The story of John Parish and PJ Harvey: “Still moves me”
Born to a pair of music enthusiasts for parents, PJ Harvey’s venture into making music of her own was inevitable.
“I felt from an early, early age I had this insatiable appetite of learning new things all the time,” Harvey told Pitchfork in 2009. “When I went to art college, it was the same… I was most interested in experimentation, and always have been. That very much excited me, learning something new. It was very natural for it to move into music, and it continues to be that way.”
In the late 1980s, Harvey joined the band Automatic Dlamini, based in Bristol, a band that was the brainchild of musicians John Parish and Rob Ellis, operating with a rotating line-up that Harvey was involved in from 1988-1991, providing backing vocals, saxophone and guitars, and her time in Automatic Dlamini served as a sort of crash course in musicianship, teaching Harvey how to approach her craft.
“I ended up not singing very much, but I was just happy to learn how to play the guitar,” Harvey reflected to Melody Maker in 1992. “I wrote a lot during the time I was with them, but my first songs were crap, I was listening to a lot of Irish folk music at the time, so the songs were folky and full of penny whistles and stuff. It was ages before I felt ready to perform my own songs in front of other people.”
Eventually, however, Harvey grew into her own, leaving Automatic Dlamini at the beginning of 1991 to start her own band, with Ellis and fellow bandmate Ian Oliver in tow. Her professional relationship with Parish would continue, as she gleaned the magnetism of a stage presence from watching him onstage.
“After the experience with John’s band and seeing him perform, I found it was enormously helpful to me as a performer to engage with people in the audience,” she noted, “And I probably did learn that from him, amongst other things.”
With Ellis on drums and backing vocals and Oliver on bass, Harvey formed the PJ Harvey Trio and, spurred by the instant success of their haunting debut single ‘Dress’, rose to critical acclaim. But it would not be until Harvey’s third studio album, 1995’s To Bring You My Love, her first solo work, that she would reunite with Parish, enlisting him as her co-producer. Parish, who had produced for numerous UK bands, provided drums, guitar, precision and organ on To Bring You My Love, and subsequently joined Harvey’s touring band.
“The lyric is quite traditional, but the way Polly delivers it has this power and dynamic,” Parish says, speaking of the title track to The Quietus in 2021. “She’s been able to continue to deliver it with the same degree of conviction over all that time, and that to me makes it an utterly classic song. Very few songs could stand that much repetition. It still moves me after so many years.”
The duo would reach new collaborative heights with their debut joint album, 1996’s Dance Hall at Louse Point. Parish wrote and played the music, while Harvey (credited under her full name, Polly Jean Harvey) contributed lyrics and vocals, with the former having written a number of songs for Harvey, who, he could tell, wanted a challenge to the dynamic she’d become accustomed to. Days spent on the To Bring You My Love tour were spent listening to demos and continuing writing, and soon, Dance Hall was born. Diverging from her usual sound, Harvey’s debut with Parish was an unexpected shift, but it remains a record that she says is a source of pride.
“Faced with John’s music, which is so different to my own, it just made me write lyrics in a very different way and structure songs in a different way,” she reflected to the Chicago Sun Times in 2001.
Parish would feature on numerous Harvey projects in the years since, including contributions to 1998’s Is This Desire?, producing and playing on 2007’s White Chalk, 2011’s Let England Shake, 2016’s The Hope Six Demolition Project and 2023’s I Inside the Old Year Dying. Their second collaborative album, 2009’s A Woman A Man Walked By, heard a mix of punk, blues, folk and rock merge together and again, featured Parish as primary composer and Harvey as primary lyricist.
Parish has also toured with Harvey’s live band, sporadically between 1994 and 2017. Continually returning to one another, Parish and Harvey are one of the most formidable duos in alternative rock, writing and performing with a combined, staggering brilliance that is founded on a mutual respect.
“I think most of her career she’s been pretty fearless,” Parish asserts of Harvey to The Quietus, “And it’s totally paid off.”
