|
Post by Modern Method. on Mar 20, 2009 14:39:44 GMT -5
The first single from PJ Harvey and John Parish's 'A Woman A Man Walked By' will be accompanied by a video from British artists Jake and Dinos Chapman (The Chapman Brothers).
You can view the video on the NME website
The single 'Black Hearted Love' will be released on April 13th through Island Records. A 7" vinyl version will be backed with new track, 'Within A Month', and the CD single and digital bundle will also contain a further unreleased track, 'False Fire'.
A digital download of 'Black Hearted Love' is available now. "We were both very excited that Jake and Dinos Chapman wanted to make a video for 'Black Hearted Love'. The result is beautiful, mysterious, surreal and enhances the song wonderfully," said PJ Harvey and John Parish of the video.
From this Monday 5 tracks from A Woman A Man Walked By can be previewed on the Last FM website.
Nominated for the Turner Prize in 2003, The Chapman Brothers came to prominence as part of Charles Saatchi's Young British Artists, they exhibited at White Cube in 2008. The Chapman Brothers presented a suitably surreal treatment for the song, "We decided 'Black Hearted Love' deserved something haunting and enigmatic - yet brazen and colourful. Hence, a collision between an ominous forest and a garish bouncy castle seemed entirely appropriate… Working with Polly and John was an absolute pleasure."
|
|
|
Post by MelancholyEcho on Mar 21, 2009 4:01:37 GMT -5
I was meant to see her on her Uh Huh Her tour in London but nobody would go with me I ended up seeing her by my ownsome for this tour. It was worth it, but I wouldn't go to a gig alone again though
|
|
|
Post by Modern Method. on Mar 21, 2009 8:55:57 GMT -5
Yeah, I never chance going to a gig on my own. They never would be as fun.
|
|
|
Post by Modern Method. on Mar 21, 2009 19:16:11 GMT -5
Polly Harvey, John Parish, Eric Drew Feldman, Giovanni Ferrario and Jean Marc Butty played a secret gig in Bridport, Somerset.
Black Hearted Love 16 15 14 Rope Bridge Crossing Urn With Dead Flowers In A Drained Pool Civil War Correspondent The Soldier Taut Un Cercle Autour Du Soleil The Chair Leaving California A Woman A Man Walked By / The Crow Knows Where All The Little Children Go Passionless, Pointless Cracks In The Canvas Pig Will Not ----------------- False Fire April
Polly Harvey (Vocals) John Parish (Guitar) Eric Drew Feldman (Keyboards) Giovanni Ferrario (Bass) Jean Marc Butty (Drums)
|
|
|
Post by AlienSexFiend on Mar 22, 2009 16:35:55 GMT -5
I saw her last night. She played here in Austin. I was able to get in the VIP balcony too. I got in for free to the whole thing. She was awesome. She didn't play anything but her stuff with John Parish though. I took a few pics, but they came out crappily.
Anyway, yes, she's awesome live.
|
|
|
Post by Modern Method. on Mar 22, 2009 19:45:58 GMT -5
Aww, so jealous! hopefully I'll catch her again on this tour. If you have a half decent picture, please do post.
I'm presuming that she wore a black dress?
|
|
|
Post by AlienSexFiend on Mar 22, 2009 21:28:32 GMT -5
Nope, she wore white actually. Yeah, a couple came out so so I guess. I think I was just too high up or something. I could see her fine, but the cell phone camera seemed to think the opposite.
|
|
|
Post by Modern Method. on Mar 23, 2009 7:22:33 GMT -5
I know, cell phones are the worst for concert pics.
|
|
|
Post by Garbage Addict on Mar 25, 2009 6:05:29 GMT -5
Black Hearted Love is just stunning I love it!
|
|
|
Post by Modern Method. on Mar 28, 2009 7:00:10 GMT -5
TWO weeks ago, Polly Jean Harvey played at the Bridport Arts Centre. It's not a venue often mentioned in the same breath as New York's Madison Square Garden or Sydney Opera House, both of which have played host to the dynamic English rock singer in the past, but it's a significant one in her career. Bridport in Dorset is where P.J. Harvey, 39, was born. The arts centre, the first stop of many to promote her new album A Woman a Man Walked By, is a gig she has played several times in her 18 years as a recording artist and one that she visits from time to time. You can take the girl out of Hardy country, but you can't take the Hardy country out of the girl, it seems. Harvey's homecoming launches yet another phase of her varied music career. A Woman a Man Walked By -- released this weekend and reviewed opposite page -- is her second collaboration with her buddy of 20 years, writer, musician and producer John Parish, following their 1996 album Dance Hall at Louse Point. The pair have come together again almost by accident, after Harvey discovered an old song they had written together and decided to expand that one song, the album's opener Blackhearted Love, into a larger project. "We both had just forgotten about it," she says in her gentle, west country twang. "It seemed such a shame that it was just lying around not being used and that was the catalyst to me asking John to collaborate on another body of work." Harvey and Parish have been friends since the late '80s, when she served her musical apprenticeship playing saxophone and singing in Parish's band Automatic Dlamini. In turn he has worked on some of her most commercially successful albums, playing on Is This Desire? (1998) and co-producing To Bring You My Love (1995) and the new project's predecessor, White Chalk (2007). Their relationship, Parish says, is based solidly on trust. "That's vital," he says. "We've been friends and worked together for more than 20years now, so there's a lot of common ground we can refer to. We're also able to be very directwith each other without taking offence." A Woman a Man Walked By is musically at odds with White Chalk, which -- in a typically radical Harvey swerve -- consisted mainly of piano ballads. This one is a mix of twisted folk, electronica, grunge and out-and-out pop, with Harvey's aching vocals ranging from brittle tobombastic. It follows a path similar to Louse Point in that Parish wrote the music and Harvey the lyrics, but it's slightly more accessible than the previous collaboration, which pleased some critics but sold relatively poorly. This one, Harvey believes, shows the maturity of their relationship, personally and professionally. "The biggest difference is that as players and singers and writers we are both much more accomplished than we were then and I guess that's a good thing to see ... that you have improved at the thing you have given your lifeto," Harvey says. "We worked quite separately to each other this time. It was only in the last two weeks that we went into the studio together. John writes the music completely away from me. I don't hear any of it until I receive it in the post. "Then I work on the words entirely separately and send it back. That's also what we did on Louse Point." The songs range from the bouncy Blackhearted Love, an unashamedly melodic rock song, to the more angular The Chair and Leaving California, both of which are shaped by vocals that seem to be coming from the very core of Harvey's soul. The ambiguity in that pained expression and in her lyrics has been the cornerstone of her success. It's sexy on one level, almost indefinable on another. "Everybody takes the songs differently," she says. "Some people might see one of my songs as being aggressive, whereas I might see it as being black comedy, but that doesn't matter to me. Primarily I feel I want to hand over the work and people can make what they want of it. I'm very happy with that." Parish also writes soundtracks and there's a filmic undercurrent or ambience to many of the songs on the album. "Sometimes that will lead me into a piece of writing that I've done already a few years back or it will lead me into writing something completely new for it," Harvey says. "I wait to see what kind of atmosphere or visual picture the music gives me." The idea of writing for film is one that appeals to Harvey, too, although she sounds a little disappointed that offers haven't been flooding in. It's an area she would "like to pursue more", she says. "I've always wanted to get into writing soundtracks for films or music for theatre." Harvey got her chance last year when she was asked to write music for a Broadway production of Ibsen's Hedda Gabler. Although the show wasn't a success, Harvey welcomed the opportunity. "I immediately agreed because I had wanted to be asked for so long and nobody had asked me," she says. Harvey and Parish will tour together for the next three months playing material from the new album and from Louse Point. There are no Australian dates so far, but she is confident they will come here next summer. "I always love coming to Australia to play," she says. That love was reciprocated during her short Australian tour last year. Ditching the confronting, sexy rock persona that has characterised her band performances, Harvey unveiled a new side to her personality and her craft by playing a series of solo shows that melted critics and fans. "I really enjoyed playing solo," she says. "It's something that I'm going to continue to do from now on. Obviously, practically, it's not that hard to do a show like that on the spur of the moment, but I thoroughly enjoyed it as a musician and asinger. I enjoyed the openness one has to have with an audience in that situation. "You can't be any other way and that helped me a lot in the way I present myself and my relationship with the audience." www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25236187-5013575,00.html
|
|
|
Post by Modern Method. on Mar 28, 2009 7:01:01 GMT -5
The avant-garde singer-songwriter has teamed up with an old friend to shock again. Nick Hasted reports Polly Jean Harvey and John Parish are sitting across from each other in a quiet hotel with the comfort of 20 years acquaintance. Harvey, of course, is the star, the woman whose Mercury-winning album Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea (2000) isnt even a career highlight. Her debut Dry (1992) marked her territory with roaring blues songs such as Sheela-Na-Gig, referencing Gaelic female church gargoyles with stretched-apart vaginas and mad grins. This wasnt going to be a ride for faint hearts. Harveys peers over eight cussedly unpredictable albums have been the likes of her friend Thom Yorke, and Bjrk: musicians who have kept large, loyal audiences as they pilot pop careers into the avant-garde wilds. This doesnt make her an easy interviewee. Her personal life and lyrics are off-limits. The image that sticks in my mind for days afterwards is of Harvey looking at me with unhappy concentration, turning questions suspiciously like unexploded bombs. Parish, by contrast, is an understated, relaxed Bristolian. He has co-written a fine Eels album, Souljacker (2001), produced or played with Goldfrapp and Giant Sand among others, and made three solo LPs. But his and Harveys collaboration has been the closest for them both. A Woman A Man Walked By is their second joint album, 12 years after Dance Hall at Louse Point. He also produced To Bring You My Love (1995) and White Chalk (2007). They met after she precociously invited his band, Automatic Dlamini, to play her 18th birthday party. What was the teenage Polly like? A very self-possessed, interesting character, he remembers. She already had good natural voice. I was immediately attracted to that I wanted to get to know her. We felt comfortable sharing ideas. As soon as there was an opportunity to get her to join my band, I did. Harvey, unsurprisingly, wasnt feeling self-possessed. No, she says, casting her mind back. I felt I knew where I was going creatively. And felt quite driven to go there. I didnt know I was a musician then. I was trying to think of earning a practical living studying English Literature, possibly going into teaching. But I knew music would be with me throughout my life. Harvey was raised in a happy, music-rich home in Corscombe, Dorset. But when she moved to London around the time of Dry, tasting urban life, the music business and fame all at once, she broke down. Looking at herself in the mirror, she hated what she saw. There have been other reported collapses since, as with her wrenching mid- Nineties break-up from Nick Cave. Harvey is wise to shut the door on her private life now. In those early days, though, she mentioned how dissatisfaction with her work caused much of her stress. If I play Rid of Me [1993] at home, she said, by the end of side one, I cant breathe. Does music still cause her pain? I certainly dont feel in pain listening to A Woman A Man Walked By, she says. I go through huge doubts when Im writing. But I know thats natural now. What has changed with both of us is our confidence and our ability. Listening back to Dance Hall, I was really astonished at how much better we are now. Parish was the producer for two of Harveys most crucial creative about-turns: To Bring You My Love, when she split the PJ Harvey band and found a more graceful blues muse, and White Chalk, with its piano songs inspired by Dorset and her grandmothers death. For A Woman A Man Walked By, as with Louse Point, Parish provided the music, leaving lyrics and singing to Harvey. I write more extravagant music than I would for other singers, he explains. Pollys expansive range can match it. A case in point is the segue between The Chair, on which Harveys Arabic wail sinks to the lonely voice of a drowned childs mother, and her old womans quaver on April. It never feels as if Im acting, she considers. I dont try and inhabit a character that I have a visual picture of. The best way I can explain it is that I want to make this song live and breathe so its its own entity and doesnt need me. I find the voice which makes it true. A Woman A Man Walked By is a delirious example of this, a manic blues in which Harvey verbally lacerates a hermaphrodite with lily- livered little parts. Its swaggering, exciting, vibrant, dirty, funny and vicious, says Parish. Never more so than when the pint- sized Harvey hollers at her quivering victim: I want your fucking ass! Its my mums favourite bit as well, she agrees, in her more usual prim Dorset tones. Turner-nominated artists the Chapman Brothers have directed the video for another blues tear-up, Black Hearted Love. But Harveys main visual muse remains photographer Maria Mochnacz, a student friend in her days at St. Martins College of Art. They have collaborated on an ever-mutating PJ Harvey persona, as the real woman withdrew from the public gaze: from the perhaps drowned woman in red of To Bring You My Love to the distracted modern office girl of Stories from the Sea and the demure Edwardian-dressed woman sitting on White Chalks sleeve. Uh Huh Her (2004) was stuffed with self-portraits of Harvey, camera always in hand: Warholian in her self-chronicling, Bowiesque in her attention to image. On stage too, shes a glamorous world away from the carefully controlled Polly talking to me. With her personal life hidden, it leaves her records as mysterious things, with words and pictures, howls and dresses to decode: like paintings, more than autobiography. Well its lovely to hear you say that, because thats exactly the way I feel a lot of the time, she says, pleased. I under-write, to leave space for the listener to fill in the picture. And I think of the whole presentation of the music how we look on stage, everything. Its not crucial, but its not a joke. It enhances the songs, and gives people a lot of pleasure me included. The new albums The Soldier meanwhile breaks new ground for Harvey, suggesting political engagement. Though set in Korea, it resonates with current conflicts. Ive always been very concerned with what is happening in the world, she claims. But its only at this age Im nearly 40 now [shes 39] that I feel qualified to open my mouth. Before I wasnt well-informed enough. I felt not wise enough. Leaving California draws on this West Country artists temporary 2005 relocation to the West Coast. Surprisingly, Harvey loved LA. I really enjoyed it. There was only one other person that I ever walked past as the Californians drove, and it was Tricky! He lived a block down. Id be walking to the supermarket, and hed be coming back on the other side of the road, going, Awlright! Im fascinated by moving to new places the way painters move somewhere for different light. Then when I go back to Dorset, its like seeing everything for the first time. I certainly feel rooted in Dorset, and natures cycle there. Unlike cities, you notice the change of seasons overnight. From bird-song. Something Bob Dylan said in The Independent last week seems to apply to how Harvey likes to see her relation to her music. Nobody looked for life-changing depths in his songs any more, he suggested: Images are taken at face value, and it freed me up. Similarly when Harvey sings I volunteer my soul for murder on Black Hearted Love, you no longer believe a souls at stake. Actually, I read a wonderful quote from Dylan, Harvey says. He said that whether it was marrying your half-sister or self- punishment, he felt able to feel what that would feel like, and write about it. I feel I can inhabit all manner of situations and write about them too, whether Ive experienced them or not. You dont have to be suffering in order to orchestrate suffering [in art]. But one can feel its important to express suffering to reflect what its like to be human on planet Earth. A decade back, recovering from the shock of her split from Nick Cave, Harvey told a journalist shed put more of myself in her songs than ever before, and planned to go deeper still. She seems to exist more in the light than that darkness, these days. Her ambitions are more modest. Its a long journey, ones life, especially a writing life, and you explore all the different avenues of trying to reach some source of strength. Im not a purely autobiographical writer. But I like to feel I can give voice to an emotion when maybe someone else cant, and then its a nice thing for them to listen to. Im very happy just to do that. www.californiachronicle.com/articles/yb/128097653
|
|
|
Post by Modern Method. on Mar 28, 2009 7:02:16 GMT -5
Batty, grieving, disoriented, wrathful, enthralled and above all uncompromising — those were faces Polly Jean Harvey showed at the Fillmore at Irving Plaza on Thursday night, in a concert that flaunted her most defiantly arty side. “I will ... not!” she barked in a vehement new song, as a choppy guitar counterpunched a stomping, irregular beat. Among the things she didn’t do was perform any of the most familiar songs from a catalog that dates back to the early 1990s. From the beginning Ms. Harvey has been brilliantly mercurial; her songs have plunged into a primal fray of sex, death and faith, leaping between the intimate and the mythic. In “Black Hearted Love,” which opened the set on Thursday, she sang, “When you call out my name in rapture/I volunteer my soul for murder.” The concert concentrated on an album due for release next week, “A Woman a Man Walked By” (Island), which is billed to P J Harvey & John Parish, and on her previous collaboration with Mr. Parish, “Dance Hall at Louise Point,” released in 1996. The billing was an indicator. As P J Harvey, Ms. Harvey is her own bandleader and songwriter, sometimes with Mr. Parish backing her as guitarist or producer. But on her two albums on a co-bill with Mr. Parish he provided the music and Ms. Harvey finished the songs with lyrics and melodies, topping his idiosyncrasies with her own. Mr. Parish is a canny primitivist. He uses low-fi, distorted guitar sounds, sparse drumbeats, austere keyboard parts and spiky, repetitive riffs; for some of the new songs, he switched to folky instruments like steel guitar, banjo and ukulele. But he rarely stays within typical blues or rock forms. He prefers odd meters and rickety, off-center structures that, in turn, push Ms. Harvey toward her own extremes, from a quiet that’s never serene to rock that ratchets up tension without release. For the concert, Ms. Harvey, who usually plays guitar, was an unencumbered lead singer, turning herself into a wide-eyed little girl or a banshee, occasionally shaking a maraca or tambourine. Among the songs performed on Thursday night was “Leaving California,” a waltz with a hint of honky-tonk piano that had her singing in a high, creaky voice about “palms that give no shade,” and “Sixteen, Fifteen, Fourteen,” a song suggesting an ominous game of hide-and-seek in which she unleashed a near-Balkan wail and quick handclaps while Mr. Parish strummed an insistent drone on banjo. Peculiar and willful as the songs were, they didn’t come across as arbitrary constructions. From lullaby to rant, from affirmation to elegy, they were enigmas informed by earthy, unruly passions. www.nytimes.com/2009/03/28/arts/music/28pj.html?ref=music
|
|
|
Post by Garbage Addict on Apr 3, 2009 10:35:33 GMT -5
Loving the album must say!
|
|
|
Post by Modern Method. on Apr 3, 2009 12:31:40 GMT -5
I pre-ordered it about two months ago! Should be here on Monday! Excitement.
|
|
|
Post by Garbage Addict on Jun 1, 2009 15:22:45 GMT -5
All this PJ talk has inspired me to show you these purchases from the past week: Got 2 more on the way (the other Good Fortune and The Letter). Not bad for 2 weeks' hunting
|
|
|
Post by Modern Method. on Jul 30, 2009 6:16:56 GMT -5
Polly debuted 2 new stunning songs ("The Last English Rose" and "Let England Shake") at the Camp Bestival concert (and the secret show on the 24th at the Wedgewood Rooms, Portsmouth). Public footage can be seen on You Tube.
|
|
|
Post by Modern Method. on Jul 30, 2009 6:20:11 GMT -5
|
|
|
Post by MelancholyEcho on Aug 5, 2009 7:57:23 GMT -5
Awesome. White Chalk is possibly my favourite PJ album, and I admittedly still haven't given A Man A Woman Walked By a proper listen all the way through. Can't wait for her new solo effort.
|
|