COWEN: What was your role in the PJ Harvey album, Let England Shake?

MURPHY: Well, that was an interesting one because I’d done a book on Afghanistan in 2008 and Polly had seen the exhibition in London, and she bought the book, and she got in touch and was interested in meeting me and talking about that. At that stage, she’d been writing the songs, and she’d done a demo, so, really, she’d already done all the work. I think some of my work might have influenced her in some way by looking at pictures from Afghanistan because she wrote about the First World War, she wrote about Iraq, she wrote about Afghanistan, and she wrote about England. That was Let England Shake.

I came back from Afghanistan, actually, having shot some video for the first time, and she said, “Oh, you shoot video too? Would you like to make some music films for me?” I said, “Sure.” That was what I ended up doing. She gave me the demo. It wasn’t an album at that stage, and I put together an idea. First of all, I was going to go to Iraq and Afghanistan to shoot these music films in those places because these places were being referenced so much in the songs.

Then I thought, actually, stay in England. It’s called Let England Shake. Stay in England and find some kind of visual equivalent of that legacy. That legacy of colonies and colonialism, of the First World War, and find it in the English people, and find it in the cities and the countryside, so I ended up doing this road trip around England twice, and I shot a lot of video, and I put it together, and I made 12 short films for that album. It was making music films for that album.

COWEN: Those are on your website, right?

MURPHY: They’re on the website, yes. We thought that worked very well, and the next project we decided what we’d do is, we would actually start that project at the same time, so I would be photographing and filming, and she would be taking notes, writing poetry and songs, and we’d do some traveling together. That ended up becoming Hope Six Demolition Project. That was the name of the album.

COWEN: Do you think you and she saw something about England back then that was ahead of its time?

MURPHY: I think she did.

COWEN: What was that?

MURPHY: It was Brexit, wasn’t it? In its simplest form, it was Brexit. “God Damn Europeans” is one of the songs that starts out. It’s some person being quoted. She’s written the lyric, “God Damn Europeans.” I guess it was tapping into some kind of patriotism, nationalism.

COWEN: The further album, Hope Six Demolition Project, that came out of trips to Kosovo and Washington. Am I understanding this correctly?

MURPHY: Trips to Afghanistan. Kosovo, Washington, DC. We’d decided we’d like to travel together and see where things would take us. The promise to each other was, if we did this once and it just didn’t work, that’s fine. We wouldn’t do it.

We were invited to Kosovo, to a very good film festival called the DokuFest in Prizren, and they wanted us to do a Q&A based on my 12 short films for Let England Shake. I’d been to Kosovo during the war, and she’d already started writing some stuff, actually, based on some of my pictures. We went, and we thought, “Okay, we’ll go on this, and maybe this can be the start of the travels.” The Balkans are a fascinating place to go to, and Kosovo is at peace, but very interesting and very, very warm people.

We spent a few days in Kosovo, and we discovered that we could travel together, and we could actually produce work, and we were sort of up and running. A year later, I was in Afghanistan working on that poetry project, The Afghan Women’s Poetry Project, a book and film. It was quiet there. It was 2012. I had finished my work there; it was December. I had a very good situation with a very nice place to live, a good driver that I trusted, and I just offered, would she like to come and visit Afghanistan?

Didn’t know whether she would or not, and in the end, she did, and we did that. That was pretty extraordinary because I think what she wrote about Afghanistan was so unique. It’s a very different take. I’d never read anything like what she was writing about Afghanistan.

COWEN: How would you characterize that?

MURPHY: An artist’s eye. I mean a true artist’s vision. Small little things becoming a whole soul. In her own inimitable way, she was capturing that. It was great to do that with Afghanistan because, as you were saying about photography and what people’s perceptions are of the country, I thought this would bring a slightly different take on the place for people that would listen.

COWEN: Do you have a PJ Harvey story that you’re able to tell us?

MURPHY: Well, funnily enough, yes. [laughs] The thing that comes to mind is the weirdest story. When we were coming back from Afghanistan on Turkish Airlines . . . We had our trip, and we went to the Panjshir Valley. We had a few little scrapes, but nothing because there weren’t any Taliban there at that time. There were, but they were in other places. We didn’t go into those places. It was fairly uneventful, but there was always the possibility of something happening.

Job done, and we were flying from Kabul to London. Literally, we were just about to land. Literally, the wheels were down, and the engines were roared into action, and we took off. I just turned to her, and I said, “Jesus, I hope we’re not being kidnapped or something. This is very strange.”

We flew around for about half an hour. Nobody said a word. Everyone was freaked out. People in the airplane were looking for some kind of guidance as to what was going on. Obviously, the people that were there, the staff were all seated. That was very strange. I just thought, “What’s going on here?” She was very calm.

COWEN: What was going on?

MURPHY: Don’t know. To this day, I don’t know. Got off the plane, was happy to be on terra firma, and that was the end of it. Forgot about it. I just thought about it right now.

I hope we’re not being kidnapped or something

She was very calm