They’ve known each other for more than two decades. Now PJ Harvey and John Parish have collaborated again.
THE PRETTY-AS-a-picture-postcard Dorset village of East Croker has a pub, the Helyar Arms (dating back to 1460), which wouldn’t look out of place in a Daphne Du Maurier tale of revenge, retribution and rum smuggling. Thatched roofs abound, a solitary church stands proud, locals attend a mums’n’tots session at the village hall, and the local cafe is set up by Mencap in order to assist the special needs citizens of the area.
Into this picture walks a woman dressed in matching red coat and lipstick. Next to her walks a man whose demeanour and dress sense couldn’t be of more contrast – Oxfam sober, sensible and conservative.
As they take their seats in the pub’s restaurant (Monday night is Pie’n’Pint Night), Polly Jean Harvey and John Parish prepare themselves for the first of several day’s face-to-face grillings from the world’s music media.
They are quite the likely couple, but then they've known each other since the late 1980s, when they were in an obscure Somerset band called Automatic Dlamini. Their paths have converged on a regular basis since then – Parish doing frequent production duties on Harvey's albums and, more strategically perhaps, on their collaborative 1996 debut, Dance Hall at Louse Point. Thirteen years later comes their follow-up, A Woman a Man Walked By.
In the manner of good friends sitting down to have a chat about a collaborative piece of work, Harvey and Parish occasionally veer well away from the direct question; conversational tangents play tag with the matters in hand. They joke with each other; at other times they conspire, and in one instance are overtly defensive of what is, to all intents and purposes, an unobtrusive question. (I askwhat they like and dislike about each other and get a haughty answer from Harvey: “I would never, ever tell anyone but John what I liked and disliked about him.” Crikey.)
It is Harvey's liking for covering new ground (or, some might say, going over the same ground in different ways) that has kept her at the forefront of unconventional rock music for the past 15 years. From her 1992 debut, Dry, through to 2007's career-defining, perfectly realised White Chalk, Harvey has subverted the traditions of the female singer-songwriter to the extent that she has become the touchstone for any female performer who wants to be noted for creating something outside the norm.
This is the songwriter who is drawn to music that is deliberately unsettling, uncomfortable and dark, and which deals virtually exclusively with taboo subject matter. "That's really where my heart lies," says the woman who, unsurprisingly, has yet to watch an episode of X Factor.
For the moment, however, Harvey has laid aside her solo work in order to engage in specific collaboration with Parish. The results are inevitably singular, a mind-bending mixture of surprisingly nifty, straight-ahead rock ( Black Hearted Love), defiantly radiounfriendly tunes ( The Chair), parental advisory sticker territory (the title track) and Polly – quite literally – barking mad ( Pig Will Not).
“The pros in our collaboration,” Parish explains, “are that because we trust each other’s opinions; we enable each other to take bigger risks and to experiment further than we might otherwise.
“A con for collaborations in general – although it’s one that we are particularly good at avoiding – is that it is possible, if not common, to compromise your ideas in order to accommodate your collaborator. That is something we avoid by the simple fact that if we’re not 100 per cent behind an idea, then we don’t work on it; there’s no attempt to persuade the other person into doing it, just because one of us might like it. We don’t go into that area at all.”
“I see this very much as an equal collaboration,” says Harvey. “We mutually feel the same away about things, and instinctively our standards are similar with what we’re trying to achieve. So there has never been a position where one of us is really fighting a corner for the music or the words. If I have any doubts about some words, I’ll say that I’m not sure about it, and John would validate that by telling me they’re not really good enough. And when that happens, we wouldn’t use them.”
And they wouldn’t get miffed about this? Some collaborations may be equal, but some, surely, are less equal than others?
Parish: “No, we don’t because our relationship flourishes on being able to tell each other that. We know that we like each other and that we like each other’s work, so there’s no hurt feelings because there’s a level of confidence between us that criticism is not going to destroy.”
“And there’s very little ego, too,” adds Harvey. “I always ask John’s opinion on my work, whether I’m working with him or not in some capacity. There have been times when John hasn’t thought too highly about some things I’ve been working on, and he’ll tell me. I can take that from him, but I still want to know his opinion.”
Why is his opinion so important? “Because I believe he has sound judgment, probably above most other friends of mine, and I feel very lucky to have someone who will give me an absolute honest opinion. I value that, I respect it. Plus, he’s usually right about things.”
On A Woman a Man Walked By, as on other albums involving PJ Harvey, the words make even more of an impression than the music. From around the age of four, Harvey says, she was interested in storytelling and writing. She's never lost her love of words and reading and storytelling.
“I was really interested in English at school, studied English literature at A level, and fully intended to go on to do a degree in English literature at one point. But the love has never left me; I find words endlessly interesting, a wonderful thing to play with and see what you can make with them.
“I’m fascinated by learning words all the time, and as I get older I find I’m more interested in the derivation of words, to the point where I’d actually quite like to do a course in how language has evolved. I definitely have that in mind – there are so many words you can see roughly where they might have come from, so I’d be into the study of that, for certain.”
Perhaps this love of words stems from Harvey’s rural upbringing. She was tutored in the arts by her hippie parents, and lived on a farm where she rode horses daily (she remains an accomplished rider, well versed in showjumping, dressage and the like). And she has lived in Dorset, give or take a few years and a few cities, all her life. Is it a conscious effort on her part to steer clear of the so-called epicentres of the music industry?
“Not at all – I don’t always stay here. I have spent some years living in America. I find I need a change after a while; it’s important to have perspective, and things could get one-dimensional if you stay living in the same place all the time. I’m in a very lucky position in that I can afford to travel and I have a job that enables me to travel a lot, too. I try to make the most of that.
“I wouldn’t want to stay in one place anyway. I think travel provides a different stimulus, which for a writer can be useful. But, yes, you can certainly uncover quite a lot of material by just staying in the one place all your life.”
One place, perhaps, but many changes. It’s clear that the constant pushing of boundaries and being able to satisfy her creative need of expression is crucial to Harvey. What’s important to her, you sense – indeed, what drives her – is to come up with work that is not just a challenge to her but also to others.
"My natural instinct is to do a complete about-face," she remarks. "I knew that John would provide that with the music – the complete change in energy. I knew that it was going to be entirely different to White Chalk, and that's exactly what I wanted. His music was going to give me things that I could never have come up with myself, so I knew he was going to throw curve balls at me."
Did that include being ready, willing and able to bark like a dog? “Oh, that was enormous fun, I must say. Quite tiring, but a lot of fun. Actually, a lot of the songs on this record have a great sense of fun.”
Did PJ Harvey say fun? The common misguided perception is that you’re quite the Very Serious Artist? “Oh, yes, I’ve been bemused by that perception my entire career.”
She shrugs her shoulders, shakes her mane of hair. “I can’t fathom it out, to be honest, but I’ve learned to live with it. Long, long ago I learned not to mind it, because it’s a waste of energy and there’s nothing you can do about it. I think the only time I was ever a bit distressed by it was back in the early ’90s, after the first couple of interviews I ever did. I have since learned to ignore it.”
** A Woman a Man Walked Byis released today. www.pjharvey.net, www.johnparish.com
