MICK HARVEY: London Date Announced – XOYO – 5 June – New Album “Sketches From The Book Of The Dead” out 2 May 2011
aaamusic | On 29, Mar 2011
Mick Harvey announces a rare London date, at XOYO on 5 June – his first in the UK since 2007. Tickets are £15 and available from:
http://www.atpfestival.com/events/mickharveylondon.php
The London live show follows the release of a brand new solo album, Sketches From The Book Of The Dead, out on 2 May 2011, the follow up to Two Of Diamonds (2007).
Sketches From The Book Of The Dead is Mick Harvey’s first fully self-penned album; the 11-track album was recorded and mixed with David McCluney at Atlantis Sound, Port Melbourne with additional recording at Harvey’s own Grace Lane music room and sees Mick Harvey (playing most of the instruments) joined by Rosie Westbrook on double bass and J.P. Shilo on accordion & violin, with Xanthe Waite contributing occasional ethereal backing vocals.
Mick Harvey – internationally renowned for his career with The Birthday Party and Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds and his soundtrack and production work – has most recently collaborated with PJ Harvey once again, co-producing and playing on her latest album, Let England Shake and will be joining her on tour throughout 2011.
In early 2007 Harvey had begun writing songs about some of the stories and memories he had of people close to him he had lost. It was just 3 or 4 songs but he knew there was the germ of an idea he cared about in there. The project wasn’t about catharsis, he says. Nor was it influenced by the music he had just produced in England, although he saw the odd parallels between his work and Polly’s, steeped as it was in ideas of identity and loss. Instead, it was an attempt to write about things that are often left unsaid, a personal endeavour to sketch the faint shapes of lost friends and family. To describe what’s left behind, not what has gone before. As he wrote, he remembered the great traditions of song stories – in folk music, in the blues, in the dark country of Johnny Cash – and knew that his songs had to carve their own forms. To set out not only the narrative but the experience beyond it, into an amorphous world of what remains after the story – that which lives on within us.
This is an album containing an extraordinary investigation into a rarely scrutinized area of the human condition. Harvey has excelled himself and made a truly unique work to go alongside so much of what he has already achieved in his 30 years of musical creativity.
Famous Last Words, from the album, is available now on iTunes. Listen to the track here:
