“It was very interesting, we were publishing the book The Hollow of the Hand together. We were printing it in Italy and got there the first day and there was a woman working on the project from London and she was a big PJ Harvey fan. She was great. And we had a meal together and then Polly said ‘oh I’m off to bed now’ about 10pm. Which is typical her, she goes to bed early often.

“And this woman says ‘Oh, my god, she’s changed’. And this woman had never known, had never met her before. I said what do you mean?”

These days, Harvey is not a party animal – and perhaps, hints Murphy, never was.

“She wasn’t, she never did that – I mean, maybe in LA or something, maybe but I don’t think even then. People see this persona on stage and they read into it. They complicate it.”

He says that Harvey has been “very clever in some ways, if you like, for just being neutral” and not appearing in the press much.

“You know, the biggest shock, the biggest headline, the better” is how he describes what happened back in the 1990s. “So she’s just kind of walked away from that. She had to do it, I think to a certain point of her career. The last album: not one interview.

Any word on a North American release?

Among music fare, Abramorama has taken North American rights to A Dog Called Money about British singer-songwriter PJ Harvey which will open on March 18 for a two-week run at the Film Forum in New York with additional markets to follow.