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Written by Jim Dunn Tuesday, 02 June 2009 12:54

I have worked with an awful lot of fantastic artists and everybody I have worked with has influenced me to a greater or lesser degree, plus all the stuff I have listened to as a fan ever since I was a kid—everything seeps in somewhere at some point and kind of surfaces.

 

 

 

 

 

Love, unlike its often mistaken twin sex, is a selfless act that requires participants to give of themselves with the belief that their contribution will be matched equally, though not always identically. We have all found ourselves in this situation—infatuation, interaction, appraisal and perhaps love. Rock love is what happens when two people (it is usually two, but there are many cases of polyamory) meet and their intermingling produces a thick bisque of music. Lennon and McCartney, Simon and Garfunkel, the Gallagher brothers, Jagger and Richards, St. Hubbins and Tufnel are just a few. Add to that list Richard and Linda Thompson, Carly Simon and James Taylor, Ike and Tina Turner, and The White Stripes—though these unions often lead to great songs about breakups and recriminations. PJ Harvey and John Parish also have that intense love of music and their relationship has spawned dozens of tracks over the years like small, boisterous children. When they speak, they speak in lyrical terms and their conversations have memorable intensity and play.

Harvey and Parish met through a mutual musician friend in 1987. Parish soon brought her in to his band Automatic Dlamini and she acted as lead singer on their second album, never released but much bootlegged. Though their late-’80s union did not produce any official recordings, it did produce a personal and professional relationship that has spanned decades. Parish has long acted as Harvey's musical compatriot, sharing musical inspiration and intuition which has led to two albums, 1996’s Dance Hall at Louse Point and this year's A Woman A Man Walked By. Parish has also acted as producer (with Flood) on Harvey’s 1995 To Bring You My Love, as well as being a multi-instrumentalist on several of her albums. Parish acts as a combination muse, peer and foil to Harvey (and others; Parish has also performed on and produced albums for such artists as Eels and 16 Horsepower). His own career includes several soundtracks for film, solo albums and band projects.

Harvey, famously shy but bold and forceful on her albums and during performance,  is the alter ego of Parish, reserved and shy on stage, seemingly most comfortable when wrapped around a guitar. Together they meld to make a complete entity that is one fluid motion and one complete thought. A Woman A Man Walked By is a series of conversations that have been held for the last decade between the two collaborators since their first album. Where Dance Hall offered some reserve, the new album takes a more scattered approach, but one which has devastating effect. The listener cannot help but be riveted by such lines as, “He had chicken liver balls, he had chicken liver spleen/ he had chicken liver heart, made of chicken liver parts/ lily-livered little parts, lily-livered little parts.”

In a wide-ranging interview Parish comes across as the consummate British gentleman, more of a conversationalist than interviewee. It is easy to see how working with him would be a process that would open one up to exploration and musical growth.

We saw you at South by Southwest in March and the performance was the highlight of the festival. Bringing the album to stage must have been challenging, but first let’s talk about the process of creating the album. You are responsible for all the music and Polly wrote most of the lyrics. I know it was a fairly long process putting this album together.

All the music came first, and then I would write and record pretty complete arrangements. In some cases, [I would] completely finished instrumentals pieces I could put on a CD and send to Polly. She’d live with them for a while until she got some lyrics she was happy with, and she would record those on top of the CD that I sen. We'd listen to what we had at the end and, when we felt we had songs that we were happy with, then we would go into the studio and actually put the things together.

The idea, then, is that you write the music need to express all your emotions, express all your thoughts about it without words, and then she adds words to them. Were there times where you contradicted each other?

We certainly didn’t work on every single idea. There were some ideas that one or the other of us felt wasn’t working for some reason and if that was the case we just didn’t pursue that idea, we didn’t want to compromise any stage or talk the other one into something that one of us wasn’t completely happy with. There were certainly one or two lyrics that didn’t work for me, but it wasn’t necessarily that they contradicted the emotion that I’d put into the music; it was more that I just didn’t feel that they were the best we could do. I know Polly felt the same about some of the bits of music I wrote. She liked them, but didn’t think that it was different enough from something else that we maybe had done before. That was the thing we are really striving to do, is to make something different, something unique that doesn’t repeat all the ideas.

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In a way, the album is like a conversation.

Very much, because it’s obviously two people’s work, and obviously these two people have a very close musical relationship that’s been ongoing for more than 20 years. It's developed along the way, and occasionally we dovetail and make an record together where we are collaborating as equal parts, as opposed to one of us helping the other one out on their records.

Was there a long interaction prior to Dancehall as well? With the current album, we are talking 10 years or so.

Yeah. We’d known each other for quite a few years before Dancehall because, you know poor Polly used to be a member of my sort of a band that I had in Bristol back in the late ’80s.

How do you pronounce the name of the band, by the way?
[Laughs] Automatic Lah-mean-ee. An unpronounceable name, destined for obscurity.

Sounds better when you say it. You had two albums come out of that band, right?

Yeah, we did. It was kind of an interesting band. I just started producing at that time; I didn’t know much technically, and I didn’t know how to produce a band that sounded like that. We were the wrong band for that time. It was a time of big digital reverbs, and it was really the wrong sound for what we were trying to do, but we didn’t know how to record. I didn’t know enough about how to break the rules of recording at that time.

With an album like this, perhaps unfortunately, I play that game of what the influences are. I wonder about your influences because you sound like an audiophile with many interests, particularly on this album. What are your influences going into this?

You’re right, there are many influences, because obviously I have been listening to music and been immersed in music for 35, 40 years. There’s a huge amount of stuff that has influenced me along the way and I can’t think specifically…actually, I’m telling a lie. I can think of a definite influence on this recording. The track “16:15:14,” I had in mind, I wanted to make something that gave me the same feeling that Led Zeppelin's “Four Sticks” did, kind of a tumbling, unstoppable motion. I didn’t want it to sound like it; I wanted it to make me feel the same way that track made me feel. So that was a specific influence that I can name. But as a producer and a musician, I have worked with an awful lot of fantastic artists, and everybody I have worked with has influenced me to a greater or lesser degree, plus all the stuff I have listened to as a fan ever since I was a kid—everything seeps in somewhere at some point and kind of surfaces. You just hope there’s enough interesting mixtures of influences that is going to make something totally unique and fascinating to people.

I listened to it and the nicest thing I could say about it (and I did say nice things) is that  I can’t really imagine anyone else making that album.

That’s a compliment.

You don’t hear a lot of albums like that these days; it’s refreshing. It reminded me of the Beatles' White Album, all over the board, but it hangs together very nicely.

That’s interesting; somebody else did say that to me actually, did bring up the White Album and pretty much in similar terms to you in that you don’t know what’s coming up next, but it does seem to work as a whole record, surprisingly. We were very aware of it—not the White Album, though I do very much like that record—but we were aware when writing and certainly when we were recording it. We made sure that when we sequenced the record that every song fit the dynamic of each particular song and enhanced the dynamics of the next song, so it worked as a journey rather than a sort of a contradictory set of songs. We wanted to make sure that every song worked as an individual piece and then that every song worked through juxtaposition as a collection of pieces. Obviously I’m aware that people don’t buy records in the order that you put them out or even buy all the songs—they might just want to buy three—but the most we can do is put them into a sequence so it works as a body of works for us, and if people want to experience it in different ways, of course that is their prerogative.

{mospagebreak}In bringing something like that to the stage do you approach the material differently? What are you trying to present when you bring that to the stage?

The show that we’re doing at the moment, that we’ve been playing in Europe and bringing to the United States, is a very dynamic show, as is the record; it moves from two quite extreme points, from very tender minimalist pieces to really extremely brutal, full-on rock pieces. It’s a five-piece band and it’s really fantastic. It’s been a pleasure to watch it develop over this period of touring. You literally saw the very first show at South by Southwest; that was the very first show that we did. I enjoyed that show, but I feel the band has really developed and grown from that point.

I don’t know a lot about your stage style but you seem to be the ultimate concentrating musician on stage.

[Laughs] I’m not a big showman. I really enjoy playing live because I enjoy that experience of playing on stage with other musicians, because something happens that doesn’t happen in the studio. There are other things that I enjoy about the studio work. It was the first one and there were an awful lot of technical things to remember. It was a technically challenging show to put together because of all the changes. I have never done a show where I have had to change instruments or sounds so frequently. So it took me and the whole band a good half dozen shows before I felt we could really start playing the music and not just be thinking about the technical: What guitar am I playing? What amp am I using for this song?

Speaking of instruments, you used a ukulele on one or two of the songs on the album. I’ve got a friend in Hawaii who plays the uke who now loves you even more.

That’s fantastic. That ukulele that I play is from Hawaii. An American friend of mine’s mother brought it back from Hawaii for me as a gift when I was about 18 and I was thoroughly ungrateful. Ukulele? I play the electric guitar! But it kind of sat on the wall for a long time. I think one day I picked it up and thought, “Hmm, this kind of sounds good.” I frequently used it on records, but I think this is the first time that I have taken it out on tour and, yeah, it’s great.

When you put together music, do you hear certain instruments in your head, or do you think of the music first and say, oh, that instrument would work with that?

It’s really quite an instinctive process when I’m writing stuff. Sometimes I have a little tune in my head and I think, “Oh that might sound nice on a banjo or on the Fender Rhodes or whatever." I’ll start off on that instrument; sometimes it works and you develop it, and other times you keep trying. It’s really a sort of a trial and error thing for me. I have a lot of instruments lying around the house, and when I’m writing I just start layering things up. Sometimes I know the kind of sound I want, and sometimes I have no idea and will just pick something at random. And sometimes I will deliberately pick something that I think is the most unlikely instrument to go with what I just put down because I am curious to see if it surprises me and sends me off into a direction that I wasn’t intending

Let me touch a little bit on your production work. You’ve worked with some really interesting bands and voices, especially Eels and 16 Horsepower. When you go into projects like that, as a producer, how do you add, but not subtract from, a band’s sound? Do you go in there and feel that you need to change the sound? As a producer, how do you feel about that?

I wouldn’t generally go in feeling I needed to change the sound; if I felt that I needed to change the sound I probably would not have agreed to do that production job. I might look at arrangements and suggest changes if I think a specific song isn’t working. But generally, in order for me to accept a production job, I have to feel that there is something interesting about the band, and feel like I could be of help in some direction. If it was something as fundamental as changing the sound of the band, I would say that’s probably too much responsibility, because then it would be turning into one of my records. If I’m producing somebody else, my feeling is I’m trying to help them make the record that they want to make rather than steer them into making a record I would want to make.

Has the collaboration between you and Polly Jean Harvey gotten easier or harder as you have gotten to know each other longer?

You know what, we are both very stubborn and sometimes we can have a bit of a stand off for a while. We have always been able to communicate ever since we started working together, so, there has always been a level of trust, and that probably has grown as we’ve gotten older and remained close friends over the years. | Jim Dunn

PJ Harvey and John Parish U.S. Tour 2009
6/2 Atlanta, GA
6/3 Covington, KY
6/5 Washington DC
6/6 Boston, MA
6/7 Philadelphia, PA
6/9 New York, Y
6/11 Indianapolis, IN
6/12 Chicago, IL
6/13 Apple Valley, MN
6/16 Seattle, WA
6/17 Portland, OR
6/19 San Francisco, CA
6/20 Los Angeles, CA
6/21 San Diego, CA

PJ Harvey and John Parish at SXSW2009. (photos: Jim Dunn){gallery}sxsw09_pjharvey:100:100:0{/gallery}