Mick Harvey has certainly had a pretty interesting life. Starting off alongside Nick Cave in The Boys Next Door, which then morphed into The Birthday, he then joined Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds in 1983, for much of the next twenty-five years and played pretty much most of the instruments in the band at one time or another.

He also worked with PJ Harvey on Let England Shake, one of the best records of this century. She’s one of the collaborators on his new, sixth solo album, which is out next week, entitled FOUR (Acts Of Love). This is a song cycle, actually divided into three parts. As well as PJ Harvey on ‘Glorious’ there are four cover versions on the record; The Saints’ ‘The Story of Love’, Van Morrison’s ‘The Way Young Lovers Do’, Exuma’s ‘Summertime in New York’ and Roy Orbison’s ‘Wild Hearts (Run Out of Time).’

The album tracklisting is as follows:

Act 1 – SUMMERTIME IN NEW YORK
1. Praise the Earth (Wheels of Amber and Gold)
2. Glorious
3. Midnight on the Ramparts
4. Summertime in New York
5. Where There’s Smoke (before)

Act 2 – THE STORY OF LOVE
6. God Made the Hammer
7. I Wish That I Were Stone
8. The Way Young Lovers Do
9. A Drop, An Ocean
10. The Story of Love

Act 3 – WILD HEARTS RUN OUT OF TIME
11. Where There’s Smoke (after)
12. Wild Hearts
13. Fairy Dust
14. Praise the Earth (An Ephemeral Play)

From Act 2, you can download the rather gorgeous ‘I Wish That I Were Stone’ which is only a minute and a half long, and yet, really rather moorish…