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Pale PJ the Gamine-Goth
Sunday Times, 26 February 2012
I am in a dark, thickly upholstered room on a sofa so full of cushions I am barely able to sit upright. Before me is another sofa on which sits a woman who seems on the verge of invisibility or, perhaps, of being lost for ever in the dusty plush.
She wears big black boots, loose black trousers, a black, sleeveless top, and she has a mound of jet-black hair. In this room, on that sofa, it is like camouflage and, half-closing my eyes, it is as if I am talking to two slender, disembodied arms and a floating face that veers between gamine and goth — a pretty face, yes, but one that defies you to say so.
Polly Jean (“PJ”) Harvey is a show-stopping confection; so striking, in fact, that you find yourself wondering if she’s quite real. They haven’t made rock stars like this — ghostly, intense, serious, haunted, self-contained — since the 1960s and ’70s. Now it’s mainly The X Factor, bloke bands, girlie dross and mayfly careers. PJ is no more a mayfly than she is a Susan Boyle.
All the more amazing, then, that Let England Shake, her latest album, has been universally acclaimed. She is the first two-time winner of the Mercury Prize; she last won a decade ago with Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea. But she remains so far out of the mainstream that she is in another river entirely. Current pop and rock just pass her by. “I wouldn’t say that contemporary music depresses me, because I don’t dwell on it too much and there’s very little I listen to. If I was forced to listen to it, then I would get depressed, but I don’t.”
I am talking to two slender, disembodied arms and a floating face that veers between gamine and goth — a pretty face, yes, but one that defies you to say so.
PJ forms her words carefully, guardedly. She stares at and plays with the tips of her fingers as she does so, as if she is turning over each question like a diamond, examining it for flaws. If she has no answer or simply doesn’t want to go there — her current private life, for example, is way off limits — she says nothing or shrugs. Sometimes I quote her something she is reported as saying.
“Did I?” she says, her eyes widening in wonder. “When?”
At first, as she eyes me warily, her voice is neutral; but, as she discovers I know at least as much about Bob Dylan as she does (a lot), a relaxed and distinctively Dorset accent appears. In fact, probably the first thing you need to know about PJ is that she is a very Dorset girl. Born in Bridport 42 years ago, she has since lived around the world and is now back living on the Dorset coast, about 15 miles from her parents.
“I’ve always felt drawn back to Dorset. I’ve lived in other cities and countries but I always go back there. It does feel like my home — I was born there.”
Music played in the house all the time — Dylan, Neil Young, Captain Beefheart — and her parents both broke rocks: Ray was a stonemason and Eva was a sculptor. PJ has an older brother, Saul, who also went into stonemasonry, a craft she now thinks is not unlike songwriting.
“It’s very creative in a very primitive way… It’s not so very much different from songwriting, it’s a matter of taking away what isn’t needed and finding a form. It is very much about editing as savagely as you can while still leaving enough form.”
Starting with the recorder at school, followed by the tenor and alto saxophones and then, at 18, a guitar, she has always been a self-taught musician. She did have a few piano lessons after her 2007 album, White Chalk, but she abandoned those after she realised that she would have to give up writing songs if she was to do it properly. PJ had the idea because, while writing the album, she exposed herself to classical music for the first time.
“It just seemed so wild to me, so different from the form of pop songs. You could go anywhere with a song. It could be 23 minutes long, have five different sections that don’t seem to relate to each other. It opened my mind to experiment with the form. There’s a lot of odd chord changes in Let England Shake.”
Creative, imaginative as a child and, I would guess, rather small and fragile, breaking rocks did not seem a likely career path. The music had got into her soul — at the age of 18 she was immersed in Dylan, the Pixies, the Bad Seeds and trying to play along to Captain Beefheart — but she never expected it to be a job. She was also planning to go to art school, though she didn’t expect that to amount to a living either. She won a place at Central Saint Martins to study sculpture, but only got as far as a foundation course. She has, however, continued to paint and draw and admits, rather shyly, that she might now put her work on show.
“I’ve got 20 years’ worth of drawings and paintings… I definitely don’t consider myself a great artist, but it would be interesting to people who like my music. I would love to be a great artist, but I would have to dedicate my life to that.”
Between 1988 and 1991, she refined her guitar skills with a constantly changing band called Automatic Dlamini and then, showing a streak of personally ambitious steel, she formed a trio called PJ Harvey. A single released by a small record company was picked up by the ever-percipient John Peel, who recorded a live Radio 1 session with the band.
Peel told Melody Maker that he liked “the way Polly Jean seems crushed by the weight of her own songs and arrangements, as if the air is literally being sucked out of them”. He added that he found the band “admirable if not always enjoyable”. An album, Dry, followed. It was tough, spare stuff, in a “blues-punk” style.
“I think that Dry was a very extreme record at that time and I kept it exactly as I wanted it. I didn’t want to use any effects or reverb, I wanted it exactly as we played it in the room. My artwork was similar at the time — very minimalistic in black and white, very elemental, not too much going on, which is what the record sounds like to me.”
It wasn’t, in other words, pop, the sort of chart fodder that would keep a band rich and in business and a record company happy. For the one and only time in her career, PJ wondered whether it was wise to pursue her own inspiration or succumb to pop.
“There was one point where I felt a little under pressure, when people might be waiting for me to go one way or another… But it was more my own feelings rather than people putting it on me.”
The issue was decided when the band caught the attention of Chris Blackwell, the founder of Island Records, and she was signed up. This was, for her career, the decisive moment. Blackwell’s Island was, in today’s terms, an old-school company. It believed in career longevity and letting artists do what they wanted. Now, panicked and beleaguered record companies just toss kids out there to sink or swim and, even if they do swim, they don’t expect them to last more than a year or two. The results are, of course, much, much worse, often laughably so.
“I was very lucky to be part of that period. Things were different then and there was much more support for longevity in an artist, money was much more abundant. Chris Blackwell was very much about supporting artists through many years and helping them to develop. That is still the case and it’s why I’m still with Island. But, for kids now, it’s extremely different and all the parameters have changed.”
Now, panicked and beleaguered record companies just toss kids out there to sink or swim
As a result, her second album — Rid of Me — was even more hardcore than Dry.
“I made an even more extreme record to establish that I would always be following my own path as an artist. Rid of Me is an extreme and difficult record, more so because of coming at that point in my career when I really wanted to cut out the kind of path I wanted to follow, which was my own way.”
With Rid of Me, she “broke” America and her third studio album, To Bring You My Love, put her right at the top of the authentic rock pantheon alongside the likes of Nick Cave.
Ah, Nick Cave. Now, at this point — full disclosure — I have to admit a degree of personal involvement with PJ.
She knows nothing about it, of course, and I knew very little about her except what I heard from Nick Cave — but that, frankly, was quite a lot. You see, between 1996 and 1997, Cave and PJ were lovers. When they broke up, Cave made an album, The Boatman’s Call, which is, possibly, the greatest break-up album since Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks (from Sara Lownds), or Frank Sinatra’s In the Wee Small Hours (from Ava Gardner).
I have never spoken to Cave about PJ — never spoken to him at all, in fact — but it’s not necessary, since his album says it all. She comes out of it as a romantic heroine, demon queen, West Country seductress and plain old erotic fantasy. In the song Brompton Oratory, for example, he takes communion after a night with her — “The smell of you still on my hands/As I bring the cup up to my lips.” The song also adds that neither God nor the Devil “Could do the job you did, baby/Of bringing me to my knees”.
So, er, PJ, what about this album? A little smile from her, a little gulp from me.
Ah, Nick Cave. Now, at this point — full disclosure — I have to admit a degree of personal involvement with PJ.
“You’d have to ask Nick Cave about that. I think I’m not solely responsible for the album in many ways. I think it’s a great record. It was an extremely different record for him to make, the songwriting is very strong.”
Feeling a great dark pool of the unsayable has appeared beneath my feet, I move on.
She first won the Mercury in 2001 with Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea, which I don’t like and, seemingly, neither does she. “I’m not displeased with it, exactly. I achieved what I wanted to achieve — to see if I could write perfect 2½- to three-minute pop songs.”
Never mind. She returned to form through the rest of the 21st century, notably with White Chalk. But since 2001 another album had been incubating in her mind. She was in Washington when she won the Mercury. It was 9/11 and she gave her acceptance while watching the Pentagon burning from her window. But it wasn’t 9/11 itself that lit the spark of her latest Mercury winner, Let England Shake, rather its aftermath. “I never linked it specifically to 9/11. It was more to do with the impotence and frustration I felt over Iraq and Afghanistan, not being able to comprehend it and trying to understand — what are we doing here? I wanted to explore this further, just how affected I was by watching footage and reading newspapers and not feeling able to do anything at that moment. I had to explore this through music.”
She spent 10 years doing something very un-rock’n’roll — researching. She read poetry and history and listened widely, taking herself down strange pathways, one of which led to the catastrophic allied landings at Gallipoli in the first world war, which feature in several of the songs, while another led her through world folk music. The latter gave the album its edgy ambivalence about home and country.
“Something I really noticed in this music was the push and pull these singers felt about their own countries — the frustrations they felt but also the love they had for them. That really influenced me in the way I wrote about England for this record. I had heard in those folk songs something quite general — no matter what country you came from, you could understand those feelings towards the country you’re living in. I would always ask myself as I was writing: could I sing from many different countries’ points of view?”
The songs are emphatically not “protest songs” — an aesthetically deadly term that once drove Dylan mad with rage at being labelled a “protest singer” — because there is no sense in which PJ is offering opinions about the history of warfare. Rather, she seems to drift over the battlefields, an amazed English angel pondering her place in this bloody history.
“It is about being a storyteller and not trying to colour that too much with my own opinion, but just really telling the facts, just to try and remain outside of it in terms of my own view. It was quite a different approach for me, a journalistic way of describing the action and making myself a witness to the action. That’s why I think the record took so long. I didn’t want to tip into judgment of some kind. I wanted to leave that open to the listener.”
I felt great hope for music. I don’t want to come across in an egotistical way, but winning a prize with this record made me feel a sense of hope
There’s a little bit of that steely personal ambition at work when I ask her how she feels about having been in the running — both at the Mercury and the Brits — with mainstream artists such as Adele. She does that little smile, which I am now beginning to feel is more than a little witchy after the Cave interlude.
“I felt great hope for music. I don’t want to come across in an egotistical way, but winning a prize with this record made me feel a sense of hope because it’s a difficult record that is trying to say something different. It’s a different way of expression for me, so for that to be welcomed by other musicians and people who enjoy music I found really strengthening… if that make sense.”
She is going back to Dorset after our talk. Does she live alone? The witchy smile.
“I don’t talk about my personal life.”
Does she have children?
Another smile. “No, but I don’t talk about my personal life.”
Well, her brother, Saul, seems to have four children, so she has nieces and nephews, and she has said elsewhere that she wouldn’t consider children unless she was married.
“I would have to meet someone who I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. That’s the only person who I would want to be the father of my children. Maybe that will never happen. I obviously see it in a very rational way, but I’d love to have children.”
But today she is not going that far. I think it’s a pity she didn’t marry Nick Cave and make him a happy man; the Cave-Harvey kids would have been quite a brood and, heaven knows, he looks pretty miserable now. But PJ’s okay as far as I can tell from the witchy smile, the gamine-goth face and the disembodied arms. And, anyway, my feet are still wet from the deep, dark pool of the unsayable, so, after she has taken one of my hands in both of hers, I leave her to dematerialise amid the dusty plush.
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