English singer-songwriter and musician PJ Harvey has announced details of her upcoming UK and European tour, which includes two nights in Dublin’s 3Olympia Theatre on Friday 22nd & Saturday 23rd September 2023.
Tickets priced from €70.00 incl booking fee & €1.50 restoration levy, went on sale via Ticketmaster.ie, however they are now sold out.
The new album, I Inside the Old Year Dying - Harvey’s first since 2016’s Grammy-nominated The Hope Six Demolition Project - was released on July 7th via Partisan Records. This highly anticipated release is produced by long-time collaborators Flood and John Parish.
Harvey has commanded attention since the start of her career and is the only musician to have been awarded the UK’s Mercury Music Prize more than once, winning first in 2001 for Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea and again in 2011 for Let England Shake. An accomplished poet and visual artist, as well as a musician and songwriter, her work is striking in its originality: vivid, absorbing, and distinct. Since the release of The Hope Six Demolition Project, which went to #1 album in her native UK, she has contributed compositions for stage and screen; most recently for Sharon Horgan’s acclaimed Bad Sisters mini-series.
Harvey first announced I Inside the Old Year Dying with the release of a first single - “A Child’s Question, August” - at the end of April. The album’s story goes back six years, to the end of touring around her last album in 2017 and how Harvey felt immediately afterwards. What she keenly felt was that somewhere in the endless cycle of albums and tours, she had lost her connection with music itself, a realization that was troubling beyond words.
The new songs, Harvey says, “all came out of me in about three weeks”. But that was only the beginning. The key to what would happen next – at Battery Studios, in North West London - lay in a three-way creative bond that now goes back nearly thirty years, between Harvey, her enduring collaborator and creative partner John Parish, and Flood: nominally a producer, though that word does not really do him justice.
“The studio was set up for live play, and that's all we did,” she says. The importance of this is hard to overstate: if I Inside the Old Year Dying is a very tactile, human record, that is partly because just about everything on it is rooted in improvisation: spontaneous performances and ideas, recorded at the moment of their creation.
