PJ Harvey & John Parish

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2:11Cards issued by JPMorgan Chase Bank and a member FDIC. Subject to credit approval, terms apply. Polly Jean Harvey, better known as PJ Harvey, is without question one of my favorite songwriters of all time. Her debut album Dry came out in 93 and was what the LA Times called a near instant classic. The same with her sophomore release, Rid of Me, which became an inspiration for Nirvana's last album, In Utero. Ten albums later, and Polly continues to be not only a remarkable songwriter on her new album, I, Inside the Old Year, Dying, but maybe more impressively, continues to find new musical territory and new voices to write from, keeping her songs and artistry as interesting as they were when she first put out music over 30 years ago.

2:58John Parrish, who's been a frequent collaborator of Polly's since the 80s, produced the new album along with Flood, and joins me in conversation with Polly to discuss their process of working together, the beauty of Polly's last few albums, and how they bonded a long time ago over Captain Beefheart. This is Broken Record, liner notes for the digital age. I'm Justin Richman. Here's my conversation with PJ Harvey and John Parrish. I'm very excited to be able to talk to the both of you. I don't always think about you guys. in unison. So it was fun to sort of think about how you guys work together in these things.

3:37But you guys met in the 80s, which I didn't realize was the case. That's right. We met in 1987, I believe. And it was through your band, John? Yes, yeah, it was. It was the guitar player in my band, Jeremy Hogg, had met Polly at a party and she'd been singing some songs and he was really impressed with her and he mentioned her to me and then she came to a couple of gigs of the band and gave me some tapes of the songs she was writing. She was a teenager and her voice already sounded really great to me back at that time. So I asked if she wanted to join the band when she left school. I think you did an audition me, sort of.

4:24You sort of auditioned me first. It was a sham audition because you definitely... What was the audition? I came up to Bristol, didn't I? And we played through some of your band Automatic Laminis' main riffs. I think you were just listening to see if I could play the riff with feel or not. Because I wasn't a very adept guitar player at that point. I could play chords, but I wasn't very adept at anything else. and a lot of John's music was based more around melodies than chord structures. So I remember playing through some melodies on the guitar with you, John. I think you were just trying to see if I could play with feel or not.

5:07In fact, I often talk about feel, you know, just when I'm talking about music, because I think the feel that I play with is what I learned from John, because we often recognize how similar we play. If I've written a part on the guitar and I'm asking John to play it for a live performance, he plays it just like me. But that's because I play like him because he taught me to play. It's kind of in a circle like that. So you don't think before that audition or that time you started playing with Automatic, you mean that you played, your playing was different before than you think? Well, I was just, I hadn't been playing guitar for very long.

5:45And so all I could play was chords on the guitar. I could play saxophone quite well, and I think I'd got to grade seven on saxophone, but I'd only just started playing the guitar, and all I knew was chords that I'd learned from songbooks. And I didn't really pick out melodies, but then when I met John, I started learning about fingerpicking melodies, and then I'd practice with records at home. A lot of those were things that John had introduced me to, like Captain Beefheart, things like that. Damn, wow. You were put, wait, you, Captain Beefheart's a lot to ask of like a 16, 17, 18 year old. I'm still trying to crack.

6:28Like I got safe as milk. I can get safe as milk. And then it goes beyond that. I'm still breaks my brain. Yeah, I had high expectations, which she always met. So that must have been the kind of stuff, John, that you were really, you're kind of like go to. I guess Captain Beefheart's stuff has been for years and years. He is obviously an absolute one-off in what he's done. It's very difficult to get tired of listening to him because you're always finding something new. I've been listening to those records for 40 years and I'll still think, oh, I suddenly see how that works. Because a lot of it to me was just like a weird puzzle.

7:10That was how I got interested in the first place because I didn't understand it. I thought I understood music. and when I first heard Captain B-Fart, I thought, I don't know what's going on here. I can't figure out who's doing it, why they're doing it. Nothing made sense. But I was kind of interested enough to keep listening because I realized it had a physical effect on me and it had a physical effect on other people that were listening to it as well. So it wasn't just that it was like bizarre. It was that you didn't understand it, but you could feel it still. I felt that there was something there.

7:38It was like hearing a foreign language and you're not knowing what's going on and then you listen to it enough times and gradually, like there's some words you think, oh, I know what that word is. And before you know, you can put a couple of sentences together. And it was really like that. I gradually got to understand it in a way just by listening to it. And there are still things that I'm discovering now. So absolutely still a go-to for me for sure. That's great. So before Trout Mask Replica Polly, like what was, before that awakening, what would have been the things that you were really loving to listen to at that time?

8:15oh I remember loving the pokes at that time and the little band that I had which was only a three tiny three-piece band it was me on an acoustic guitar a girl on a flute and a penny whistle friend of mine called Catherine and this guy called Gus on the bass and we used to do a lot of folk covers I think when John came to see me that's what I was doing in the local pub but so I loved things like the post because I could hear that it was folk music which I love but it also had rebellion and spirit and punk and then I fell in love with the pixies as well and they were a huge influence on me I think John you I think you introduced me to Nick Cave in the bad seas because I remember you playing Cabin Fever you know what you were just describing about Track Moss Replica I remember listening to that going I don't know what this is and it made me feel seasick I just didn't know what I was listening to and you played me from her to eternity as well and then I really got into Nick Cave and the Bad Seats and Tom Waits I don't think I knew Tom Waits and then John introduced me to that and that was a massive influence on me so I had this sort of mixture of Tom Waits, Nick Cave, The Pixies, Captain Beefheart and then my mum and dad's collection of records which was brilliant mostly bob dylan and the rolling stones it was all sort of offside with that i love it i can i can hear that feel in your playing there's some some stones in there some stones in the pixies you mentioned your sax playing when you're growing up playing sax in in dorset like is it a jazz ensemble or is it more as part of like a like a brass ensemble in the classical sense well my mom and my dad were always very into music so much so that they had a group of friends that were London-based that started introducing them to rhythm and blues bands from London that my mum started then bringing those bands down to play in the local village halls in our village areas.

10:19So we'd end up with these rhythm and blues and boogie woogie bands staying with us nearly every weekend and some great players and that's when I thought oh I really like the saxophone. And then they'd start giving me ad hoc lessons on the saxophone when they're staying. And I started learning at school. So that's how that happened. And then I joined the local big band. So I was second tenor in a big band for quite a few years, which I love because you play all those big band standards. And Jim Ellington and, you know, play some amazing songs. I learned a lot about structure and parts and being one of a whole from doing the big band work.

11:00Were you interested in big band music? Not really. No, I wasn't. I was much more into Trap Miles Replica, but I really enjoyed playing in a big band because I guess, you know, in the way that I love playing in the current band we're in, you just learn about listening. You learn about listening to each other and you learn about playing off of the feel that you're all creating then that changes all the time that's what makes it so exciting i was listening to i think you were on it too john but you did a uh ian stewart tribute you guys did a lonely avenue uh john wasn't on i was i did that with my cousin so that was just you and your cousin i thought john might have been on but you sounded so natural doing that it's crazy my mom's brother's son my cousin Ben Waters, he's a boogie with pianist and he became a boogie with pianist because he loved seeing Ian Stewart play.

11:58Now, Ian Stewart was often known as the fifth Rolling Stone or sixth Rolling Stone. And he was always in the background. I mean, rumour has it that he wasn't in the Stones because he didn't look right. But he was always with the Stones and he ended up being their road manager and he played on stage with them a lot as you'll often see him in the background now he was um great friend of mum and dad's he influenced my cousin to want to play boogie boogie piano so now my cousin ben waters is a professional boogie boogie pianist and he put together this tribute to ian stewart and that's how that happened so was ian stewart around then Like, was he one of the people you remember?

12:41You know, I said my mum and dad had a group of friends from London. Oh, I'll try and keep it simple. But so down here in Dorset, where we live, it's a very, very beautiful part of the countryside with rolling hills and an incredible coastline that's now become like a World Heritage site. It's called the Jurassic Coast. So people from London would just come here every weekend. One of them had a flat in this little cove and all of the people from London would come here just because it was so beautiful to escape London. And mum and dad, who lived down here already, met those people. One of those people that used to come down every weekend was Ian Stewart.

13:22He was the one that introduced mum and dad to all of these bands from London that ended up coming down to play. And one of all bands was Ian's band, which was called Rocket 88. Right, right. Which I guess would have been based on that Ike Turner song from way back when. When you would see him, did you know he was part of the Rolling Stones? And maybe, I think probably the founder of the Stones too. Yeah, we did. Me and my brother. And because Charlie Watts came down and Charlie played in Rocket 88, you see. So Charlie ended up coming and staying in our house. And I remember my brother and I following him around because we knew that he was famous.

14:00So we just followed him around the house the entire time. Followed him in the garden, followed him everywhere. Did you ever talk to him after following him? I think maybe a little bit. We were a bit shy because we were quite young then. Yeah. That is a crazy experience. I love Charlie Watts. I was trying to figure out, I feel like the last decade or so has been a really fruitful, I seem to have read that it was a little difficult maybe, but a really fruitful run of records from like Let England Shake to Eye Inside, The Old Year of Dying. I mean, just the three records that have come out in that time have just been really moving and interesting.

14:43But I was thinking about your guys' earliest work compared to this. And I mean, how does your guys' creative relationship work this well over time? I mean, it's just insane that you guys are sort of still seemingly, to the listener's point of view, like in lockstep creatively. Yeah, I mean, I think that that's quite rare to be a good creative relationship for that many years. I think we're both really appreciative of that. I mean, it's not something you can make happen. It's either there or it's not. And I think that we've been lucky that we've, for whatever reason, creatively developed along similar lines or parallel lines for a long time.

15:29We've always kind of understood what each other's doing. And we know each other's parameters really well. So it's very easy to judge things for each other and accept judgment from each other because we understand the parameters. We also trust each other implicitly. And that, again, is not something that you can make happen. It's either there or it's not. And again, we're really appreciative that we have that because it just feels like when we're working together in the studio, and particularly when we're working with Flood as well, who's obviously been a part of all of those records, it feels like an incredibly strong creative unit.

16:09It creates a situation where people are not afraid to take chances and not afraid to take risks. And we know that there will always be somebody there to either support it or to say, actually, that's not working. But maybe it's a route to something else. And if it's afraid, you know, we're not worried about trying something and it's not working. And then somebody thinking, oh, then they're not really very good. You know, we know that we have great respect for each other and terrific trust. and that's been absolutely foundational to the work, I think. Yeah, I completely agree with John. I think it's having that level of trust, because we've known each other for a long time and we've been through a lot together, myself, John, and Vlad.

16:53And so then you can just be so open. You can be so risk-taking and come up with crazy ideas and we'll have a go at them anyway, and then a lot of them fall down and they're rubbish and we just laugh about it. Because the other thing is we do laugh a lot. We have a similar sense of humor, so we spend a lot of time laughing. And that really helps. And we don't have egos in the sense of needing to hold on to some precious idea. We just let it go and we'll try something else. So it makes for a really wonderful, inspirational collaboration. You're just constantly firing ideas off each other. After this break, we'll be back with more of our conversation with John Parrish and the one and only PJ Harvey.

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18:16With built-in security on the first nationwide 5G advanced network, you keep private data private for you, your team, your clients. And with seamless coverage from the world's largest satellite to mobile constellation, your whole team can text and stay updated even when they're off the grid. That's your business, Supercharged. Learn more at supermobile.com. Seamless coverage with compatible devices in most outdoor areas in the U.S. where you can see the sky. Best network based on analysis by Ookla of Speedtest Intelligence Data 1H 2025. The greatest music stories aren't always in the songs themselves.

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19:32Claude doesn't just compile facts. It helps you see patterns across decades of music history, ask the kinds of follow-up questions that reveal deeper truths, and works through the nuanced relationships between artists, movements, and moments. Whether you're a music journalist, industry professional, or someone who just lives for understanding the stories behind the sounds, Claude matches your level of curiosity about what really drives great art. Try Claude for free at claude.ai slash brokenrecord and see why the world's best problem solvers choose Claude as their thinking partner. This episode of Broken Record is brought to you by Chase Sapphire Reserve.

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20:46And that's not even mentioning how the card gets you into the Sapphire Lounge by the club at select airports nationwide and access to one-of-a-kind experiences like music festivals and sports events. Whether you're booking your next big trip or we can escape, Chase Sapphire Reserve makes travel more rewarding. Discover more with Chase Sapphire Reserve at chase.com slash sapphire reserve. Cards issued by J.P. Morgan Chase Bank and a member FDIC. Subject to credit approval. Terms apply. We're back with more from John Parrish and P.J. Harvey. Speaking of like being open to ideas, the demos to Let England Shake were really fascinating.

21:26There's a lot of you singing, not even singing, but you writing songs over samples of things. Yeah. Which is a really wild idea. I've never heard demos that sound that way. How did you start demoing songs that way for that record? Yeah, that was the first time I'd done that. It was going back to feel. It was some pieces of music I loved the feel of, but also the words were absolutely right for the words and the lyrics I was creating. So I only used loops of things that resonated with the subject matter of the song so that made for a really strong combination and then some of those loops we did use in the eventual recording and some of them we didn't or some of them we just referenced but we used parts of so it was just a good launching pad for me as I was trying to find my way into what I was writing and you can also hear on the demos I was mapping out vocal ideas as well because I knew I wanted lots of additional singers.

22:33But it's very interesting to hear how then those demos then moved into the final recordings. And that changed quite a bit. John, I don't know if you want to say about, I think our environment just being in EAP Church made a big impact. Yeah, yeah, it did. It was a great session. The demos were really interesting. We didn't want to use like whole loops going through all the tracks, you know. And so we approached in different ways, either sometimes replaying some things or replaying little bits and pieces of them or using sort of segments instead. But it was such a strong body of songs and lyrically it was a big departure for Polly.

23:13And how do you view that as someone who's worked alongside her for so long? I have to say when Polly first said that she was writing an album of songs loosely about war, I was a little bit nervous as to how she was going to pull that off, because I think that's an incredibly difficult thing to do in an artistically successful way. As soon as I heard the first three or four demos, I was like, okay, these are great. She's totally going to do it. And it is a tremendously impressive piece of writing, all the songs on that record. When we came to record them, it was the most open that Polly had been in a recording situation.

23:54and I don't know whether that was just the time of the development of her as an artist, the development of Polly as a human being, or the fact that the songs were very much third person. Up until that time, you could say there was a degree of luck, or certainly people would interpret most of the songs before that as being Polly writing the first person, even if they weren't. Whereas this group of songs, you absolutely couldn't. I suppose you could try and glean some kind of idea of what she might think about about historical events or current events and how she was tying the two together. But for whatever reason, in that session, Polly was incredibly open to the process.

24:36Maybe it was also to do with being very confident in the material. The songs came together very, very quickly in a beautiful space. It was a big open space church where we could all play at the same time. and literally every day we would start a new song and we wouldn't really know how it was going to work out. We wouldn't even know who was going to play what instrument, whether Mick would be playing drums or whether I would be playing drums and then the other one of us would be playing either guitar or keyboards or poly might be playing guitar or auto harp. It was really, this is the song, it's a great song, let's see where we can take it.

25:12And by the end of each day, pretty much the song had really found its own direction. It was a really tremendous session. Does that feel true to you, Polly, in terms of this feeling like this writing being a little bit different than your other writing before? Yeah, definitely. I remember after White Chalk, I just knew I needed to find a completely vibrant and exciting new path for myself. And I didn't know what that was. And it took quite a long time to find it. and anything I write about, I've got to feel very deeply, emotionally connected to it or very moved by it. And I can remember at that time, England was involved in the Afghan war and the Iraq war.

26:01And I think I was just watching a program, a documentary about one soldier who'd been wounded in the war in Afghanistan. And I just found it so incredibly upsetting. I just remember this whole all night feeling so upset and I thought you should write about that if you're feeling this upset I think I was crying you know thinking write about that write about that and that's how I thought how can I write about that and that's how it began how how do you do that so that was the starting point um and I think I learned a lot from that moment because I think every album I've done since then I have really thought the area that I'm trying to explore has to have a lot of meaning for me and has to really move me in order to really write good work.

26:49That moving from this is what I should write about to how do I write about it to actually then having written about it, before you got anything you felt was good, were there like a lot of failed attempts to write? Well, Lengland Shake again was the first time that I wrote words firstly alone on a page with no music. Prior to that, I'd always created songs in tandem with music and lyrics together. They'd grow with each other. And sometimes words would grow out of just chanting rhythmically on top of a riff that I had on the piano or guitar. But this time, because of what Joss said, like how, you know, it's such a difficult subject, how on earth you're going to approach that.

27:36I knew I had to get the words right. At least a semblance of them being right first. I couldn't just improvise words on top of music here. I had to think really carefully about what I was saying. It was a very fine line to tread. And there were a lot of words written, a lot, before the songs that made it on the album. And a lot of them never came to anything. And that's the other thing. That was the first time I started moving into poetry and I started taking poetry lessons that I wouldn't call. Letting and Schuss was not poetry. They are songs. but it was where my interest in wanting to learn the craft of poetry began because as a starting point I went and read all the First World War poets and I could see this magical craft that they had and I wanted to learn how do you do that.

28:28So that was the first time I really thought I can't want to go into this and then I moved into it deeper with Hope VI and then with Ironside the Old Year. Were you reading a lot of World War I histories as well? Yes, yes. And contemporary war at the time, like Afghan-Iraqi war. Yeah. And before this documentary, there was no interest in war, no personal interest in war. No, no, no, always. No, I'd always been, you know, very engaged with what was happening in the world, very upset by current conflicts. always fascinated too by the history of Afghanistan and I always felt drawn to that and Britain's involvement in both in world wars so no I was very interested I just never occurred to me that I could possibly write about it got it just didn't get qualified you know but you have to I think there's a way in that you don't have to be qualified but you can still walk the right line of speaking in a very naive way.

29:34I mean, I often think of William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience because that tiny little book is basically how to live, you know, but it's written like children's nursery rhymes. So I think you can write in a really naive way, but still say an awful lot. Yeah, absolutely. Even just, you know, it's funny, the sample on the demo of Let England shape Istanbul not Constantinople which was like a kind of a goof of a song in a way but even that song is kind of saying a lot in its weird way you know like these histories of countries conquering one another and name changes and what's in a name and what they mean it's I don't know that's interesting yeah and that's what I love doing playing off what the original loop was doing and then laying my words on top of it sometimes joining in with those words sometimes not I think it also added a certain level of humor.