Iconic British singer PJ Harvey returned recently with her album ‘A Woman A Man Walked By’ but in a new interview the singer reveals the recording nearly didn’t happen.
PJ Harvey was born into an artistic family, growing up surrounded by old blues LPs and Captain Beeheart wig outs. When she began making her own music, Harvey blended these influences with a lust for punk rock resulting in her celebrated debut album ‘Dry’.
A constant collaborator on those early recordings was John Parish, a fellow Dorset musician who acted as Harvey’s muse for a time. However the pair parted company thirteen years ago, after their final effort ‘Dance Hall At Louse Point’.
Last year the twin talents got back together to work on new material. The result is one of PJ Harvey’s most challenging efforts in some time, with ‘A Woman A Man Walked By’ featuring both sterling songwriting and white noise.
In a new interview with NME the singer claims that she found a long lost cassette featuring an early version of the track ‘Broken Heart Love’ which the pair had worked on. Inspired, Harvey got back in touch with her former collaborator with ‘Broken Heart Love’ becoming their first single together in more than a decade.
“I came across a cassette tape of a song that was ‘Black Hearted Love’ that John and I had made maybe six or seven years prior to that,” she explained.
She added: “It was actually a piece of music that John had written and given to me and asked me for a lyric idea for one of his solo albums. And we never used, or he never used it. It was at that moment, that this was the right time for us to make a record.”
As if that wasn’t ground breaking enough, Harvey recruited BritArt bad boys The Chapman Brothers to work on the video. A stunning short film followed, by two artists more used to constructing minutely detailed battle scenes from toy soldiers.
Indeed, Harvey shows no signs of slowing down and recently revealed plans to work on the soundtrack to a Broadway musical.
PJ Harvey and John Parish’s new album ‘A Woman A Man Walked By’ is out now.
