Dance Hall at Louse Point

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. It was reissued on vinyl LP in October 2020.

Dance Hall at Louse Point
Studio album by PJ Harvey and John Parish
Released	23 September 1996
Recorded	12 February–10 March 1996
Studio	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)

Professional ratings

Review scores
Source	Rating
Allmusic	[1]
The A.V. Club	(unfavourable) [2]
Entertainment Weekly	A [3]
NME	(8/10) [4]
Pitchfork Media	(6.3/10) [5]
Q Magazine	[4]
Robert Christgau	[6]
Rolling Stone	[7]
Spin	(7/10) [4]

Background

Parish wrote and played the music, while Harvey sang vocals and wrote the lyrics.[8] 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.[9] 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 for one week.[10] It yielded only one single, "That Was My Veil", which spent a week at #75 in the UK charts.[11] 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",[12] despite it winning generally positive reviews: Entertainment Weekly opined, "This is 'deep' music in every sense; total immersion is recommended",[13] 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."[14]

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.

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

Personnel

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

Charts

Album

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

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 Archived 19 October 2007 at the Wayback Machine
3. review
4. review
5. review Archived 17 May 2008 at the Wayback Machine
6. review
7. RS745 review
8. Roberts, Randall (25 March 2009). "PJ Harvey and John Parish Interviewed: The Pair Discuss Collaboration, the Art of Staging, and Echo and the Bunnymen". LA Weekly. Retrieved 16 August 2018.
9. McDonnell, Evelyn (17 October 1996). "Dance Hall At Louse Point". Rolling Stone. Retrieved 16 August 2018.
10. "John Parish - Chart History". Billboard. Retrieved 16 August 2018.
11. "PJ Harvey - Singles". Official Charts. Retrieved 16 August 2018.
12. Lindsay, Cam (24 September 2007). "Stories From the Queenie - PJ Harvey - 1996 to 1997". Exclaim. Retrieved 16 August 2018.
13. Entertainment Weekly 27 September 1996 Accessed 27 December 2011
14. Chicago Sun Times, 10 May 2001.