Dance Hall at Louse Point

Dance Hall at Louse Point
Studio album by PJ Harvey and John Parish
Released 23 September 1996
Recorded 12 February–10 March 1996 at Small World in Yeovil, United Kingdom
Genre Alternative rock, experimental rock, art rock
Length 39:47
Label Island
Producer John Parish, PJ Harvey
PJ Harvey and John Parish chronology
Dance Hall at Louse Point
(1996)		 A Woman a Man Walked By
(2009)
PJ Harvey chronology
To Bring You My Love
(1995)		 Dance Hall at Louse Point
(1996)		 Is This Desire?
(1998)
Singles from Dance Hall at Louse Point
  1. "That Was My Veil"
    Released: 14 October 1996
Professional ratings
Review scores
SourceRating
Allmusic [1]
The A.V. Club(unfavourable) [2]
Entertainment WeeklyA [3]
NME(8/10) [4]
Pitchfork Media(6.3/10) [5]
Q Magazine [6]
Robert Christgau [7]
Rolling Stone [8]
Spin(7/10) [9]

Dance Hall at Louse Point is the debut collaborative studio album by English alternative rock musicians PJ Harvey and John Parish, released on 23 September 1996 on Island Records.

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 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 – and 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 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 Island Records label feared 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",[10] 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."[11]

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 indicated

  1. "Girl" – 1:29
  2. "Rope Bridge Crossing" – 5:10
  3. "City of No Sun" – 2:14
  4. "That Was My Veil" – 3:01
  5. "Urn with Dead Flowers in a Drained Pool" – 3:03
  6. "Civil War Correspondent" – 4:23
  7. "Taut" – 3:15
  8. "Un Cercle Autour du Soleil" – 5:07
  9. "Heela" – 3:19
  10. "Is That All There Is?" (Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller) – 5:11
  11. "Dance Hall at Louse Point" – 2:10
  12. "Lost Fun Zone" – 1:27

Personnel

Charts

Album

Year Chart Position
1996 UK Albums Chart 46
1996 US Billboard 200 178

As of March 2009 the album as sold 47,162 according to nielsen soundscan.

Singles

Year Single Chart Position
1996 "That Was My Veil" UK Singles Chart 75

References

  1. ↑ Dance Hall at Louse Point at AllMusic
  2. ↑ review
  3. ↑ review
  4. ↑ review
  5. ↑ review
  6. ↑ review
  7. ↑ review
  8. ↑ RS745 review
  9. ↑ review
  10. ↑ Entertainment Weekly 27 September 1996 Accessed 27 December 2011
  11. ↑ Chicago Sun Times, 10 May 2001.
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