Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds

With all 14 Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds albums being remastered and reissued, Kris Needs chronicles one of music’s most compelling catalogues, with help from project co-ordinator and now-departing musical mainstay Mick Harvey

Nick Cave’s ascent to his current iconic status and unparalled creativity aboard a roller-coaster of drugs, chaos and, finally, domestic stability, is well documented. His legend and profile sometimes overshadow the musicians who grasp his visions and bring them into reality: The Bad Seeds are both gang and gentlemen’s club, qualifying for membership by being able to plug into the supernatural chemistry which rumbled menacingly into life on the first track of the first album (a cover of Leonard Cohen’s Avalanche). They could never be called a normal group and, through different line-ups over the last 25 years, always sound like no-one else but The Bad Seeds.

Mick Harvey was the modest organisational and musical pillar who recently announced his departure from the group he helped form over 25 years ago, for “a variety of personal and professional reasons”. He managed to channel whatever madness was encircling his old Melbourne school friend when it was time to record while playing in the Bad Seeds and overseeing projects like the reissue programme, which will be his mighty Bad Seeds epitaph.

Immersed in the remastering and 5.1 Surround Sound conversion process, Harvey has been able to re-examine and re-evaluate the albums away from the hurricane’s eye of their …

by Kris Needs, Mick Harvey
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