The Garden, a PJ Harvey Discussion Site

Maybe posted somewhere in this thread… but what happened to this PJ Harvey / Seamus Murphy documentary about their trips and proces of creating The Hope Six Demolition Project? Is this still in production?

From July 2016:

Kuk91 wrote:Long interview with Seamus Murphy

They start to talk about his work with PJ on 58:48 mark.

<...> and regarding the documentary - "we're waiting for some funding to come in, and once it comes in, it's gonna be months of editing". He also wants to travel some more (for the film), and maybe he will film "a couple of events with Polly and a band". He also planning to use her notebooks in the film, and described it in general as a "mixture of their travels, his own travels, and recording sessions in Somerset House".

Ah… I'll wait.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BS0vpsFlJvL/

^ What's there? You can't enter without a Facebook account.

TheNightingale wrote:^ What's there? You can't enter without a Facebook account.

its a Tour only 7"
A side - A Dog Called Money
AA side - I'll Be Waiting

maybe it will appear somewhere soon..

https://www.instagram.com/p/BS4UoXOBGKU/



It's funny how "Homo Sappy Blues" is still being ignored, though. And it's also pretty weird to find out about official releases thru the lucky fans.

Some info about these songs which was "leaked" during the open recording sessions:


"I'll Be Waiting": she wanted the guitar to be stuttering, in a bid to try and replicate the stuttering of children suffering from post-war trauma; initially, she wanted a young boy to be the lead singer for this, and that she would only "shadow" him (but as we can see from personnel notes, it turned out NOT to be the case); might be based upon the poem "The Children":
Some fan even wrote down the lyrics by the ear:

"A Dog Called Money": might be based upon the poem "A Guy Who Knows What the Fuck's Going On" (from "The Hollow of the Hand"):
Supposedly, this poem is an almost word-by-word replica of someone's direct speech (just like "The Community of Hope"); in the "Acknowledgements" section of the book she's thanking someone called Pops for this specific poem (Pops might be meaning "an old man", "someone's grandpa" - just some person PJ met in Washington).

https://www.discogs.com/PJ-Harvey-A-Dog ... e/10141194

"Limited edition of 1000 copies. Available at 2017 North American tour."



https://www.instagram.com/p/BS-BcInAy1y/

Only 1,000 copies? I hope they don't sell out before they get to Portland. Either way, I'm sure they'll rerelease it digitally for the rest of the world afterwards.

It interests me that we now have nine songs which never made it onto the album, three of which have been officially released ('Guilty' and these latest two), one released via the BBC ('Dance on the Mountain'), four we've heard bits of via On Kosovo Field, and 'Homo Sappy Blues'. That's nearly as much material as the album itself. Let England Shake only gave rise to two 'extra' tracks, and White Chalk, none. You could read this either as Polly being especially inspired this time round, or alternatively finding the creative process particularly hard going. I incline towards the second, but I don't know what other people think.

AineteEkaterini wrote:It interests me that we now have nine songs which never made it onto the album, <...>

Actually, there's also "Age of the Dollar", "The Boy" (dismissed by John Parish and Flood, and hence probably unfinished) and "Imagine This" (Romario thinks it's an early version of "Chain Of Keys", I don't).

Plus, about these four songs about Kosovo ("Pity for the Old Road", "The Red Road", "Clothes of Grief" and "Where is Our City?") - I believe they were never mentioned on the chart wall during the sessions, so I'm thinking they were never even considered to be a full band numbers [I think she always have songs which are deemed to exist only as demos - for example, it's really hard for me to imagine "Easy", "Dance" or "Liverpool Tide" with drums and stuff]. I also think that she has much more demos from Kosovo and both other trips, and these were just selected by the people behind the radio play. Also, in some interview she said that it takes quite a lot of time for a set of words to "decide for itself" what it is going to be - a poem, a piece of prose, or a song (maybe 2 or 3 simultaneously), and that she often sings her poems (or says them out loud) to edit, and I wouldn't be all that surprised to know if she has a song version for almost every poem from "The Hollow of the Hand".

About "White Chalk": in KCRW interview she said that initially there was 40 or 50 songs and song ideas, then before the recording they selected about 20 - they recorded for half a year, so there might be a 9 or so recorded tracks which "weren't good enough", or maybe too personal. [I wonder if "Bitter Little Bird" is one of them.] That's a shame, of course.

About "LES" - they recorded it in one month, there were some sonic challenges (sound engineer said they worked very hard to sound, funnily enough, "NOT like in church"), plus at first there were only 3 musicians including PJ (and Jean-Marc Butty came in on a later stage of recording), so I think 14 known tracks might be all they recorded (although I certainly wouldn't mind to hear more - such a fantastic album that is).

Kuk91 wrote: Actually, there's also ...

Thank you so much for that!

Kuk91 wrote:About "LES" - they recorded it in one month, there were some sonic challenges (sound engineer said they worked very hard to sound, funnily enough, "NOT like in church"), plus at first there were only 3 musicians including PJ (and Jean-Marc Butty came in on a later stage of recording), so I think 14 known tracks might be all they recorded (although I certainly wouldn't mind to hear more - such a fantastic album that is).

Either Flood, John Parish or Mick Harvey once said in an interview that they recorded 17 or 18 tracks for Let England Shake. I remember crossing my fingers back in 2011/2012 for a companion EP or a deluxe reissue with a bonus disc, but of course nothing materialised. Polly can be quite a control freak when it comes to releasing her songs - maybe the remaining tracks weren't up to her standards.

AFAIK this is the complete list of The Hope Six Demolition Project songs we know about (tracks in bold have been released in full):

• The Community of Hope
  The Ministry of Defence
  A Line in the Sand
  Chain of Keys
  River Anacostia
  Near the Memorials to Vietnam and Lincoln
  The Orange Monkey
  Medicinals
  The Ministry of Social Affairs
  The Wheel
  Dollar, Dollar
  
  Age of the Dollar
  The Boy
  A Dog Called Money
  Guilty
  Homo Sappy Blues
  I'll Be Waiting
  Imagine This
  
  Clothes of Grief (demo)
  Dance on the Mountain (demo)
  Pity for the Old Road (demo)
  The Red Road (demo)
  Where Is Our City? (demo)

I think it matches Kuk91's list exactly.