Mick Harvey + Amanda Acevedo
By Kit Macdonald
Mick Harvey was for several often tumultuous decades Nick Cave's right-hand man, in the Birthday Party and the Bad Seeds, and as the one member of those bands who stayed sober throughout, is known as "the man who kept his head when all around were losing theirs". His first solo album in a decade, Five Ways to Say Goodbye, takes the loss of many of the people around him during those years as a central theme: the video for the gentle and gorgeous single When We Were Beautiful & Young features images of Birthday Party bass player Tracy Pew (died 1986) and guitarist Rowland S Howard (2009) and Bad Seeds members Conway Savage (2018) and Anita Lane (2021) among other departed friends and collaborators.
As well as playing material from his new solo album, Harvey will be joined by the Mexican singer and filmmaker Amanda Acevedo to perform songs from the pair's collaborative album of duets, Phantasmagoria in Blue, which came out late last summer.