"
Mick Harvey takes us through nine key albums in his catalogue" -
Uncut, August 2016:
PJ Harvey
Stories From the City,
Stories From the Sea (ISLAND, 2000)
Polly Jean Harvey’s fifth
album, co-produced by
Mick Harvey, showcased
a more streamlined rock
sound and picked up the
2001 Mercury Prize.I’m not sure why we
ended up in Great Linford
[near Milton Keynes], but it’s a good recording
studio. Polly had been recording at Townhouse 3
as well, and we were all very upset when that
studio got closed down. I think she was looking
for another studio that had the potential to be a
bit like that. I think she wanted to be away from
where she was living too – you stayed at Great
Linford. She was on a very particular path there,
she was making quite a straight record in a funny
way. I’m not quite sure how she got to that point
because it didn’t seem very typical of her, to be
honest. But, you know, she’s a real ‘zone’ person.
She gets into the zone of what she wants to do
and that becomes the focus, very strongly, for
what happens with each project. That’s where
everything is focused. I was credited as
a producer on Stories…, but there’s a sort of
arbitrary side to that, really. The producer is the
person who guides the overall sound, and to
some degree, sometimes everyone’s doing that.
All the Bad Seeds stuff is usually credited as
‘produced by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds’,
although there’s obviously people in the band
who were doing more of the production work
than other people – usually me and Nick and
Blixa. With Stories… we were there from the
beginning, so it was treated like a team. Polly
took us in, me and Rob Ellis, and wanted us to
guide the production. So then you feel more
of a responsibility to always be on board, and
to always have an idea or an opinion, as opposed
to skiving off and not being involved for half a
day or whatever.
PJ Harvey
Let England Shake (ISLAND, 2011)
Picking up another
Mercury Prize, PJ’s
eighth LP saw the singer,
Mick Harvey, John
Parish and Jean-Marc
Butty record in St Peter’s
Church in Eype, Dorset.It was great recording in a church. We spent about five weeks there.
It was all close mic’d – I don’t think we used much of
the ambient sound ’cos it was just too wild. But a
bit seeps in anyway. Polly became very interested
in war themes and WWI, and a couple of other
conflicts, and I also have an interest in some of
that. So we discussed a lot of that stuff. She had a
lot of ideas about it, but I didn’t contribute to any
of the writing – Polly doesn’t really co-write lyrics
with people [laughs], she works very hard on
them in her own time. But we talked a lot about
ideas and exchanged ideas. Polly used our voices
a lot on this and her latest [2016’s The Hope Six
Demolition Project], she likes ensemble singing,
and on Let England Shake there’s quite a few bits
where my voice is featured, like on “The Colour
Of The Earth” where I sing some of it solo – that’s
an odd one, isn’t it? But then the most beautiful
bit is when we’re all singing together. She’s
a much stronger singer than I am but the blend is
important. It was hard to envisage something
this unusual-sounding having a big impact – by
the end we were thinking: ‘Is everyone gonna
think this is crazy?’ It’s such a weird record.