As imaginative as the creative process it documents, A DOG CALLED MONEY is a uniquely intimate journey through the inspiration, writing and recording of a PJ Harvey record.
Writer and musician Harvey and award-winning photographer Seamus Murphy, hatched a collaboration. Seeking first-hand experience of the countries she wanted to write about, Harvey accompanied Murphy on some of his worldwide reporting trips, joining him in Afghanistan, Kosovo, and Washington DC. Harvey collected words, Murphy collected images.
Back home, the words become poems, songs, then an album, which is recorded in an unprecedented art experiment in Somerset House, London. In a specially constructed room behind one-way glass, the public – all cameras surrendered – are invited to watch the 5-week process as a live sound-sculpture. Murphy exclusively documents the experiment with the same forensic vision and private access as their travels.
By capturing the immediacy of their encounters with the people and places they visited, Murphy shows the humanity at the heart of the work, tracing the sources of the songs, their special metamorphosis into recorded music, and, ultimately, cinema.
Seamus Murphy, the film’s director said:
This arcane piece of information epitomises things you hear in the febrile environment of a war. The words, spoken by PJ Harvey or Polly as I know her, are the first words in A DOG CALLED MONEY. It was something I had heard on my first trip to Afghanistan as a photojournalist in 1994 in the time of a terrible civil war. I must have shared it with her when we were in Kabul together in 2012. When I hear Polly read that line back now, with the distance of years, it’s like an old tale being dusted into life from myth.
PJ HARVEY BIOGRAPHY
PJ Harvey is one of the world’s most respected and awarded recording artists. From the outset of her career she has commanded global attention as an accomplished composer, multi-instrumentalist, lyricist, and poet.
She has released nine critically-acclaimed albums, been nominated for six Grammy Awards, and is the only artist to have received the UK’s prestigious Mercury Music Prize twice. In 2013 she was awarded an MBE for services to music.
Harvey began collaborating with esteemed photojournalist Seamus Murphy in 2011 on her 8th studio album LET ENGLAND SHAKE, for which Murphy directed 12 short films. Murphy and Harvey collaborated again, this time travelling to Kosovo, Afghanistan and Washington, DC where Harvey collected words and Murphy collected images. The resulting work became Harvey’s 9th studio album, THE HOPE SIX DEMOLITION PROJECT; her first collection of poetry accompanied by Murphy’s photographs entitled THE HOLLOW OF THE HAND (Bloomsbury 2015); and now Murphy’s feature documentary, A DOG CALLED MONEY, which received its global premiere at the 2019 edition of the Berlin Film Festival.
PJ has also contributed music to numerous film, TV, and radio projects including: PEAKY BLINDERS SERIES 2 starring Cillian Murphy; BBC Radio 4 productions of EURYDICE AND ORPHEUS by Simon Armitage, and ORPHEUS AND EURYDICE by Linda Marshall Griffiths; BASQUIAT by Julian Schnabel; THE CRADLE WILL ROCK by Tim Robbins; and most recently Shane Meadows’ forthcoming 4-part drama, THE VIRTUES.
She has also scored theatrical productions for Director Ian Rickson, including: THE GOAT; THE NEST; and ELECTRA; and most recently Ivo van Hove’s production of ALL ABOUT EVE, starring Gillian Anderson and Lily James.