Beth Gibbons: "And by the time Poll romps home with 'Down By The Water', Beth from Portishead is screaming for more, waving her beer bottle aloft and dancing the lambada. Is it just spooky coincidence that the final four words on Portishead's last album were, "This mess we're in"? Hmmm. Never mind that for now. Because if born-again supervixen Polly can rock the Queen Of Darkness to her feet, imagine what she'll do for the rest of us."
Adrian Utley: "Adrian went on to say that the only decent release he rates from recent months is Polly Jean Harvey?s ?Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea? and blamed society and the music industry in general for the current lull in creativity."
Adrian Utley(Portishead): " Then a few years ago I was doing a session for Marianne Faithfull which Polly Harvey was producing and she had an AD30 with a 2×12 cab and I used hers in the studio. It was so totally brilliant – and not just for guitar… we played bass through it for certain things and that also sounded great.”
Garbage: "Play PJ Harvey's "Hardly Wait" before their set is due to commence"
Shirley Manson: "She's the bomb"
Shirley Manson: "She can sing the blues, a lot of white chicks can't do that. She does it in a really unique way. She's a true blues singer"
Shirley Manson: "I feel that she's influenced by the same people I am and that really bonds me to her desperately"
Shirley Manson: "I love everything she's ever done, I think everything's incredible"
Shirley Manson: "Every period of PJ I have adored"
Shirley Manson: "I just think she's amazing, a great singer
Shirley Manson: "She's likened herself to PJ Harvey. Unfortunately she hasn't the talent nor the grace to bless herself with"
Shirley Manson: "Massive PJ Harvey fan, this is one of the most anticipated records for me of the year." (referring to Is This Desire)
Shirley Manson(on what drew her To PJ): "Totally her voice, ya. I love her riot sounds and it's sort of got this sort of perfect mixture of male and female, and a lot of power and a lot of unability that I like."
Shirley Manson: "Just got hold of an advance copy of the new PJ Harvey record.It's FUCKING EXTRORDINARY!!! Buy it.Buy a trillion copies.Keep it safe.Play it to EVERYONE.Play it to the children. Educate the masses. This is my record of the year, holding hands with Eminem and pissing on the competion"
Shirley Manson: ""Woke up early and played the new PJ Harvey cd over and over ('We float' made me cry the first time I heard it.) whilst tidying up my hotel room."
Shirley Manson: "All the same, the songs seem to share a certain fascination with the darker side of the female psyche, leading some people to group Shirley with the scary women of pop, like PJ Harvey and Courtney Love. Shirley disagrees, "I don't think there's anything scary about them, I just think they're striking, they're individualists, and that upsets people at times. It frightens people because society in general makes us think we're not supposed to be like that. They're strong women and that intimidates men. "
Shirley Manson: "Who would you rather be stuck in a lift with - Courtney Love, PJ Harvey, Björk or Tori Amos? PJ definitely. Firstly, I think she is unbelievably amazing; I just adore her records and I play them all the time. I think she's really underrated. I heard her on some radio show the other night and she's got a really beautiful, soft calm voice and think she wouldn't add to my frustrations at being stuck in a lift.
Shirley Manson: " Finally, In a section called "Artist's High-Fives". In it musicians of the year pich 1998's top albums. Here are Shirley's top five:
1.PJ Harvey - Is This Desire ? 2. Hole - Celebrity Skin 3. Laurryn Hill - The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill 4. Vic Chesnutt - The Salesman and Bernadete 5. Outkast - Aquemini
Shirley Manson: "Best Recording Act: PJ Harvey, Lauryn Hill Worst: Hootie and the Blowfish "(Alternative press 98)
Shirley Manson: "and Shirley used PJ Harvey as a prime example of an amazing female artist who doesn't get played."
Shirley Manson: " "Moral courage turns me on for some inexplicable reason. You know, really ballsy, smart women. I mean, historical figures like Eleanor Roosevelt and Amelia Earhart really inspire me. Mary Queen of Scots is kind of a tragic heroine. And I fell madly in love with people like Patti Smith and Chrissie Hynde when I was young. And I love Bjork and PJ Harvey now. Alice Walker, the writer, is just an amazing woman. There are just so many! I find women on a daily basis really inspirational."
Shirley Manson: "Patti Smith,Siouxsie and the Banshees, Blondie,David Bowie,Velvet Underground,Billy Holiday,The Pretenders,Elvis Presley, Iggy Pop, The Duke and The King,Richard Hell and The Voidoids,The La's,Bob Dylan,John Lee Hooker, The Distillers, Fiona Apple,Grace Jones,Nick Cave,PJ Harvey" (influences from her facebook page)
Shirley Manson: "People I would like to see more of in 2011" - PJ Harvey- Have you heard her new song?! It's sublime!" (from her facebook page)
Shirley Manson: "Let England Shake" -You can pre-order PJ Harvey's new album on Itunes RIGHT NOW!!!!!!
And no I did not get paid for this endorsement.
But if you have already heard the exquisite single "Written On The Forehead" you will be as excited as I am by this glorious discovery!Listen to the single at least twice before you decide how you feel about it.
You will find it leaks into your brain and caresses your worries....... soothes your troubles.............
The Queen is back on TOP FORM.
Hallelujah!!! Hallelujah!! Hallelujah!! Something wonderful to listen to.(from her facebook page)
Butch Vig: "I like the new PJ Harvey record"
Duke Erikson(Garbage): ""PJ Harvey" (when asked who his favourite band was)
Josh Freese(The Vandals): "Yeah, well I did a little bit of work with PJ Harvey on the last Desert Sessions record but I'd like to do some more with her."
Chris Goss(Masters of Reality): "They’re usually people that I like. I think there has to be someone that’s making music that there’s something about it I like or did like at a particular time. There’s an interesting little story behind the Polly Harvey tracks. I was recording Mark Lanegan’s record and Polly came in to cut a track for that, and then she was in the high desert doing DESERT SESSIONS with Josh Homme and I stopped by. The two tracks that I wrote with Polly on that record we wrote and recorded them in two hours. And they were done. That one-take song was only performed once, that’s absolutely true. It was never rehearsed. I was playing some chords and Polly sat down back scene with her notebook, and I said ‘well’ should we go give it a shot?’ And we walked into the studio and sat in front of the microphone and ran through it. And the run-through was the take! It had never, ever been rehearsed for ten seconds before that. And after we finished that take, I heard all this applause coming from the studio and my first question was, ‘was the tape running?’ and they said yes. And I was very happy, and I think it was a testament to Polly whose power as a poet and a singer, on that particular track was something else. She was throwing her voice around the room, and moving back from the microphone and projecting her voice into a different corner of the room. And I swear it sounds like two vocal tracks being overlaid over each other. I mean it was a magic moment. It might be a cliché but it was sheer magic. It was like we had accomplished something pretty unusual.
Japandroids: "I feel we didn't give it everything we should have. I'm a little bit nervous for it to come out. One of the goals with the covers was to get the covers to a point where we would be proud to give them to the band [who conceived them], and be like, "We love your band and we did this." I don't know if I can give that one to Polly Jean. It should have been even better than that."
Japandroids(on whether she'll understand): "I hope so. We love that music so much and it's meant to showcase that."
Japandroids(on who else they would want in their band given the chance): " I want to sing? Nick Cave, obviously. PJ Harvey. Who else would we like? Um, Freddie Mercury."
Atticus Ross: "Polly Jean Harvey call me"
Atticus Ross: "I think that goth should be divided into "Goth" and "Nouveau-Goth." I think that someone like PJ Harvey is "Nouveau-Goth" and that's much more interesting. She embraces a much wider spectrum. With our record, it's almost like [on] some of the darker tracks we've tried to, not exactly "lighten"... but, we've tried to throw something in there which is..."
Brody Dalle(The Distillers): "We also listen to PJ Harvey"
Ryan Sinn(The Distillers):"I'VE BEEN LIST ENING TO A LOT OF INDUSTRIAL LATELY, MORTIIS, NINE INCH NAILS, APOPTYGMA BERZERK, VELVET ACID CHRIST, WUMPSCUT, ASEMBLAGE 23, KMFDM, MARLYN MANSON, JUCIFER, LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT, HAUJOBB, PJ HARVEY, RASPUTINA, THE CURE, JOY DIVISION, EMPEROR, THE NEW SLA YER, TORI AMOS, DANZIG..." Christina Martinez(Boss Hog, Jon Spencer's from Pussy Galore and Blues Explosion.. other band): "I listen to the Stooges and anything that Nick Cave does. I adore PJ Harvey …."
The Naked and the Dead: "My musical taste also runs the gamut from Cocteau Twins (still my all-time faves), PJ Harvey, Billie Holiday, to lots of various old jazz and blues."
Marty E Concussion(Dirty Pearls): "I set up an audition for some "chick band" (which I didn't mind....I'm not sexist, for God's sake! If PJ Harvey had called me up, I'd have died of a heart attack....by the way....Polly Jean....call me! Hahahahaha)."
Steve Albini: " I recorded a remarkable album by the remarkable band PJ Harvey"
Steve Albini: "There hasn't been much written about your guitar playing, that's the first thing I noticed about your music, and something that's never talked about. The singing and the songs are nice but the rock is the most distinctive thing. You're a great and original guitar player" (select 93)
Steve Albini: "Polly was a wicked guitar player"
Steve Albini: "I still like that record. That's the only one (of the major records I've produced) that I would ever throw on for entertainment now and again. I think Polly is an amazing songwriter and I think she's a fantastic guitar player. I keep hoping that she will gravitate to a fixed band arrangement for her live performace and that she'll start writing music as part of a band again becaause I think that's where she was strongest. But I have a lot of faith in her and I think that whatever she's working on, she will find something of substance in it. "
Steve Albini: "Of course it's progress for her. Personally I preferred the sound of the rock band, but Polly's no dope. She is making these incremental changes in her delivery and methods with open eyes, and she's very aware of how it changes the music. She is a genius, and I'm more than willing to wait for her experiments to pay off"
Steve Albini: "Every woman is a whore except PJ Harvey"
Todd Trainer(Shellac): "Todd's favourite PJ Harvey album is "Rid of Me"
Dave Gilmour(on whether anything current impresses him):" Not much does these days. I've been impressed by one or two Lemonheads songs, some PJ Harvey songs."
Robert Smith: "'Album of the year...Uh Huh Her by PJ Harvey. Favourite song would be Shame"
Robert Smith: "When we embark on an eight month tour next year, I've got know who's going to go mad and who isn't. The alternative was to do our own summer tour. We have to set it up ourselves and take our own lights, PA and crew. This way, we arrive, everything's set up, we play, we fuck off. It's much more interesting than doing your own tour, because we get to see other bands like Polly Harvey and Supergrass, whom I otherwise wouldn't have seen. Two real high points in the last month. "
Robert Smith: "Robert said that he wanted to see either Deftones, Dandy Warhols or PJ Harvey at the festival, but he wasn`t sure if he would eventually go, because he always had to talk to hundreds of people."
The Cure: "Were so impressed they extended an invitation for Polly to join them on tour. Morrissey, u2 and The Cure were all fighting over Harvey"
Miki Berenyi(Lush): "Like all that stuff with PJ Harvey!" remarks Miki. The artist was slagged off and mixed up into all the riot grrl stuff, according to Emma. Miki remembers reading all of that where PJ Harvey was slagged off "because she wouldn't say that she was a feminist or something . People would ask, 'Are you a feminist?' and she would say, 'No, I'm not, and I'm not fucking interested either.' But even if she says she's not a feminist, not by this little code book, you kknow we have to listen to her songs, and they're not... you know, they're not idiotic songs. So if you took feminists as being a strong female figure, then she's it. It's pointless to slag her off... there's no denying it. She's got a helluva lot more pull and effect than someone like Huggy Bear, as good as they can be. PJ Harvey's gonna hit much more of a nerve with people, I think. . .""
Will Oldham: "I remember listening to City of No Sun from the amazing dance hall at louse point, that track really struck me. I remember thinking why would someone choose to sing a song like that way"
Will Oldham: " Album of the year- PJ Harvey- Is This Desire"
Will Oldham: "“love will protect you to the edge of the wood/and a monster will get you/and love does no good.”"(excerpt from a song he wrote about her)
Will Oldham: ""Even If Love," as a whole, is for Polly..."
Will Oldham: "I wish I was Polly Harvey's manager sometimes. So great, and I'm sure her label and management don't understand why she's great, fully. And sometimes I feel like she doesn't understand why she's great because of that, because she has these weird buffer zones around her that are distractingly diffusing, and it keeps us from getting full access to how good she is."
Will Oldham: "liked the record pretty well, and I thought it was her best record of the past few records, for sure. I wasn't a big fan of the Stories record and Uh Huh Her. They were both good.. though it was nice to see her doing something that was more uniquely her, like White Chalk. Uh Huh Her seemed like her doing her, and Stories from the City seemed like her doing other people or something. But the records before that, like Is this Desire and Dance Hall at Rouse Point. (on White Chalk)
Will Oldham: " You don't know that record? That's the record where John Parish wrote all the music and she did all the singing. It's so amazing, and there's a weird moment in it that's very strange and disturbing where - and I feel like the label or she or somebody decided that maybe the record wasn't long enough, so they stuck a weird Mick Harvey produced cover of 'Is That all There Is,' the Lieber-Stoller/Peggy Lee song, which is okay, but Peggy Lee's version just fucking slays, destroys that. There's no reason for that to exist, and it's in the last third of the record, so if you ever listen to that record, I would just delete it because the rest of it works as this amazing piece - like, insane singing styles that she's doing, great lyrics. It's a superior record. And it's weird when you see people do work that's so far ahead to so many other things, and you know that the folks that they work with have no clue who they're working with, like the managers. (on dance hall..disagree totally about the Peggy Lee cover but each to their own)
Will Oldham: "Polly Harvey, totally fucking amazing voice, and maybe the most exciting voice to me of singers alive right now just because of the range and all the things she's willing to do with her voice, from like Diamanda Galas, to Björk and Barbara Streisand to Nick Cave, all dynamics thrown into one voice."
Will Oldham: ""I felt I was actively ripping her off with that song," Oldham chortles"
Will Oldham: ""Let's hit the button. Well, the first song that comes up is 'City of No Sun' from the 1996 album Dance Hall at Louse Point. When this came out I thought it was a really great record. I still think so. Vocally, it's one of the most exciting records in the past decade. There's whispers and sometimes there's screaming. [Sings] 'Love me tenderly my darling/...In the city of light and truth'. I've never tried to figure out why she sings the way she does or the intent behind it, but I guess there's a villainous aspect to it."
Will Oldham: ""Some of the older country singers have meant a lot to me. Closer to home, someone like Polly Harvey would be good. Her singing has always been very important to me." (on who he would like to collaborate with)
Peter Murphy(Bauhaus): "Peter chooses PJ Harvey's Man-Size"
Peter Murphy(Bauhaus): "Peter likes PJ Harvey"
Peter Gabriel: "Gabriel is listening to Polly Harvey's Man-Size from her latest album"
Warren Zevon: "Haven't really heard her. First couple of albums of P.J. Harvey's, I thought they were real, real great. I'm a little less fond of this new one, 'cause it sounds like the influence of Nine Inch Nails. I mean, they're fine, he [Trent Reznor] is fine. But I don't want to hear him as a influence on editing styles. I'm not interested in Quentin Tarantino's influence on swearing styles, either. [laughs] "James Ellroy Swearing School." [Harvey's] first two albums, Dry and Rid of Me, I thought were everything that alternative should be, because they were a little baffling to someone my age. But they were of a whole different kind of thrust of lyric point of view. And they were dissonant and weird. For someone to be playing that way, it's like she's playing some kind of Bartok shit with that trio. And I thought that was magnificent. That fulfilled my highest ideas of what these young people are doing. It's kind of scary. I like that Frank Black kid, too."
Warren Zevon: "One of the best albums of the year" (on rid of me)
Heather Nova: "Heather, a PJ Harvey fan"
Chrissie Hynde: "Älbum of the year- PJ Harvey Is This Desire (98) (Chrissie's also been spotted at various shows during the desire and stories period)
Howe Gelb: "Gelb returned the favour by covering Harvey's 'Desperate Kingdom of Love' on Provisions"
Howe Gelb: "Polly, glad you could make it," says Howe running across the yard and clutching her tight." (I included that line because I thought it was cute ha ha)
Howe Gelb: "i had kept the interviewer waiting when i got a phone call from polly. we have not spoken is some time. when she finally checks in like this, time tends to stop and she becomes the narrator to whatever dream this is supposed to be. its mostly just 2 libras sitting on a hill. we yammer and sigh and chuckle trying to top each other’s clever anecdotes. it’s a bit of magic for me. there is something confusing about that woman.(from his tour journal)"
Howe Gelb: "We had a fantastic version of that song at the London show. We didn’t have a guitar hookup for Polly, so I gave her the CD player cued up to some white noise, the same that’s on the studio recording. I had it really loud, so I told her, “Polly, just push this button [laughs] when you want to kick it in, and hit it off when you want it to quit.” And it sounded great. At the end of the night we did Rainer’s “Losing Ground,” this monster version with everybody, and it was really beautiful."
Howe Gelb: ""No, but her I know her via John Parish. Polly and I appeared to have much in common. We feel us on our ease in each other's company. I am really mad about her and her performances. I am mad on her parents that I know good. As they Polly saw opgroeien, that layman on my relation with my daughter Patsy. Have you seen her? She is with me and walks here around here somewhere." (translated from dutch)
Howe Gelb: "Another perfect thing for supporting an instinct. It wasn't only that she didn't know Johny Hit And Run Paulene, but I think she hadn't even heard of X before. She's so young, I must forgive her. So I told yer about that group, one of the greatest forever, and about how important it was to me back in 1980. I guess when I heard Billy Zoom playing... that was the moment when I thought that possessing a Gretsch is the only thing that counts. The first two albums of X were real milestones in that story, also of my personal story. Polly was at my home with John Parish, our common friend, I made her hear the song and a few minutes before accompanying her to the airport I put a micro in front of her mouth, and she sang like that, in a hurry and furious. One take, and away. She was already late."
Howe Gelb: "We had a fantastic version of that song at the London show. We didn’t have a guitar hookup for Polly, so I gave her the CD player cued up to some white noise, the same that’s on the studio recording. I had it really loud, so I told her, “Polly, just push this button [laughs] when you want to kick it in, and hit it off when you want it to quit.” And it sounded great. At the end of the night we did Rainer’s “Losing Ground,” this monster version with everybody, and it was really beautiful.
Howe Gelb: "I lament the absence of polly during this run. I find it funny how much I miss her when she’s never usually there"
Last edited by Polly_Jean_Cave on Mon Jan 24, 2011 9:44 pm, edited 33 times in total.
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