Mick Harvey, Nick Cave’s musical director in the Bad Seeds, singer/songwriter, composer, is back in an old stomping ground, Berlin. It was there in the early and mid-1980s that the Birthday Party then Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds based themselves releasing four albums by the latter and a couple by the former; they were tempestuous, dramatic times, dark, raw and unpredictable. Out of it came not only some extraordinary music but also an extraordinary musical partnership. However, with the Seeds enjoying some down time ahead of a return to the studio sometime in July to begin work on the next album, Harvey is out peddling his excellent fourth solo album, Two Of Diamonds, which follows in the footsteps of its well-received predecessor, One Man’s Treasure.

Both are eclectic collections drawn from songs that mean a lot to him with some Harvey originals enhancing the mix. The second in a series Mick has always envisaged as trilogy pulls in five great Australian songs: Photography by the big bad ‘Viking’, Chris Bailey, which originally appeared on the Saints 1984 album, A Little Madness To Be Free; 1960s r’n'b giants The Loved Ones’ classic Sad Dark Eyes; No Doubt by the Cruel Sea’s James Cruickshank from his solo album Hymn For Her; Home Is Far From Here which references his own 1980s outfit and side project Crime And The City Solution with whom he recorded six albums; and, finally, and most importantly, a blinding performance of the never-heard-before Everything Is Fixed by the late great David McComb, principal songwriter of The Triffids.

The song is one of six demoes McComb recorded post-Triffids, five of which were basically unusable because all the instrumentation plus McComb’s vocals were recorded through his microphone, which in Mick’s words was “just this cacophony going on”. “When I heard this though I knew I had to do something with it,” he says. “Sometimes I record certain songs because most people don’t know them. They haven’t been in my living room. I like to do that - do a song that maybe is obscure but really should be heard.”

Bailey’s Photograph is another: “The original recording is very melodramatic and fantastic. It’s the standout on the album and a song I’ve always had in mind to do. It’s always stood out for me. What’s special is that it talks about a particular thing that rarely doesn’t get written about like this - that melancholy and loss, yet it also has a strange defiance to it, which is just fantastic. There’s this will shot through with this strength. It’s a remarkable song.”

The ‘Crime’ song is one of his personal faves while Sad Dark Eyes was more a case of ‘why not?’ than ‘why?’. Harvey doesn’t limit his interpretive powers to just Australians though. There’s a gem of a take on Bill Withers’ I Don’t Want You On My Mind - “He’s such an amazing singer. I did something a little bit different with this one [think moody, broody]. It’s just a really obscure song. Those 1960s Withers album are so hard to get. There’s a few floating around getting exchanged and I’ve got them on my iPod. They get played a lot.”

He also executes a beautiful version of Emmylou Harris’ Here I Am from 2003’s Stumble Into Grace and offers a previously unreleased song from his long-time friend, PJ Harvey, on whose albums he’s played since 1995. He also co-production her outstanding Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea (2000). The love/lust Slow-Motion-Movie-Star is a mesmerising spacey performance that’s perfectly balanced by his own Blue Arrows and the genuinely graceful Little Star.

“I suppose it isn’t surprising that a lot of the songs I do are written by friends,” he says. But what friends! The calibre of songwriter and the quality of song doesn’t get much higher. No wonder he wants to do a third.

“Yeah, life’s pretty good at the moment,” he says. “I get to to travel around Europe for two or three months a year, come back to Australia, do some good work, and I’m not terribly stressed or overworked anymore. I’m not finding it hard to say ‘no’ anymore. These days I have to turn down virtually any production jobs.

My sanity is more important.”