Watch PJ Harvey Play “The Community of Hope” on BBC’s “Andrew Marr Show”

PJ Harvey was a guest on BBC One’s “The Andrew Marr Show” this morning. In addition to performing “The Community of Hope” from her latest album The Hope Six Demolition Project, she sat down for a rare interview about the album’s creation and her time spent in Washington, D.C. (The song would later garner criticism from D.C. politicians.) Watch her performance below, and read some excerpts from her interview.

On traveling the world:

Working closely with the photographer Seamus Murphy, who’d done a lot of traveling all his life as a photojournalist, I began to travel with him, and the first country we went to was Kosovo, and we also went to Afghanistan, and then we thought for a long time about what would be another country to visit before we felt we finished the project of an album and also a book—it became a book called The Hollow of the Hand—but we decided that like Washington DC felt like the right place to go to to tie up the ends.

Asked why:

A lot of the decisions were made there that affected Afghanistan and affected Kosovo, so it was a nice place to go back, and I as a writer was just trying to almost look at the similarities that I could find rather than differences, and we ended up spending a lot of time in a neighborhood called Anacostia which is south of the river—a very poor part, very run-down neighborhood—and I talked to a lot of the people there. We spent about a week on the streets talking to people and listening to what they had to say, and I collected notes like a journalist might.

Asked whether journalism and songwriting go together for her:

I still call myself a songwriter, really. I mean I gather information for songs, and my biggest drive in my life is to want to sing to people, that’s the way I get across the things that interest me and the things that concern me.

Read “PJ Harvey’s Onstage Evolution in 7 Videos” on the Pitch.

 

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