All Tomorrows Parties - Mick Harvey

First published on 15 Jan 2009. Updated on 20 Jan 2009.

It's no small honour to be the first curators of Australia ATP. I suppose in some ways we're a logical choice for All Tomorrow's Parties to bring it into Australia – in fact, I think Barry [Hogan, ATP founder] wanted the Bad Seeds to do one of the very early ones in England when it was still kind of a weird holiday camp thing. It's a very different structure to the normal kind of festival. I don't how many people would be able to kick it off because it's a very different concept for people to get their heads around, so we'll kind of demonstrate what the thing is and how it works.

What were the criteria for the acts you selected for the bill? Well we're a little bit limited in that we can't fly out all the international people that we'd like because it'd just be too expensive, whereas in England or America in the summer there's a lot of people around playing festivals. We were really hoping to get [influential 70s electro-punk duo] Suicide to play: they were very into the idea but they're kind of quite old now and Alan [Vega] didn't want to take the flight. I mean he's 70, so...

Oh come on: Vega can come out here and do some goddamn shows, surely? Well, he's got a youngish boy too, and there's been a lot of complications with school... No, he's very sweet and I fully understand why they chose not to do it. It would've been great it but again, it's a fairly limited capacity. It's kind of a bit of a boutique so either you start charging $300 a ticket or you just don't have too many international acts.

Suicide aside, was there a particular win that you were delighted by? There's a few. It's great Psarandonis has been able to work out. He's this legendary Cretan folk musician – and there you go, he's 70, so if he can make it [laughs]. And Afrirampo, the female Japanese duo, they're pretty wild apparently. There's quite a lot of reunion sorts of things: it's great to have The Reels on the bill, and [70s Melbourne punk band] The Primitive Calculators, and the Laughing Clowns reunion too. We had Ed [Kuepper] and Jeff [Wegener] on tour with us in Europe doing their duo thing and ended up with not only the Laughing Clowns but also [Kuepper's pioneering punk band] The Saints. There was a phone call to Ed saying, "Are you gonna be able to do this, you're gonna do two shows?" and he's like [airily] "Oh yeah, I can do it, no worries."

Did all of the Bad Seeds have to agree on the acts? The suggestions have come from all around the place and sometimes it's like two or three members will go "Yeah, that's great, let's put that on." Like Jim [Sclavunos, percussion] and Warren [Ellis, violin] have basically rubber stamped a few of the things while me and Nick are still sitting there going "No, I don't know what that is," but it's on the bill anyway. If two or three people say 'yeah that's great', then it's in.

All Tomorrow's Parties happens at Cockatoo Island on Sat 17 and Sun 18 Jan.