many personnel changes, they have remained the constants.
Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds have spent the past couple of weeks performing in Mt Buller, Victoria, Brisbane and Sydney as part of the All Tomorrow's Parties festival, which they also curated.
"It was a fantastic experience to finish my touring days in the band with the recent shows in Australia and the unique events that took place in conjunction with All Tomorrow's Parties, especially Mt Buller, which was one of the many highlights of my involvement with the band throughout the years," Harvey said.
"I shall continue working on the Bad Seeds back catalogue re-issues project over the coming year and look forward to the new opportunities I shall be able to accommodate as a result of my changed circumstances."
Harvey, a multi-instrumentalist, has released several solo albums.
- AAP (from abc.net.au)
Nick Cave, one of the legendary wild men of rock, has just added one of cinema's soppiest movies to the festival he and his bandmates, the Bad Seeds, are curating.
The 1970 tear-jerker Love Story will screen in the film program at All Tomorrow's Parties festival at Mount Buller, alongside more predictable fare such as The Proposition, which was written by Cave, and Ghosts … of the Civil Dead, in which he had a leading role.
And Cave predicts he'll be shedding a tear, too. "I cry at anything in the cinema," the 51-year-old musician said. "I cry at British Telecom ads."
He chose the film, he said, because "I'm just an Ali MacGraw nut". His bandmates Mick Harvey and Warren Ellis picked most of the films for the first Australian incarnation of the English-born festival, "but I threw that one in there. In between all the Kurosawa films, I thought it would be good to have it."
There is, in fact, just one Kurosawa film, the Japanese director's 1950 masterpiece, Rashomon, but the program is likely to please cineastes: the French New Wave classic Le Samourai, Peckinpah's The Getaway, Korean movie The Isle. There's also a fair smattering of cultish Australian movies — Walkabout, The Boys, the 1975 junkies-in-Melbourne drama Pure Shit — plus Mel Gibson's Mayan epic, Apocalypto.
Also just announced for the festival is a visual arts program dedicated entirely to the works of Louis Wain. Wain rose to prominence in the late 19th century with his anthropomorphic images of cats behaving like Englishmen. He died, insane and in obscurity, in 1939, but his works have in recent years become highly collectable — by Nick Cave, among others.
So, are any of the 15 works on display Cave's? "Absolutely not," he said. "I've been lending mine out forever and I'm fucking sick of it. I want them back."
