Here’s a scenario to test the friendship in your group of mates. Tell them you’ve won a competition for you and seven of your mates to choose the lineup for a week long summer festival. It’s exactly the sort of thing a beer company would promote, so they’ll lap it up. Now, watch heads butt and strategic alliances form as your mates squabble over pressing issues such as whether The Presets should play the same stage as Birds Of Tokyo.

Now imagine you and your mates hadn’t won a beer bottle cap competition, but had earned this prize the only other way possible – by being part of one of the world’s most influential and leftfield-mining bands of the past 30 years. Your mates have names such as Mick Harvey, Martyn Casey, Jim Sclavunos, Thomas Wydler, James Johnston, Conway Savage and Nick Cave. You grew up in locations as diverse as New York, Germany and Melbourne, and within the music industry, you each have a wealth of both shared and individual drinking stories. It stands to reason that the lineup you and your mates choose is not going to crossover too much with the cookie cutter corporate summer festivals.

Late last year, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds were offered this very opportunity – to choose the lineup, or curate, the first All Tomorrow’s Parties festival in Australia. Bands including Sonic Youth, Mogwai, The Shins, Slint and Dinosaur Jr have done this in weekend-long festivals in the UK and increasingly the USA since Belle and Sebastian kicked the first ATP off in 1999. A decade on, and the festival’s inherent conceptual difference to the same-ole-same-ole has seen the cultish idea of organiser Barry Hogan flourish into a music fan’s ongoing dream series.

Bad Seed viola player Warren Ellis, he of the big bushy beard, is one of All Tomorrow’s Parties’ advocates. It’s a good thing too, given that this is the second time he’s had a hand in curating one, after The Dirty Three put one together in 2007. “It’s a pretty unique idea. As far as festivals go, it’s about as original an idea as Meredith Music Festival, which is still BYO and all about the music. It’s not a corporate thing. This one seems like a great idea that this guy had 10 years ago, to ask a band to curate their own thing.

“When we (The Dirty Three) curated it, it was probably one of the best weekends of music I’ve ever seen in my entire life. It was just phenomenal, walking around and seeing everyone, from Felix Lajko to Alan Vega to Spiritualized. Ed Kuepper was there, Jeffrey Wegener smoking cigars. It was great seeing this whole wide collection of people on site, just walking around. It was wonderful. Hopefully this one will have elements of that too.”

With a few of the same names (Kuepper, English space rockers Spiritualized, Greek lyre magicworker Psaradonis, not to mention many of the Bad Seeds) appearing, there will inevitably be some closeness in vibe to The Dirty Three’s triumphant British weekend. It’s far from all old hands though. The Bad Seeds have selected a dazzlingly diverse lineup, featuring familiar names like The Saints, Robert Forster and Fuck Buttons, playing alongside some older and more niche names that even a seasoned music fan may need the internet to fully get their head across.

“When we (The Dirty Three) curated it, it was probably one of the best weekends of music I’ve ever seen in my entire life. It was just phenomenal, walking around and seeing everyone, from Felix Lajko to Alan Vega to Spiritualized. Ed Kuepper was there, Jeffrey Wegener smoking cigars. It was great seeing this whole wide collection of people on site, just walking around. It was wonderful. Hopefully this one will have elements of that too.”

Covering blues, electronica, punk, psychedelia, avant-noise, Japanese oddballery and more, it’s an intriguing mix. I ask Ellis how Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, a group whose internal dynamics constantly change and whose members are scattered across the world, came to agree on the lineup. Did they all sit down together? Did everyone have an equal say? Did discussions get heated? Did Nick pull rank? “Fortunately we were on tour, and we were on a bus. Even more fortunately we were on tour with Ed Kuepper, so we could get him in the corner and put him in a headlock and make him do the Laughing Clowns show (Sydney and Mt Buller only). That was easy, but to get him to do The Saints as well we just had to get him in an Indian wrestle, and he finally submitted after the lot of us all stacked on him. So that was one name on the bill, two ticks.

“We just sat there and put down a whole bunch of stuff. Everyone was just throwing names in. It starts as quite a random, abstract concept, and then it starts to take shape when the organisers get in there and start saying ‘Well there’s this to consider’ or ‘We’ve got no money left so we can only do this’.

“It’s interesting because when you would suggest something, you wouldn’t be alone in wanting it. There’d be at least two or three people who’d say ‘Yeah, that’s a good idea’ or maybe even everybody. I guess that’s why we all play in a band together, because we have something that we like about certain things, a certain connection.

“From my side of things it looks like a logistical nightmare. Some people you want can’t do it, and some people are too expensive, but it seems to work itself out at some point, and you get what you can. Especially because this is the first time in Australia, bringing people here is a very different proposition than bringing people from America to Europe. The prices are so much more, so it seems like a very different concept to me. It needs to work in a different way. It’s probably good they’re starting out quite big I think.”

I’m brave enough to admit to Ellis that there are some names on the lineup that I’ve never encountered before. Hiding his shocked disgust, he talks me through the German ‘70s supergroup Harmonia. “Well I put their name in. They’re just the greatest electronic band that ever existed, next to Can. If you’ve heard of Neu!… They’re like the supergroup of electronic music. Everybody from David Bowie to Eno has pilfered them. They just put out a couple of albums, and everything they did was fantastic. They must be very old now. I think they’ve played one show or something since back in the day, so I certainly didn’t expect them to say yes, but sometimes it just works that way.”

With performances spread over four nights at the Powerhouse, the week undoubtedly peaks on Thursday, when the curators become the curatees, and Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds play their first Australian set since the release of last year’s extraordinarily well received Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! Given the attention and awards splashed on the album, I ask Ellis what it’s like to be back in the mainstream spotlight in his homeland. Apparently he’s been wearing some super strong sunnies, because it’s gone unnoticed. “Are we? Have they? No, I’m certainly not aware of what’s going on out there. I have no idea actually. I haven’t been out in Australia for a while.”

It’s one hell of a welcome home party planned.

ALL TOMORROW’S PARTIES as curated by NICK CAVE & THE BAD SEEDS runs each night from Tues Jan 13 to Fri Jan 16. Tuesday, HARMONIA play The Powerhouse; Wednesday, MICHAEL GIRA plays The Powerhouse; Thursday, NICK CAVE & THE BAD SEEDS, THE SAINTS, SPIRITUALIZED, ROBERT FORSTER, THE NECKS and JAMES BLOOD ULMER play The Riverstage, & PSARADONIS plays The Powerhouse. On Friday, FUCK BUTTONS, DEAD MEADOW and AFRIRAMPO play The Powerhouse.

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