A few conflicting emotions tossed themselves around when I heard the one-two news punch that (a) Mick Harvey had left the Bad Seeds and (b) one Edmund Kuepper had been recruited as replacement, at least for a forthcoming tour of Europe.
First, I had to take stock of my own response. If this had been the mid-80s, and those twin pillars of Oz Rock Royalty Nick Cave and Ed Kuepper had been thrust together onto the same stage at the same time, I would have been wetting my pants with excitement, and running up to total strangers on the street to tell them about it. So I have found it curious to observe my sardonic eye-rolling reaction in 2009. It's not as if my affections for either of them have cooled in the ensuing 25 years. In fact, if anything the opposite has happened: of all the old guard, Cave and Kuepper have been the ones to have continued to work hard, develop their craft, and surprise. I suppose my thoughts, if I can pin them down, go like this:
(a) when am I ever going to Europe? Hence, the Cave-Kuepper thing is of theoretical interest only;
and, (b) to borrow from well-known music critic John Wayne, could any stage be big enough for the two of them? Unless my memory has failed me, Kuepper hasn't played second fiddle to anyone since The Saints, and look how that turned out. Cave? Well, I can't think of any name that more conjures the expression "front man". So what, or who, is going to give? Which makes it an interesting proposition, but not, I expect, a lasting one. One can only assume they shared one too many beers up on Mount Buller.
You also have to spare a thought for Mick Harvey, unsung hero of Australian music. I suppose his departure from the Bad Seeds was written on the wall with, in particular, the Grinderman project and, in general, the growing dominance within the Bad Seeds of that fiddlin' bushranger, Warren Ellis. But it is a sad thing, nevertheless, to contemplate the bald fact that "it's over".
It is easy, I suppose, to romanticise, in a tortured-artist sense, the life lived (if that is the right word) by Nick Cave in Berlin in the early 1980s. But I have always believed that if it wasn't for Mick Harvey Cave wouldn't have survived those days. Surely he cut it pretty fine as it was. Even hip cats only have nine lives. But Mick Harvey, at least on my reading of it, was the fulcrum around which Cave wildly spun: solid, dependable, able to withstand all the pressures that swirled around them. (Of course I could be wrong, but I've seen nothing in Harvey's subsequent appearance of unshakeable calm to make me doubt it.)
Also, Harvey was in large part responsible for the sound of the Bad Seeds, and the way that band developed. Or, in a sense, didn't. The Bad Seeds have always given new meaning to the word "ramshackle", and yet to see them play, in any of their many permutations, or to listen to "Live Seeds", is to understand that they are, when all is said and done, one of the great rock bands. They evolved over the space of the first four Bad Seeds albums, and Harvey's hands can be found all over each of them. In fact, for me the Bad Seeds, as a band, were never better than on "The Firstborn Is Dead", in which they comprised just (but not, he hastens to add, "merely") Barry Adamson on bass, Blixa Bargeld doing whatever it is that Blixa Bargeld does, and Harvey.
And yet Harvey has never sought the spotlight. Whether that is the result of his close-quarter observations of what that spotlight did, and what it might have done, to Cave is a question that even Harvey himself probably couldn't answer. But it's not for want of talent. "Intoxicated Man", his first solo record, was many people's (and my own hand is up) first introduction to Serge Gainsbourg, and it is a fine album, understated like Harvey himself, typically perfectly played and arranged, and (if I remember right) he even did the translations himself. His subsequent "pop" records (I haven't heard his soundtrack work) may not quite reach that gold standard, but any of them would serve, and frequently do, as perfect Sunday-afternoon listening.
In short, Mick Harvey has long been one of our honest-to-goodness heroes. We wish him well.
