PJ Harvey

John Parish (left), PJ Harvey and Flood let the tension out during the recording of I Inside The Old Year Dying.Photo: Steve Gullick

PJ Harvey and her fearless collaborators have navigated three decades and six albums without repeating themselves, and her new album is another masterclass in innovative production.

Flood, John Parish and PJ Harvey have been a production team for almost 30 years. They first worked together on Harvey’s third album, To Bring You My Love, in 1995 and have now produced her 10th and latest, I Inside The Old Year Dying.

John Parish met Polly Jean Harvey when, as a 19‑year‑old, she joined his Bristol band Automatic Dlamini in the summer of 1988, contributing guitar, saxophone and vocals. Flood, meanwhile, was first brought in by Harvey’s then‑label Island Records to co‑produce To Bring You My Love at a time when his credits already included Nick Cave, Nine Inch Nails, Depeche Mode and U2.

Sitting in Parish’s home studio in Bristol, he and Flood admit that there are up sides and down sides to such a lasting and close working relationship. For Parish, the main benefit, as he sees it, is “that level of trust that develops and builds over time that is just absolutely foundational to what we do”.

“Yeah, absolutely,” Flood says. “There’s never any question about one’s intent. There’s this sort of level of [relieved sigh], ‘Ah, I don’t need to worry.’ If things are going terribly...”

“...You know that there’s always somebody there to pick up the baton,” Parish adds. “So when we’re kind of hitting a wall, and you’re like ‘Aarrrgh!’, one of us will go, ‘Well what about...?’ and you think, ‘Thank God for that.’ You can move on. It could be a totally mad idea. And it might be rubbish, but nobody’s going to think badly of you. They’re going to think well of you for putting that out there... because it might have worked. And sometimes it does work. It makes it a very freeing sort of situation because you do feel that everyone’s going to support you.”

Both agree that their main challenge, however, is pushing themselves to help create a fresh sound for each new Harvey record and avoid venturing back down well‑worn routes. “She’s an artist in the truest sense,” Flood says of the singer, “so she’s pushing all the time. But, working with people that you know, there’s a lot goes unsaid. So you don’t go, ‘Oh, that sounds amazing.’ Even though we’ve done it 300 times. Somebody will chirp up and go, ‘Nah. Heard that one before. Should we try doing something different?’ So that is very, very draining.”

“Yeah, it’s tiring,” Parish says, “even though the sessions that we did on this record were incredibly creative, and really, really thoroughly enjoyable. But it’s still tiring, because everybody’s trying to make something that we all haven’t heard before, to make something that’s really emotionally engaging, and that hopefully has an engagement beyond the room. That takes a lot, you know. There are very few artists that come to a new record each time with a totally new body of work, and a really new sound.”

Coming Together

When Parish, Flood and Harvey first pooled their talents on To Bring You My Love, it was at a transitional point for the singer, who’d broken up the power trio that bore her name on 1992’s Dry and the Steve Albini‑recorded Rid Of Me in 1993. The result was a more experimental and sonically varied set spanning dusty blues, lovelorn country and the bossa nova murder ballad ‘Down By The Water’ that freed PJ Harvey up for the future.

“It was such a bold move of Polly’s to effectively [say], ‘I’m going out on my own,’” Flood stresses. “And it doesn’t happen very often, but I have been very privileged to work with a handful of people who you just know, from day one, it’s going to be OK.”

“Yeah, from day one, it was a good fit,” says Parish. “We were kind of, ‘OK, we immediately know we’re all on the same page about things.’ We might have different ways of going about doing things or different opinions, but the goal is the same.”

Out & About

There have been many adventures for the three down the years, not least when Harvey chose to record much of 2011’s Let England Shake on location in Eype Church in Dorset. “But that’s my day job,” Flood points out. “‘I can build a studio for you.’ If you go to a studio, the band has to impose their vibe, energy, whatever it is, on that space. Whereas if you, as the studio, go to a space... you can work with the environment. There’s a reason why it’s been chosen. Then all I do is just bring a load of microphones and off we go.”

“The only challenge,” Parish points out, “was when somebody died and we had to take the studio out while they had a funeral, and then put it back in.”

More unusual still was the making of 2016’s The Hope Six Demolition Project, which involved the team working in a bespoke, white‑walled studio at Somerset House in London, in an art installation titled Recording In Progress. Ticket holders were given the opportunity to watch the sessions from behind one‑way glass for blocks of 45 minutes. Obviously, some were luckier than others in terms of what was actually going on in the studio when they randomly observed the proceedings.

“It seemed like a mad idea at first, I have to say,” Parish admits. “But we quickly embraced it. The funny thing is that you got used to it very, very fast. It was only really the first couple of days that we were even aware that there were people watching. It would have been distracting if you could see them. I think that would have made it not work.

“The only time I think that you became aware of it was if you did something particularly good or particularly bad and you thought, either, ‘Well, I hope somebody saw that,’ or ‘I hope nobody was in for that really terrible take of that song!’”

Flood adds with a grin, “I do remember one session of about 30 minutes of me trying to tune a foot pedal to the tuning of a tom‑tom, and me and Polly lying on the floor just weeping with laughter.”

Off The Page

I Inside The Old Year Dying arrives after a seven‑year gap between albums for PJ Harvey. Exhausted in the wake of the long tour for The Hope Six Demolition Project, she had grown so distanced from music that she wasn’t even sure whether or not she wanted to carry on as a recording artist and live performer. But, as John Parish points out, “Polly’s not the only artist who I’ve heard say, ‘That’s it, I’m never going to tour again!’ or ‘I’m never making another record.’ I think that’s a pretty common thing for an artist. But after a while, y’know, you’ve got some new songs, you’ve got some new ideas, and the whole thing becomes suddenly a bit more appealing again.”

Up until this new record, the making of almost every one of Harvey’s albums had involved her creating very minimal, but very precise demos for the team to reference when they got into the studio. This time around, the process was different. In 2022, Harvey published her second book of poetry, Orlam, centred on the tale of a nine‑year‑old girl growing up in a magical version of rural Dorset. For the album, she adapted many of the poems for the songs’ lyrics.

“In a way, the book was the demo,” says Parish. “Because musically, there weren’t arranged demos. They were either piano and voice or guitar and voice. A simple rendition of the idea. Really, a rendition of the lyric with the tune.”

Work began on the album in January 2022 at Battery Studios in Willesden, North West London, co‑owned by Flood and Alan Moulder. In its Studio 2 tracking room, the team worked on the facility’s Cadac G‑series desk, previously owned by Radiohead and housed prior to that in Wessex Studios, where it was used on classic recordings by the likes of Queen and The Clash. Installed in 2018, the Cadac replaced an earlier Neve VR console.

“The Neve was past its sell‑by date,” Flood says. “Brilliant board, but it ran so hot, you could fry an egg on it. And all the pots were starting to go. They’re really difficult to replace, and it just reached that point where it’d gone over the edge. I persuaded Alan that we should still keep with an old board. Because I think it’s good to know what the old disciplines are, so that people can learn from them. [The Cadac] is not the most instinctual board. But the sound of it is fantastic. As soon as we got it up, and you started EQ’ing it, you were going, ‘I’m putting all this low mid in... I hate low middle,’ and suddenly it sounded like the ’70s.”

The Battery Studio 2 live room was a riot of equipment and cables during the tracking sessions. Here, John Parish (centre) is on drums whilst Flood (right) handles electronic processing.

Chaos Unfolded

At the start of the sessions, Harvey, Flood and Parish had no fixed ideas about how they wanted I Inside The Old Year Dying to sound. Very quickly, though, within the first few days, and mainly through improvisations, a pattern began to develop. The result is a beautifully hypnotic and haunting album, its sounds often treated with tape echo and amp distortion to create an inviting but sometimes unsettling sonic landscape.

“We knew the basic tunes and chords, but she was very, very open to how that would develop,” says Parish of Harvey. “So when we started in Battery, it was pretty much a blank slate. We really just set up and played until we started to enjoy what we were hearing. At the beginning of the week, nobody knew what it was going to sound like.”

Flood, working with engineer/mixer Rob Kirwan and engineer/musician Cecil (Adam Bartlett), wanted to create a fluid and open workflow, to the extent of not even closing the doors between the control and live rooms.

“You see the pictures of the studio, and it looks like a Francis Bacon workshop,” he laughs. “Y’know, wires everywhere. The control room and the studio were as one. You’d just wander around, and everywhere you went, there was an activity centre. So you just migrated out and someone would be playing. Usually John.”

“Yeah, there was always something going on,” says Parish. “Everything was set up and miked up all the time. So there was no kind of like, ‘Oh, I’ve got an idea,’ then half an hour later you’re ready to record. It was immediately, ‘Oh, all right. Let’s go.’ It looked like chaos. I don’t know how it was working. But obviously Rob and Cecil seemed to know.”

For the beats‑driven tracks on the album, Parish tended to start off behind his vintage Slingerland drum kit, augmenting it with a Roland HPD‑20 trigger pad. “There was often a weird electronic sound as well that we would incorporate as part of the kit,” he says. “Sometimes it was a trigger off one of the drums that was going through an amp, which would have been miked in the room.”

“Or I’d be wandering around in front of him,” Flood says, “with an SM58 attached to a [Roland] Space Echo, getting loads of feedback. If the artist or the musician hears what it’s going to be, they can react and work accordingly. Rather than, ‘Uh, yeah, we’ll just do that in the mix.’”

Flood: I’d never have thought of using the sound of cows mooing as a bass!

Milking Machines

Still, within this creative freedom, Harvey did have specific — sometimes highly unusual — elements that she wanted to introduce to the production. Mainly these came in the form of field recordings she wanted to manipulate. “Sometimes Polly has the manifesto, which is, y’know, ideas to try,” says Flood. “Like a book of ingredients. ‘OK, I’d like to try these sorts of things now.’ And it’s always really inspiring because I try never to second‑guess her. So, one [part] of Polly’s manifesto was, ‘I’ve got all these natural sounds. Can we try and use them in an interesting way?’ And you go, ‘OK, well, I’d never have thought of using the sound of cows mooing as a bass.’”

Flood isn’t joking when he talks about a sample of a mooing cow being repurposed as a bass sound. “I mean, I don’t remember what the original cow sounded like,” Parish smiles. “But it translated very well into a sort of a bass thing. Sampled and then filtered, cut up. It went in as a cow and ended up as a bass.”

“Cecil just worked his magic,” says Flood. “And [there were] many requests for repeat performances. We tried it once and it was just like, ‘Genius.’ There’s even a musical bumblebee. If you don’t know it, you would never know about it. But that adds depth to the record. And it doesn’t really matter what it is that’s made it.”

“A lot of the sounds on the record are things that you just don’t know what they are,” Parish says. “And that makes it to us immediately interesting. That you can’t define it. You want something bassy that you can put into some kind of tune and into some kind of rhythm, but it’s nice if you don’t know what it is.

“It’s not like you’re sitting there the whole time, thinking, ‘What’s that?’ It’s only if you start to pick something apart, you think, ‘What is making that sound? I thought I was just listening to an ordinary song, but I don’t know what any of the instruments are. I can’t quite tell.’”

Uncertain Electronics

Another unorthodox sonic feature is Parish’s Variophon, a ’70s German‑built electronic wind synth that he bought from Talk Talk producer Tim Friese‑Greene. “It’s a really early attempt to synthesize brass and woodwind,” Parish explains. “So, it’s pretty crap, 8‑bit samples, and each one’s on a chip twice as big as a phone. And it’s very temperamental, it doesn’t always work. But you have to blow into a thing and press a key at the same time. So you get this natural kind of ebb and flow. But sort of an unnatural sound to go with it.

“It responds to how heavily you’re blowing and it’s just a pretty mad sound. I’ve got two of them. One hardly ever works. But it’s a fantastic instrument, which is terrifying to use live. I tried twice and both times it was an utter disaster. It’s not that it will sound different... it’s just that it might not do anything.”

Elsewhere, Flood’s modular Roland System 700 was used fairly extensively throughout. “‘Seem An I’ has got a really strong modular synth part that’s kind of running underneath,” says Parish. “Which fascinates me, because it sounds like one thing in the track and then when the track stops it carries on for a little bit and you think, ‘Oh, it’s doing that. I didn’t know it was doing that because it sounds very different.’ I love that.”

One other track, ‘The Nether‑edge’, features Harvey’s lead vocal fed through what sounds like an electronic pulse. “It’s a gate that’s being triggered,” says Flood. “Part of the experimentation is, ‘Let’s take the thing that everybody knows and loves and try a few ideas.’”

“There was nothing easy about that track,” Parish says. “That started with kind of an abstract Flood loop that made perfect sense to him, that me and Polly both really liked, but couldn’t quite see how it married to the song. We loved it, but it was just wrong. It didn’t quite work with the tune, but we knew we wanted it to work. So, I sort of tweaked the melody. I started messing around with the actual tune. And I thought, ‘If I just change a couple of notes in the melody...’ and it suddenly worked.”

More traditionally, for his acoustic guitar parts that feature throughout, John Parish tended to use his antique parlour guitar. “It’s a really beautiful old, old guitar that actually belongs to my wife’s auntie,” he says. “She had it in an attic somewhere and once said to me, ‘Oh, you play guitar.’ I was expecting to see some piece of crap. But she presented me with this thing. I thought, ‘Oh, my God. That’s amazing.’ And so we’ve purloined it, and it’s been put to a lot of good use. It sounds amazing. It’s got a fantastic tone.”

Mic Psychology

For vocal recording, Flood tended to have Harvey use a handheld Shure SM58 in the control room. “A trusty 58,” he says. “Ninety percent of all lead vocalists that I’ve recorded in my career have been on an SM58. Again, it’s the psychology. People get used to the way that their voice responds on certain mics. So with a lot of singers, I say, ‘OK, have you got a favourite mic? Bring it in.’ Nine times out of 10 they’ll end up with a 58 because where they’re doing most of their singing is live. So, to get them to leave their heads and start performing, give them a very cheap and cheerful microphone.

Polly Harvey’s voice was tracked mostly through a Shure SM58, often running into an amp or other processing. An old Neumann CMV 563 is also visible in this photo.

“Over the years, we’ve always done it so that Polly’s in the control room and everybody’s around. So again, from another psychological point, if the artist has an audience, then they’re performing in a different way. For me, the most important thing is communication. So, you don’t have that thing of somebody’s sung their heart out and they’re just looking at generally two blokes talking behind the glass.”

“[The SM58] was often going through an amp as well,” Parish points out. “It was plugged into a Fender Twin or something like that, which was dry, or giving a reverb or something, and Polly was responding to that in the room. So, you had that real sound, which was really great to play along with when you were cutting the basic tracks.”

For one song, ‘I Inside The Old I Dying’, Flood asked Harvey to close her eyes, so that she wasn’t aware of where the microphone was, while he — as she recently put it — “gave me prompts like a director might an actor”.

“Again, to move the voice from the head to the heart,” Flood says. “It’s so difficult when, as the singer, the writer, the lyricist, you know how [the song] goes. And then to be able to give something that’s really emotional, which is what Polly is about. It’s that idea that you’re capturing something at its very essence. That’s basically what I was trying to do.”

Dying Memory

Both agree that ‘I Inside The Old I Dying’, the second single released from the album, was the trickiest track to nail. “It was just about, ‘Let’s put it in a different time signature,’ and then it all clicked,” Parish says. “There’s always going to be difficult ones. And it’s about finding the key to unlock it. It was almost the last couple of days and suddenly it really coalesced. We never got to the stage where we thought, ‘Oh, this isn’t going to work. We’re going to lose this song.’ Because we all believed we would find the way to make it work.”

“I remember you came in on that one with the parlour guitar,” Flood adds. “You said, ‘I’ve just been playing around with a couple of things.’ And I kicked myself, because normally, there’s microphones everywhere.” But on this rare occasion, Flood wasn’t recording. “You played it through once,” he reminds Parish, “and Polly started singing, and I went, ‘Oh my God this is amazing,’ and then, ‘Nooooooo!’ But I’ve got the memory. So, bad luck everybody else.”

“But then,” Parish adds, “we very quickly went, ‘Let’s just do that again... exactly like that.’”

The songs for I Inside The Old Year Dying were derived from poems written by PJ Harvey.

All Hands

Mixing happened mainly during the tracking sessions, with additional tweaks done afterwards at Rob Kirwan’s Open Plan Studios in Manchester. Often, the mixes tended to employ more than one pair of hands on the desk for multiple live fader movements printed back into Pro Tools. “This was one of the major criteria, like, ‘Don’t overthink, just have a laugh,’” says Flood. “I’m looking after the vocals, John’s looking after Variophon and Rob’s giving the hairy eyeball to everybody! But there’s a different feel to everyone mixing on the desk. Very, very different.”

In one instance, on ‘Autumn Term’, the team reverted back to an earlier mix, even though it was one that featured wrong chords. “Flood had already basically printed a version like that,” Parish says. “I’d just played this thing, and then we did some other things. Then later on, we thought, ‘Oh the chords are wrong there.’ And so I put the right chords in and then we were listening to it, and thought, ‘It doesn’t sound as good as the other version, does it?’ So we went back. Thank God for that printed‑out version with all the wrong chords because it is much better. There’s a tension there that just went when it had all the right chords. It sounded nice, but it just lost the magic.”

Sometimes, as with ‘Autumn Term’ and album opener ‘A Prayer At The Gate’, the mixes kept nagging at Flood, due to his chief Pro Tools bugbear. “My pathological hatred is of delay compensation,” he grimaces. “Which basically means nothing ever plays back the same. So I police this all the time. Like, ‘Autumn Term’, there were a couple of occasions we played that, and I was going, ‘That does not sound the way I remembered it.’ Or with the drums on ‘Prayer’, I kept on going, ‘It doesn’t sound like John’s sitting next to me. No, that’s not the right version. No, that’s not the right version. Yes, that one’ll do.’”

“That’s really the magic of Flood’s ears because none of the rest of us could hear it at the time,” Parish stresses. “At first, we’d go, ‘Oh, he’s imagining it.’ But then you listen to it, and you think, ‘Oh, no, actually, he’s right. I can hear it.’ But that’s great, because I think that to be able to hold that memory of sound is quite unusual.”

“It’s a blessing and a curse,” Flood laughs.

“It’s a blessing for us!” Parish concludes.