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."

urn with dead flowers in a drained pool
John Parish and Polly Jean Harvey Lyrics

Jump to: Overall Meaning ↴ Line by Line Meaning ↴

I need your lie
Darling love lies

And if you gave it to me
I'd hold it in the palm of my hand
Like a good luck charm, or a vice
And I'd reach up like a child to receive it

There is no more said
There is no more real
I got sun on my back
I remember you

Take me inside
Your warm love lie

And if he took me
I'd hold him up to the light
Like a god, or a good luck charm, or a vice
And I'd open up like a child to believe it

There is no more said
There is no more real
Got sun on my back
And I remember you

No
There is no more said
There's, there is no more real
I got sun on my back
And I remember you

And still you can't give your peace to me

Overall Meaning

The lyrics of "Urn With Dead Flowers in a Drained Pool" convey the idea of a yearning for a deceptive love. The song talks about the desire for a dishonest love that can only be achieved through a lie. The first stanza talks about the need for a lie that will be held onto like a charm or a vice, something that will be clung to tightly, even if it isn't real. The following stanza continues with the same theme, asking to be taken inside the warmth of the love lie. The singer mentions holding up the lover to the light like a god, meaning that they believe this lie to be divine, something powerful and mystical, even if it is only an illusion.

The chorus repeats the lines "There is no more said, there is no more real, I got sun on my back, and I remember you," emphasizing the idea that the love is gone, and all that is left are memories that are just as unreal as the love itself. The singer acknowledges in the last line that even though they yearn for this peace, they will never receive it.

In essence, the song is a commentary on the human desire for love and companionship, even if it means settling for something that is not genuine. The lyrics capture the feeling of longing for something that one knows is not real, yet still yearns for it. It's a song about the delusion of love and the desperate yearning for it.

Line by Line Meaning

I need your lie
I desire your truthful deceit

Darling love lies
My dear, love is filled with falsehoods

And if you gave it to me
If you offered it to me

I'd hold it in the palm of my hand
I would cherish it greatly

Like a good luck charm, or a vice
As if it were a bearer of fortune or an addiction

And I'd reach up like a child to receive it
I would be eager and innocent in accepting it

There is no more said
Nothing more is spoken

There is no more real
What remains is not genuine

I got sun on my back
The sun shines down on me

I remember you
I recall your memory

Take me inside
Bring me within yourself