Seamus Murphy: evaluation

Transcript context

…What was your role in the PJ Harvey album, Let England Shake? Well, that was an interesting one because I’d done a book on Afghanistan in 2008 and Polly had seen the exhibition in London, and she bought the book, and she got in touch and was interested in meeting me and talking about that. At that stage, she’d been writing the songs, and she’d done a demo, so, really, she’d already done all the work. I think some of my work might have influenced her in some way by looking at pictures from Afghanistan because she wrote about the First World War, she wrote about Iraq, she wrote about Afghanistan, and she wrote about England. That was Let England Shake. I came back from Afghanistan, actually, having shot some video for the first time, and she said, “Oh, you shoot video too? Would you like to make some music films for me?” I said, “Sure.” That was what I ended up doing. She gave me the demo. It wasn’t an album at that stage, and I put together an idea. First of all, I was going to go to Iraq and Afghanistan to shoot these music films in those places because these places were being referenced so much in the songs. Then I thought, actually, stay in England. It’s called Let England Shake. Stay in England and find some kind of visual equivalent of that legacy. That legacy of colonies and colonialism, of the First World War, and find it in the English people, and find it in the cities and the countryside, so I ended up doing this road trip around England twice, and I shot a lot of video, and I put it together, and I made 12 short films for that album. It was making music films for that album. Those are on your website, right?…

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