‘The Virtues’, featuring original music by PJ Harvey, begins on Wednesday 15th May at 9pm GMT on Channel 4.
The 4-part drama tackles themes of repressed memory, apocalyptic revenge and the hope of redemption.
‘The Virtues’ stars BAFTA-nominated Stephen Graham (This is England, ’86, ’88, ’90, Boardwalk Empire, Taboo, Line of Duty) alongside Irish actors Helen Behan and Niamh Algar.
“I am so happy to have provided the original music for this extraordinary and powerful new drama by a director I have admired and followed all my life,” says Harvey. “Shane has a unique directness and sensitivity to his work which I am drawn to and aspire to in my own work, so our collaboration was open and trusting. I sent Shane ideas as demos for him to try out as he edited and let him choose what he used and where to the greatest effect. In the end we both loved how the demos worked so left them as they were, adding to the raw beauty of the piece.”
‘The Crowded Cell,’ a new song by PJ Harvey, closes each of the 4 episodes.
Listen to two tracks – ‘Descending’ and ‘The Moth’ – here.
Invada Records in conjunction with Lakeshore Records have today released All About Eve – Original Soundtrack, composed by PJ Harvey. The 12-track album contains 10 original pieces of instrumental music as well as two new songs written by Harvey and sung by Gillian Anderson and Lily James. Harvey’s score for All About Eve, is performed by herself, James Johnston and Kenrick Rowe, and uses Franz Liszt’s ‘Liebesträume’ (a musical element of Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s original 1950s classic film) as a musical touchstone, exploring the more somber and deeply psychological aspects of the story. The album is produced by PJ Harvey, with additional production and mixing from Adam ‘Cecil’ Bartlett.
Harvey began her collaboration with theatre director Ivo van Hove late 2018 for a modern stage adaptation of the classic 1950 Academy Award-winning film. The play, starring Gillian Anderson (X-Files, The Fall, American Gods, Sex Education) and Lily James (Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, Baby Driver) will run until May 11 at London’s Noël Coward Theatre in the West End.
On composing this score, Harvey says, “I have always loved stories, and so to compose music to support and enhance a story being told is a challenge I enjoy. I also love the freedom that working instrumentally can give me without the constraints of song form.”
“For All About Eve I chose to work with my long-time collaborator James Johnston as he has a soulfulness and sensitivity to his playing that inspires me. I also worked with Kenrick Rowe who has a versatility to his drumming I knew I could experiment with until I found what was right.”
In addition to creating the play’s sonic landscape (with sound designer Tom Gibbons), Harvey also wrote two new songs for the play’s lead actors: Gillian Anderson performs ‘The Sandman’, and Lily James, ‘The Moth.’
“Ivo wanted to take the play into a non-specific era, so I suggested that in a party scene we could play a contemporary piece of mine, or a song that Margot could sing rather than the existing piano piece by Liszt. Ivo loved this idea and thought that it would be good for Eve to sing a song too, so I worked on songs that had the emotion and lyrics that would be fitting for their characters at the time they appear in the play.Gillian and Lily have brought the songs alive and made them their own, and I think they give very moving performances both on the recordings and on stage.”
Van Hove describes Harvey’s score as, “Very simple, but in its simplicity, it’s complex. The images that she uses are very concrete, but at the same time little bit mythical. A song can bring into a few minutes a huge world alive. Where we in the theater need perhaps five or six pages to establish it, a song can do that within a few lines.”
Tracklist Becoming
Shimmer
The Sandman (featuring Gillian Anderson)
Waltz
Descending
Lieben
Ascending
Cadenza
The Moth (featuring Lily James)
Träume
Arpeggio Waltz
Change in C
Seamus Murphy’s new film A Dog Called Money will receive its World Premiere at the Berlin Film Festival today at 5pm. PJ Harvey has worked with film-maker, photographer, and journalist Seamus Murphy for over a decade.
“What initially compelled me to track him down as a collaborator was his unique ability to capture life and death, uninhibited, and without judgement,” says Harvey. “Due to his life’s work of documenting the human condition from such a close and intimate perspective, Seamus’s lens is able to go to places most of us will never otherwise see. His work allows us as viewers to enter, contemplate, and extract meaning for ourselves, within the beauty, colour and context that he captures.”
“Once again this artist inspires and surprises me with his new film. I had no idea how he would bring together four distinct journeys through Afghanistan, Kosovo, Washington D.C., and the making of an album by a Dorset-born songwriter, and yet A Dog Called Money flows beautifully. This engaging film is poised, deeply moving, and carries with it an overriding sense of positivity.”
The photo used in the film’s poster was taken during the recording sessions for The Hope Six Demolition Project LP at Somerset House, in January 2015.
PJ Harvey, “Recording in Progress” – Somerset House, London, January 2015
* All About Eve, starring Gillian Anderson and Lily James, and featuring an original score by PJ Harvey, to be broadcast live from the Noël Coward Theatre to 2,500 cinemas across the UK and internationally on 11th April 2019 with National Theatre Live.
*Directed by Ivo van Hove, All About Eve will be shown in over 2,500 cinemas, and begins previews in the West End on 2nd February 2019.
Sonia Friedman Productions and Fox Stage Productions have today announced a live cinema broadcast for All About Eve. The world premiere of Ivo van Hove’s highly anticipated stage adaptation of the 1950 Twentieth Century Fox film and the play “The Wisdom of Eve” by Mary Orr will be broadcast on 11th April 2019 by NT Live. NT Live screens to 2,500 venues across 65 countries including 700 cinemas in the UK.
Emmy Award-winning Gillian Anderson and Lily James lead the cast including Monica Dolan, Ian Drysdale, Tsion Habte, Jessie Mei Li, Julian Ovenden, Sheila Reid, Rhashan Stone, Stanley Townsend and Philip Voyzey.
Ivo van Hove’s direction will be accompanied by set and lighting design from Jan Versweyveld, costume design by An D’Huys, with music composed by double Mercury Prize-winner PJ Harvey, alongside Tom Gibbons’ sound design. Casting is by Julia Horan CDG.
