PJ Harvey & John Parish
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black hearted love Words: Abi Bliss Photography: Cat Stevens In a stone inn in rural Dorset, PJ Harvey and long-time collaborator John Parish talk the rapture, beauty and disgust of new album A Woman A Man Walked By. Plan B peruses a menu, will pass on the chicken livers, if it’s all the same to you East Coker is a place where the name looms larger John Parish prepare to once more sit on the sofa her previous guise of austere black or grunge-ironic than the village itself. These days an appealing and talk. As Parish studies his bowl of parsnip leopardskin for a vamp-drag of piled hairpieces and outskirt of Yeovil (whose road signs, with baffling soup, Harvey changes from her photo-session bone-clinging dresses. At Glastonbury 1995 her optimism, proclaim the town to have ‘The heart dress into jeans and a jacket. The poet may have dazzling pink catsuit and Joan Crawford eyelashes of the country, the mind of a city’) it was written dubbed April the cruellest month, but February could be seen from several fields’ distance. into poetic history by TS Eliot, who traced his English is generally the chilliest, and even the Helyar’s Then came Dance Hall At Louse Point, written ancestors back to here, and whose ashes lie in the log fire isn’t enough to fend off goose pimples while touring To Bring You My Love and recorded village churchyard. on bare arms. soon after, as the eyelashes were peeled off and the After Eliot visited in the Thirties, he composed Change accomplished, she settles down next panstick scoured away. A deliciously world-weary ‘East Coker’, part of his metaphysical opus Four to Parish, who projects the dignified affability of cover of Lieber and Stoller’s ‘Is That All There Is?’ Quartets. The poem paints the village as a place a man who can enter middle age without too aside, Parish wrote and recorded all the music: where time’s passing is a cycle of decay and rebirth – much soul-searching about how his time has Harvey found, fitted and sang the words. Thirteen “In my beginning is my end” – where past ghosts been spent. Harvey is a famously reserved years on, they’ve revisited that arrangement for still dance lightly across the fields on summer interviewee, but having Parish there takes A Woman A Man Walked By. So why now? midnights. As the poem turns to the horror and the heat off a little. If the questioning lingers “Well, we’d always assumed we’d make another inevitability of death, from the third, and bleakest, on her too long, that intense, hazel-eyed stare record together,” says Parish, “with me writing the section comes these lines: need not frost over in polite evasiveness, but music and Polly writing the lyrics. It came about now ‘It’s something that we guard against, the possibility of weakening the work by compromising each other’s ideas’ – Parish ”Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but can be safely deflected towards her cup of tea simply because Polly came across an old tape with conscious of nothing – I said to my soul, be still, as he answers. the song ‘Black Hearted Love’, when she was and wait without hope”. A Woman A Man Walked By is billed as Harvey sorting out all her tapes at the end of the White Generations later, they’re echoed, yet denied, and Parish reunited, but in reality the Yeovil-born Chalk recording.” Although Parish brought in by PJ Harvey’s White Chalk: “When under ether/The musician has been a longstanding presence in PJ regular Eric Drew Feldman, Autolux drummer mind comes alive/But conscious of nothing/But Harvey’s career. Having been tipped off by a friend Carla Azar and guitarist Giovanni Ferrario to flesh the will to survive”. who overheard her singing, he met her after she out some tracks, Harvey denies having felt tempted tried to book his group, Automatic Dlamini, to play to add her own music to his compositions. Yet Sitting solidly on a corner in the village, The Helyar at her 18th birthday party. The gig fell through, there’s no hint of two strong-willed artists jostling Arms has been much renovated since those inter- but Harvey went on to join the band, playing sax, for the creative top bunk: in fact, the album seems war years when untroubled lanes and picturesque guitar and singing backing vocals until 1991. so much the work of one unified sensibility that rural toil provided a fertile backdrop for Eliot’s Automatic Dlamini came to an end around it could easily have been billed as a new PJ Harvey literary meditation. Nevertheless, it’s still one the time of PJ Harvey’s first album, Dry, with Parish record without anyone noticing. With such a sharp of those ageless stone inns where light passes focusing once more on his previous sideline of division of labour, surely they must have had some through the windowpanes and halts, suspended producing bands. They worked together again musical disagreements? at the exact late-afternoon point when it would on 1995’s To Bring You My Love, his playing and “There wasn’t really one on this record. be best to put aside poetic scribblings and break production work helping reshape Harvey’s sound It’s something that we guard against, the possibility out the toasting fork and slippers. A red setter from the spinal fluids-and-rust-lubricated guitar of weakening the work by compromising each weaves around the barstools, tastes the air and grind of the Steve Albini-recorded Rid Of Me to other’s ideas, so if there’s anything we have grins, scenting tantalising leftovers from the a gothic melodrama, flawlessly staged between disagreements about, that we’re not 100 per cent weekly pie night. blood-crimson velvet curtains. confident about, we won’t work on that piece. What would Eliot have made of the duo The performances around To Bring You My We don’t try and persuade each other of the other now emerging from the nostalgically named Love saw Harvey lay down her guitar and step person’s point of view,” Parish replies. Apple Loft? Having installed themselves in the pub deliberately under that uniquely harsh spotlight “We have had disagreements on other projects, for a fortnight, doing press for their new album, reserved for female singers – but on her terms, though,” Harvey points out. “Sometimes we A Woman A Man Walked By, Polly Harvey and mocking the expectation of glamour by swapping naturally – or perhaps unnaturally – seem to hear 36 | plan b pj harvey & john parish rhythm in the opposite way to each other. years/Jesus, come closer/I think my time is near”. I remember one week-long disagreement going But even the supposedly naked hurt of Dry clothed on when we recorded ‘The Devil’ off White Chalk. frustration, lust and jealousy in tales of Samson We were really in a big sulk with each other for and Delilah and sheela-na-gigs. a long time.” Now Harvey’s lyrics are more subtly defined and Who won in the end? less obvious in their reference points, sketching out “He did,” she grins. “Dammit.” more ambiguous realms where outlines are lighter Both of you seem keen to push yourselves and and the emotions spill over and mix more freely. others forward. Can you each recognise when If listeners to ‘When Under Ether’ tried to pin the the other is working within their comfort zone, song down to a specific scenario, the most and jolt them out of it? commonly seized upon being a woman’s experience “Yes, but I don’t think we had to do that much of abortion, they risked losing grasp of the song’s with this record,” Parish says. “We’re both quite gauzy, between-worlds evocation of psychological rigorous self-editors, so we tried to move beyond and spiritual awakening. And so when ‘Sixteen, that before we even got together for this record.” Fifteen, Fourteen’ concludes with Harvey feverishly whispering “There is no rapture in the garden” over on collaboration, and voice and over, leaving unanswered the question of what If PJ Harvey’s 2004 album Uh Huh Her brought happens when the countdown reaches zero. for the first time the suggestion of over-familiarity, ‘Leaving California’ changes the tone once Harvey herself must have sensed this: for 2007’s again, with a piano waltz that sees Harvey return White Chalk she responded by embracing the to the brittle, regret-filled soprano of White Chalk. challenge of expression through both a new Considering how each successive album has seen instrument (piano) and a new, eerily high vocal her find a new kind of voice to suit the music, does register. But plenty has happened for John Parish, she feel completely in control of it? too, in the years since Dance Hall At Louse Point. “No, I don’t. I don’t at all. I really hope that it He produced a wealth of other albums – including doesn’t come across as just doing vocal acrobatics. Eels’ Souljacker; which he co-wrote – working I hope it doesn’t sound like that to people because with Goldfrapp, Sparklehorse and Giant Sand; it’s certainly not intended to be,” she says, sounding scored film soundtracks and released two other hurt at the thought. “I don’t feel in control of my solo albums, How Animals Move and Once Upon voice, because I feel it’s really instinctive.