A Dog Called Money

Strip away all the celebri­ty tit­tle-tat­tle, gos­sip and innu­en­do, and when we talk to artists we’re pri­mar­i­ly inter­est­ed in how they go about mak­ing their art. What’s your inspi­ra­tion? What’s your method? What’s your secret? Kudos to singer-song­writer PJ Har­vey for being at the cen­tre of a film which attempts to lay the cre­ative process hor­ri­fy­ing­ly bare.

The desire to exhib­it the unseen bedrock of her songs takes its most lit­er­al form in a live instal­la­tion at London’s Som­er­set House, where Har­vey and her musi­cal col­lab­o­ra­tors record the album ​‘The Hope Six Demo­li­tion Project’ in a pur­pose-built, sound-proofed rock box where onlook­ers can spy on the record­ing ses­sion through one-way mir­rors and mon­i­tor the evo­lu­tion of each song.

Footage of the ses­sions only makes up half of Sea­mus Murphy’s
con­cep­tu­al doc­u­men­tary A Dog Called Mon­ey, as we also fol­low Har­vey on a whistlestop tour of Syr­ia, Afghanistan and Wash­ing­ton DC as she search­es for sociopo­lit­i­cal grist for the lyri­cal mill.

At one point she’s sat on the stoop with kids in DC’s pre­dom­i­nant­ly black Ana­cos­tia neigh­bour­hood, look­ing a lit­tle bemused as they freestyle for the cam­era and talk blithe­ly of their many run-ins with gun vio­lence. In Kab­ul, the pair vis­it a music shop and watch an all-male choir in the midst of an intense prayer chant. They see pover­ty and des­o­la­tion, and para­phrased ver­sions of Harvey’s diary-like nar­ra­tion can lat­er be heard dur­ing the Lon­don recording.

On one hand, Harvey’s cre­ative gen­eros­i­ty is laud­able, and she is self-crit­i­cal enough for this entire endeav­our not to seem trite. Yet see­ing the cre­ative process writ large has the effect of dimin­ish­ing the impact of the music, divest­ing it of all mys­tique and ambiguity.

It’s the not know­ing where these sto­ries and ideas derived from that caus­es the lis­ten­er to paint pic­tures in their mind. This film is like a fusty album explain­er, and it’s real­ly not that much fun.