By all rights, Dance Hall At Louse Point shouldn't be much of anything, a one-off collaboration between Harvey and the guitarist from her pre-fame band Automatic Dlamini, who wrote all the music here. But Harvey is probably the fastest-growing artist in rock, and Louse Point seems to have hit just the right point on her growth curve. It’s almost frighteningly great, as powerful and rich as To Bring You My Love but much easier to listen to in its entirety. Harvey has been working on her voice, and the results are stunning, both technically and artistically. She’s turned into a great interpretive singer - of her own words and other - and proves it when she slows the old standard Is That All There Is? to a crawl and wrings it for every drop of passion and horror it's worth. Parish’s music is a splendid surprise, too, with a distinctly different setting for every track (Led Zep-ish heaviness, hyper-compressed treble attack, whatever it takes) and vivid guitar playing offset by resonant, prickly organ textures. Also Harvey is the star here, indulging her drama-queen extremism, broadening her lyrical range and basically sliding her tongue into listeners’ ears. If this is her idea of a between-albums quickie, it’s hard to imagine what the next PJ Harvey record is going to sound like.

Top of page

Dance Hall at Louse Point by Johnny Cigarettes

From Vox, November 1996

One tends to worry about artists who have anything to do with "contemporary dance".
Collaborating with your former producer and band member is perhaps understandable, but writing music for an avant-garde dance-expression performance-type farrago might well be considered foolhardy.
The first worrying factor is what the hell their dances will actually consist of. Women on the verge of a nervous breakdown? Murder of Innocents? Bit of religion? Bit of war? Bit of doomed romance? And persumably everyone would have to die tragically at the end. Well, we can always avert our eyes and immerse ourselves in the music. Great comfort that’s likely to be.
If Polly Jean has ever been aware of being caricatured as the female Nick Cave, she certainly makes no effort to prove us wrong. More emotional tightropes and less bottomless pits of purgatory, perhaps, but otherwise it’s a familiar story: Rope Bridge Crossing is macabre, bottle-scarring guitar blues about losing one’s mother; Taut is a hairtearing guitar maelstrom, with clattering rhythms and a story about adolescent lust, tragic romance, murder and religion. Even the cover of Lieber and Stoller’s Is That All There Is? has childhood innocence, depression, lost love, and, you guessed it, death at the end. But stylisted as Louse Point all is, it’s impeccably stylish with it, our Polly oozing rich and strange emotional colours across Parish’s edgy, scary soundscapes.
Memorable peaks are many: when City Of No Sun starts to scream blues murder over shrink’s couch confessions and compulsive strumming, Taut’s bewildering, innocent chaos; and Heela’s malevolent bass prowling across a momentious R&B rhythm.
Somehow, one doubts this contemporary dance project is going to be West End material, but it should find a comfortable place in the seventh circle - or indeed, the stalls - of Hell. And we, of course, will be burning along with it.

Top of page

John Parish, Polly Jean Harvey & The Mark Bruce Company
by Victoria Segal

Queen Elizabeth Hall, London

From NME, 1996

Another world. From The Astoria to the South Bank, from plastic beer beakers to glasses of wine, from noise and clatter to reverent silence - tonight is one of those crossover events that generally make right-thinking people slightly twitchy. The potential for disaster has been well explored : mix rock music with other art forms and you can bet those dread words "performance art" - or even "David Bowie" - come ominously to mind. It’s little wonder (ha) that most people interested in what Sundays papers would grimly call "The Arts" tend towards a purist stance. As Matt Groening puts it, "Is there anything more frightening than an open-mic poetry reading?". You know, if you ever see a real dancer straying near to a concept album, then run like the wind. They can only mean harm. Wrong. This, this is amazing, exhilarating, crushing, a perfect synthesis of Mark Bruce’s choreography and John Parish and Polly Harvey’s Dance Hall At Louse Point album.
Set as a stage, with Polly and the musicians as house band and the five dancers as clientele, the piece works so well because it’s a projection, both a living album and a visible manifestation of the singer’s persona. The bareknuckled, red-raw rock’n’roll and sultry showtune swagger, mixed and matched like stubble and an evening gown, are lit by mirrorballs and yellow pools of spotlight, clothed in black velvet and satin. All those blues-bruised, devil-at-the-crossroads metaphors are made seductive flesh.
Flesh. For all her restraint, her constant mystery, Polly has always been the most uninhibited of performers and writers. They might not be any vulgar full-frontal-soul exposure, she doesn’t bundle her secrets up to sell in neat packages, but in every desirechoked yowl, every intimate image, every compelling pose, she untethers herself. Her sheer physicality is reflected in the dancers firecracking across the stage, lustful yet scared, abject yet domineering, entwining in vicious courtship rituals to the rippled wash of Girl, seeming to eviscerate themselves to the tangled neuroses of Heela. It’s no coincidence there’s a song called Lost Fun Zone
From the first moment, Parish’s music pulls the strings - most disturbingly in the sequence to Taut where Polly prowls among the dancers, seeming to control a brutal male-female struggle with a swing of her skinny fist. "Even the Son of God had to die, darlin’", she hisses, between her inchoate muttering, like the sight of a crucifix would reduce her to dust. It’s like that old story of God and Satan playing chess for lost souls - whoever she is, she’s playing to win.
The music is drink-blinded, ripe with trouble; the dance is spectacular - but if any alterno-rock-star was going to carry it off, Polly was.
Forget distinctions between contemporary dance and contemporary music - when PJ Harvey crosses over, it’s not just to another cultural world. It’s to the other side.

Top of page

Rosie by Brian Duguid

from The Wire, March 1999

Out of the blue comes one of the best soundtracks I've heard in some time. Perhaps best known for his collaborations with PJ Harvey, Parish conjures a measures, wistful tone that reminds me of Ned Rifle's music for the films of Hal Hartley: black, shimmering swashes of electric guitar alternate with pointillistic, hesitant plucking. Much of the guitar sounds like a slightly more 'rock' variant on Loren MazzaCane Connor's rain-drenched atmospheres, and when Parish adds gentle accordion and violin to the stew, it's a particularly impressive blend. The regretful vibrations of I Did It For You Mama and the fragility of Rosie Takes Elvis are noteworthy highlights from a consistently outstanding release.

Top of page

Rosie by Darren Johns

From NME, March 1999

Taking into account that the mood of a film is always reflected in the soundtrack, Patrice Toye’s Belgian film Rosie must be as desolate and existential as it is art-house. For here, PJ Harvey collaborator, producer and all-round serious muso John Parish has stripped back his moody template to a bleak blues that chills with its authentic air of detachment.
Paradoxically, he’s pulled out all the stops to create the ambient sparseness of the continental avant-garde. The 13 excerpts on the LP are essentially fleeting incidental passages which work wonders with your imagination, even without the film’s visual guidance.
Stripped of vocals – with the exception of Tricky cohort Alison Goldfrapp’s frail tones on the clipped neo-jazz of Pretty Baby - it imparts an almost unbearable emotional solitude. The lone guitar sadness of Rosie Rosita, the Swans-like emptiness of Pipeline Disturbance - these send weighty sensations from a thousand beautifully shot Euro-tragedies racing through you like particularly acute drowners. In winter. In Iceland.
Not an LP for the office party, then, but one which will assist in the reading of those Kafka novels gathering dust on your shelves.

Top of page

Rosie by Joe Cushley

From Mojo, May 1999

Being a multi-instrumentalist and producer gives Parish a head start as a film composer. But he possesses other, more esoteric abilities which mark him out as an excellent exponent of the art. First, he understands dynamic extremes - whispers (the breathy cymbals of Pretty Baby) and screams (the swamp rock drawl of Burn Rubber Barons). Secondly, he know how to balance the varying energies of instruments; thus, on Rosie Takes Elvis, accordion and toy organ vie with distorted slide-guitar. His versatility is apparent from the off. Disturbance, an ominous, recurrent metallic drone sounds like Link Wray's contribution to an Enya tribute album. Rosie Rosita has a melodic shimmer which speaks of the melancholic Continental flatlands (I'm guessing this is not a screwball comedy).
There are echoes of David Lynch's soundtrack sidekick, Angelo Badalamenti and Eric Clapton's brooding Edge Of Darkness, but ultimately John's his own man. You don't even have to see the film, and you can't praise a soundtrack much higher than that.

Top of page

This was an adventurous and risky enterprise. John Parish, a musician of enormous ability and scope, is best known for his work with PJ Harvey. Here, he brought together the brilliant band which backs Polly Harvey, added some extra Bristol luminaries and let the whole lot loose on the soundtrack he has written for the Belgian movie Rosie.
Would anyone turn up? Would the idea of fusing live interpretations of the soundtrack music to extracts from the film work? And would it be rock and roll? The people who put this show together are to be congratulated for their courage and imagination. I suppose the clue to this lay in last year's Dance Hall at Louse Point shows, where items such as their interpretation of Eno's Here Come The Warm Jets demonstrated the instrumental power at the core of this particular outfit. But few could have predicted just how engrossing this evening would become.
The stripped-down world-weariness of the White Hotel (the trio featuring PJ Harvey's last drummer Jean-Marc Butty) attracted attention from bookers and record company scouts around the hall, while Portsmouth artistic co-op The Obscura Project's electronic extravagances courted controversy, but it was Rosie who triumphed. The precision of musicians like Adrian Utley, the silver voice of Alison Goldfrapp, the welcome lack of rock song structures (it was a soundtrack, not a gig, and the audience didn't take long to adjust to the fact), interpreting Parish's atmospherically melodic soundscapes contributed to a musical evening of a kind which nobody present had ever experienced before.
This unique event points out a new direction not only for the career of John Parish but also for rock music in general. A jaded musical scene just got an unexpected shot in its arm.

Top of page

John Parish - Columbiafritz, Berlin, by Oliver Gray

From LOGO Magazine

The Columbiahalle is in the old American sector of Berlin, just opposite the diplomatic and military buildings from where the Berlin airlift was launched. That's why the Underground station next to it is called "Platz der Luftbrücke". As we emerged from said station, anticipating a select and low-key evening with John Parish and his band, we were startled to find ourselves surrounded by thousands of rowdy, grungy, beer bottle-throwing youngsters. Blimey, John has a bigger following in the German capital than we anticipated.
And then it became clear: The Columbiahalle has a little brother called the "Columbiafritz" lurking in its shadows. Here was the venue for the John Parish show, while the stoners were out in force for the Queens Of The Stone Age next door. We treacherously toyed for a moment with the idea of pretending that our guest passes were for the main hall, but, having travelled half way across Europe, settled for the more discerning, better behaved, more intimate gathering in the "Fritz". Two credibility-boosting things that John's band has which the Queens don't, however, are: 1. Their tour bus is bigger and more densely populated. 2. They got busted on their way through France and the Queens didn't.
Well, you know that thing that only happens on rare and magical occasions? I'm talking about when the encore have been done, the house lights have been switched on and taped music is blasting out over the P.A. It's obvious the band isn't going to come back on, yet still the audience refuses to go home. Short of cracking open the tear gas, there's no option for John and co but to re-appear one more time. "That's it", he gasps, "you're all invited backstage for a drink. Every last one of you". "Westward Airways" is reprised and the evening has been a winner.
This is no ordinary band, oh no. Just look at the state of them. The more "experienced" members (John, Jeremy Hogg and Portishead's Adrian Utley) mainly keep their heads firmly bowed to concentrate on their enormously complicated foot pedal boards, thus revealing their uniform state of follicle fallibility. Then there are loads of youngsters like Jesse Morningstar (who also doubled as support act) and Ben Shillabeer (who also doubled as T-shirt vendor). Finally, the ensemble is completed by the demure Claire McTaggart (violin) and Tammy Payne (drums and vocals).
Last time John hit the road, he had a diverting backdrop of visuals from the film Rosie, but this time, with no stage antics and no particular visual focal point, it's solely about the music. And the music is so strong and so atmospheric, (there are nine of them, you know) that there is a tangible feeling of affection and emotion throughout the hall as almost all of the new album "How Animals Move", plus a good chunk of "Rosie" is performed with precision and spirit.
You might think I was mad to travel all the way to Berlin for a gig. Well, I wasn't. I was bloody sensible. You should have done it too.

Top of page