John Parish and PJ Harvey have made two albums together: 1996's Dance Hall … Read Full Bio ↴John Parish and PJ Harvey have made two albums together: 1996's Dance Hall at Louse Point and 2009's A Woman A Man Walked By.

The pair had previously been musical collaborators for several years. As a teenager growing up in rural England, Harvey contributed saxophone, guitar and backing vocals to Parish’s band Automatic Dlamini before forming her own band in 1991. Parish later served as co-producer, guitarist, percussionist and keyboard player on Harvey’s 1995 album To Bring You My Love and was featured heavily on her 1998 album Is This Desire?.

On Dance Hall at Louse Point, Parish wrote and played the music, while Harvey sang vocals and wrote the lyrics. The album was viewed by many of Harvey's fans as a minor side project, perhaps due to the top billing accorded the more obscure Parish and her own accreditation as Polly Jean Harvey rather than the more widely recognised PJ Harvey name. Consequently, it sold more poorly than any of her solo releases, entering the UK charts at #46 and barely denting the U.S. Billboard charts at #178.

It yielded only one single, That Was My Veil, which spent a week at #75 in the UK charts. Harvey later admitted that she let Parish handle all promotional duties for the record because she was exhausted following a year of intense promotional activity for To Bring You My Love in 1995. Reportedly, bosses at Harvey’s Island Records label feared that the avant-garde venture was “commercial suicide”, despite it winning generally positive reviews. Entertainment Weekly opined, “This is 'deep' music in every sense; total immersion is recommended.” Musician reckoned “The results are as engaging as they are disturbing....full of strange moves and unusual textures.” Logo felt it was “thrillingly sinister”, while Q magazine praised its “polecat scat and brooding rural blues," adding that it felt "more a series of themes and word paintings.”

Speaking about the album to NME in 1998, Harvey explained "I just really wanted to learn different things, and a lot of learning comes from working with other people. I tend to place more importance on lyric writing than music, and I wanted to somehow bring the music to a similar level with that, but I didn’t feel confident in myself as a musician to do it. I know John can write demanding and intellectual music – much more than mine, which is very simple. So it was really just to test my lyric writing." In 2001, she told Chicago Sun-Times, "People don't even count that, yet that's the record I'm really proud of. It was an enormous turning point. Lyrically, it moved me into areas I'd never been to before. Faced with John's music, which is so different to my own, it just made me write lyrics in a very different way and structure songs in a different way."

Parish and Harvey did a brief UK club tour with the Mark Bruce Dance Company in early 1997, performing the album’s experimental songs with a group of interpretive ballet dancers onstage.

Twelve years later, the duo released A Woman A Man Walked By, also on Island. The album, which was recorded in Bristol and Dorset and mixed by Flood, was released on March 30, 2009 on Island. It consisted of 10 new songs, including an instrumental. All the music was written by Parish, who also played most of the instruments. The lyrics, once again, were by Harvey.

The first single from the album was "Black Hearted Love," which is described as having "anthemic grunge-pop guitars." The track debuted on the Zane Lowe Show on March 2.

The album was described by journalist John Harris, as "...mischievous, deadly serious, elegant and poetic, and possessed of a brutal power – it is doubtful that you will hear a record as brimming with creative brio and musical invention this year." In a track by track synopsis on their website, The Fly described the album as "a body of folk tales, funeral songs and trapped, tangled love songs... brilliant."

The Chair
John Parish and Polly Jean Harvey Lyrics

Jump to: Overall Meaning ↴ Line by Line Meaning ↴

Where, where have you gone?
Daniel, my only son
I, I even slept with you
To be here in your chair
Sitting in your favorite chair

When you snuck into the water
I felt you leave through one thousand

Yawning miles
My heart slowed, my heart slowed
Never to pick up again

Pieces, pieces of my life
Are gone

Washed away in water that took
My son

Overall Meaning

The lyrics of John Parish and Polly Jean Harvey's song, The Chair, revolve around loss and grief in the aftermath of a tragic event. The song is believed to be about the loss of a child, where the mother, who is the singer, mourns the death of her son Daniel. The lyrics convey her sense of emptiness as she yearns for her son's presence. The line "Where, where have you gone," reflects her desperation to know where her son is, and the reference to his chair is like a way to keep him close. She even slept in it to be close to him. The line, "When you snuck into the water," hints at the cause of Daniel's death, and the mother was left to deal with the loss and the aftermath of his death. The lyrics convey a sense of finality to the situation, as she acknowledges that "Pieces, pieces of my life, are gone", which speaks to how her life has drastically changed following her son's death.

Line by Line Meaning

Where, where have you gone?
Where have you disappeared to?

Daniel, my only son
My beloved child, the only one I had

I, I even slept with you
I shared an intimate bond with you

To be here in your chair
To feel closer to you by occupying your empty seat

Sitting in your favorite chair
Comforting myself by being in a spot that was special to you

When you snuck into the water
When you secretly went into the water

I felt you leave through one thousand
I sensed your departure through an extensive distance

Yawning miles
Vast stretches of distance

My heart slowed, my heart slowed
I felt a deep sense of loss and my heart became heavy

Never to pick up again
It felt like my heart would never fully recover from the grief

Pieces, pieces of my life
Fragments of my existence and my identity