''Dance Hall at Louse Point'' is the debut collaborative studio album by English

alternative rock Alternative rock (also known as alternative music, alt-rock or simply alternative) is a category of rock music that evolved from the independent music underground of the 1970s. Alternative rock acts achieved mainstream success in the 1990s w ...

musicians

PJ Harvey Polly Jean Harvey (born 9 October 1969) is an English singer-songwriter. Primarily known as a vocalist and guitarist, she is also proficient with a wide range of instruments. Harvey began her career in 1988 when she joined local band Automat ...

and

John Parish John Parish (born 11 April 1959) is an English musician, songwriter, composer and record producer. Parish is best known for his work with singer-songwriter PJ Harvey. He has also worked with such artists as Eels, Aldous Harding, Tracy Chapm ...

, released on 23 September 1996 on

Island Records Island Records is a multinational record label owned by Universal Music Group. It was founded in Jamaica by Chris Blackwell, Graeme Goodall, and Leslie Kong in 1959, and was eventually sold to PolyGram in 1989. Island and A&M Records, another ...

. It was reissued on vinyl LP in October 2020.

Background

Parish wrote and played the music, while Harvey sang vocals and wrote the lyrics. The pair had been musical collaborators for several years before making this album together – as a teenager growing up in rural England, Harvey contributed saxophone, guitar and backing vocals to Parish’s band

Automatic Dlamini Automatic may refer to: Music Bands * Automatic (Australian band), Australian rock band * Automatic (American band), American rock band * The Automatic, a Welsh alternative rock band Albums * Automatic (Jack Bruce album), ''Automatic'' (J ...

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 would also feature heavily on her 1998 album '' Is This Desire?''. The album was viewed by many PJ Harvey 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. The album consequently sold more poorly than any of her solo releases, entering the

UK Albums Chart The Official Albums Chart is the United Kingdom's industry-recognised national record chart for album, albums. Entries are ranked by sales and audio streaming. It was published for the first time on 22 July 1956 and is compiled every week by the O ...

at number 46 and barely denting the

U.S. The United States of America (USA), also known as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It is a federal republic of 50 states and a federal capital district, Washington, D.C. The 48 contiguous ...

Billboard A billboard (also called a hoarding in the UK and many other parts of the world) is a large outdoor advertising structure (a billing board), typically found in high-traffic areas such as alongside busy roads. Billboards present large advertis ...

'' chart at number 178 for one week. It yielded only one single, "That Was My Veil", which spent a week at number 75 in the UK Singles Chart. Harvey later admitted that she left all promotional duties for the record to Parish because she was exhausted following a year of intense promotional activity for her own '' To Bring You My Love'' album in 1995. Reportedly, bosses at Harvey’s

label feared the avant-garde venture was "commercial suicide", despite it winning generally positive reviews: ''

Entertainment Weekly ''Entertainment Weekly'' (sometimes abbreviated as ''EW'') is an American online magazine, digital-only entertainment magazine based in New York City, published by Dotdash Meredith, that covers film, television, music, Broadway theatre, books, ...

'' 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 ''Q'' was a British popular music magazine. It was founded in 1986 by broadcast journalists Mark Ellen and David Hepworth, who were presenters of the BBC television music series ''The Old Grey Whistle Test''. ''Q'' was published in print in the ...

'' 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 ''New Musical Express'' (''NME'') is a British music, film, gaming and culture website, bimonthly magazine, and brand. Founded as a newspaper in 1952, with the publication being referred to as a "Rock music, rock inkie", the ''NME'' would be ...

'' 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 The ''Chicago Sun-Times'' is a daily nonprofit newspaper published in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Since 2022, it is the flagship paper of Chicago Public Media, and has long held the second largest circulation among Chicago newspaper ...

'', "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."Chicago Sun Times, 10 May 2001. 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. In 2009 Parish and Harvey released their second collaborative album '' A Woman a Man Walked By''.

Track listing

All tracks composed by PJ Harvey and John Parish, except where noted. Track titles feature appended parenthetical place names. # "Girl" (Bristol) – 1:29 # "Rope Bridge Crossing" (Dorset) – 5:10 # "City of No Sun" (Tokyo) – 2:14 # "That Was My Veil" (Modena) – 3:01 # "Urn with Dead Flowers in a Drained Pool" (Modena) – 3:03 # "Civil War Correspondent" (Stockholm) – 4:23 # "Taut" (Washington D.C.) – 3:15 # "Un Cercle Autour du Soleil" (Stockholm) – 5:07 # "Heela" (Dorset) – 3:19 # "

Is That All There Is? "Is That All There Is?" is a song written by the American songwriting team Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. It became a hit for the American singer Peggy Lee in 1969. The song was originally performed by Georgia Brown in May 1967 for a televisi ...

" (

Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller Leiber and Stoller were an American songwriting and record production duo, consisting of lyricist Jerome Leiber (; April 25, 1933 – August 22, 2011) and composer Michael Stoller (born March 13, 1933). As well as many R&B and pop hits, they wr ...

) – 5:11 # "Dance Hall at Louse Point" (Bristol) – 2:10 # "Lost Fun Zone" (Tokyo) – 1:27

Personnel

*John Dent – Mastering *

Mick Harvey Michael John Harvey (born 29 August 1958) is an Australian musician, singer-songwriter, composer, arranger and record producer. A multi-instrumentalist, he is best known for his long-term collaborations with Nick Cave, with whom he formed The ...

– Organ, Bass, Guitar (10), Bass (Electric), Drums, Producer *PJ Harvey – Producer, vocals & lyrics *John Parish – Producer, Engineer, all instruments

References

{{Authority control 1996 collaborative albums PJ Harvey albums Island Records albums Albums produced by John Parish Albums produced by Mick Harvey