Tim: Did the Bad Seeds ever play any other Birthday Party besides Mutiny?

Mick: In Australia we were doing Swampland, Jennifer's Veil and Pleasure Avalanche. We didn't have as many of the From Her To Eternity songs then.

Tim: You really wouldn't be prepared now to do those?

Mick: I don't think so, no. I don't think Nick would be averse to doing Jennifer's Veil, but Blixa, well Blixa and myself are both very much against the idea of doing any Birthday Party songs, but at the soundcheck Nick just said "We have to do Mutiny", so we learned it then.

Tim: That's a logical choice, if there's going to be anything. Blixa played in on that in the studio.

Mick: Yeah, I think Blixa conceded the point eventually. "Dat's OK. I vill do it."

Tim: I wondered how Nick comes up with all these great sea sagas. You guys obviously fly around a lot more than you go around in boats. How does he get all this stuff. Does he really read Moby Dick like Jessamy says? It's like he's lived before and was a sailor then. He goes into such detail, and with the metaphors it seems like only a guy with years of boating experience could write like this. Any theories on that, Mr. Harvey?

Mick: No, none whatsoever. I think he just likes the imagery of he himself being the captain of the ship, so he uses that.

Tim: Do you know if there's plans to get I Put a Spell on You onto vinyl?

Mick: No. It's on an NME cassette though. It's a very strange recording of it that we did in this little studio, just me, Nick and Hugo. The others were away.

Tim: I was surprised the band agreed to be included on an NME cassette. It's a good way, I suppose, of getting the music out to a lot of people who would otherwise never hear the group.

Mick: Perhaps.

Tim: I guess you should like the paper some. I know Nick sings bad lines about writers, but NME's given you a lot of publicity.

Mick: I don't know that Nick necessarily writes against just journalists. I think they're the easiest people to pick out of all the vultures that are around who generally try to use you.

Tim: Why hasn't a Peel session been done lately?

Mick: Nick did one. It's terrible. We got this really bad production crew; they were just totally unhelpful, actually quite obstructive. We did From Her..., Saint Huck , and I Put a Spell on You, and it was just terrible. The recording just really... the engineer was hopeless. The producer didn't do anything except tell Nick he had to use a pop shield, which Nick immediately threw away. So that's how much the producer did. It was impossible to get them to do anything we wanted, so it's just a rotten recording.

Tim: Any idea why Phil Calvert's no longer a Psychedelic Fur?

Mick: What I heard was that he finally got into the studio to record with them and they wanted him to play along with a click track. He wasn't very good at doing that, and he also argued that he wanted to be a bit wild and record with just the band playing. I really don't know, I've just heard this from others, but that would sound fairly believable to me. So the Furs tossed him out. He's in Melbourne driving a cab and playing with a local group, playing on jingles.

Tim: Happy ending then, I guess. He might be the biggest success story of all from The Birthday Party.

Mick: Depends on if you see success in financial terms or not. That's about how it'd go with Phil if he ever was. He's fairly much lost now that he doesn't have us to keep him on the straight and narrow. That straight and narrow which only we know!

Tim: Sutcliffe and Thirwell are friends of Nick? They helped write Wings off Flies.

Mick: Thirwell is the Foetus, the fabulous Foetus, and Sutcliffe is Pierre, a friend of ours from Melbourne who was actually in a group and had a song called Wings off Flies. So Nick just lifted the title of the song from him. Pierre never actually sang the words Wings off Flies; the song was just called that, and it opened with "She loves me / she loves me not". Quite a good song.

Tim: Does Nick steal a lot of his material like that?

Mick: No, he doesn't at all. If he does, the other person gets credited. You seem to be drawing a lot of background information.

Tim: I don't want to leave any stone unturned.

Mick: You haven't asked me about my own musical aspirations, what I want to do.

Tim: OK, tell me about them.

Mick: When I get back to London I've got a friend of mine coming over from Australia, and we're going to be putting together a group. His name's Simon Bonnie. He used to be in a group called Crime and the City Solution, who were a great influence on The Birthday Party, I might add.

Tim: They were going that long ago?

Mick: Yeah, back in '77,'78, and '79 in Sydney and Melbourne. Anyway, he was the singer, and when I was back in Australia we did some demos and they worked out quite well. But I said "Well, I'm not going to stay in Melbourne. I'm going back to England. If you want to carry this on, you're going to have to come over there." He's coming over now; in fact that's what these phone calls have been about. I've been trying to arrange getting him over there by the time I get back. And we mean to start a band up, probably using Rowland's brother, Harry, on bass, whom I've been living with for some time. So it'd be the three of us and, I don't know, a couple other people, but obviously that would not be, in line with my attitude at the moment, a full-time group. It would not be anything that I would commit myself to doing wholly and solely, that I would see fit to feeling a responsibility to support and carry on in the way that a full-time group has to be supported and carried on, prop up all the members and say, "Yes, you've got a group here, I'll support you," kind of things. It's just going to have to be there and do whatever it does, and everyone will look after themselves. I just thought that I should point out that if I had done my own record or if I had a strong say in what was going on, then the record I would've recorded would not have been like From Her.... I think it's fairly clear that it's Nick's record and what Nick wanted to do. Nick is moving towards a very bluesy sound, which I quite like, but what I want to do personally with something which I would be a strong contributor to would not sound like what this record sounds like.

Tim: What things would you do? Would you be singing with your own group?

Mick: No, no. Simon is the singer. If you look at the latter day Birthday Party stuff and the music I was writing during that time, it wouldn't surprise me if the musical direction of what I do next would be fairly much in line with that. I wrote most of the music for The Bad Seed and on Junkyard I wrote 6 inch Gold Blade, and Kewpie Doll, although I'd rather forget that one. Originally that was written much differently. I can't explain what went on with that. I don't like that song anyway.

Tim: It wasn't played on the '83 tour.

Mick: No. Obviously what I would do would be a development from those other songs. I'd be going for a much stronger, more powerful music in terms of speed. Simon is a very different sort of singer, much more in the vein of Jim Morrison or someone like that. He's got a deep voice and he sings. Doesn't leap into screams and stuff like that. Very much into singing, sings very personal and open lyrics, very different from Nick's. I think it would be to some degree a rock group, for want of a better description, but I want to keep challenging the conceptions of what a rock group can do. I honestly think the Bad Seeds are not like a rock group at all sometimes, which I think is great.

Tim: Any ideas on the name for what you've put together?

Mick: I think we might just call it Crime and the City Solution again. That's a good name.

Tim: You have any songtitles?

Mick: Oh yeah, we did these demos of four songs.

Tim: Can you tell me what they were called?

Mick: Oh now, it doesn't really matter does it? I really want to have a... well, you'll see when I do it. I'm not that great at talking about what I do. These are still sketchy plans, but I think Nick's now looking at September or October to go to Berlin and record an EP. Obviously that leaves us two or three months in between for all us to be getting on with other things. If I get anything together, I think you'll fairly much see what I'm wanting to do at the moment.

Tim: You see yourself as pretty much a drummer? Ever get the urge to play keyboards or guitar onstage again?

Mick: I really don't know what I'll be playing in this group. It depends on who we find. I don't even know if it'll work out. We might try to get something together, decide it's not really happening, and forget about it. Because I really have a lot of things anyways I can do. Nick's things are going to keep happening every so often, and I'll want to keep doing them if he wants me to. And I have actually had a couple other offers since I've been in America which I'm very interested in following up, if I have the opportunity. But I don't want to talk about them now. Basically, what I want to do is to keep challenging myself. I'm always trying to excite myself with what I come up with. There, that's what I do.

Tim: Any other final messages?

Mick: Yes, I'd like to say a big thank you to everyone who voted me best drummer in the Offense Newsletter Reader's Poll. It's about time!

AND I'M FINALLY DONE TYPING THIS! The poll he refers to is from 1983. Rowland Howard won best guitarist, Tracy Pew was best bassist. Do I even have to tell you who won best Male vocalist? Or best band. Best EP went to The Bad Seed (Mutiny was second) I don't remember what won best album (but Junkyard won it in 1982) Get the feeling that the readership of this newsletter was a bit slanted in one direction?