Former Bad Seed Mick Harvey has been speaking about his reasons for his 2009 departure from the group. Harvey that he left thanks to "a combination of an awful lot of things. I think that some things have changed inside the band and my role in the band had changed gradually and things that I was doing outside the band had changed gradually," Harvey told Spinner.com. "The balance between how much time I was spending on the creative side and the management side of things had changed and the balance wasn’t right anymore."
As is hinted at in the Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard’s film that accompanies the forthcoming Murder Ballads reissue, it was around the time of that album being recorded that Harvey began to feel his role within the Bad Seeds had started to change.
"There were a few key things that kind of pushed it over the edge, I guess," he said. "That was mostly to do with the fact that I got to the point where I felt that I couldn’t really say what I felt anymore with what was going on about the way certain things were being done because I’d said what I thought about them but was ignored.
"It’s also about the way some the material was being approached. I thought some of the stuff was being dumbed down but that’s just my opinion. But it wasn’t a good situation."
