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PostPosted: Tue Jan 07, 2025 9:36 pm 
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https://www.theage.com.au/culture/music ... 5l2b8.html

Thinking about taking a year off? It worked for PJ Harvey
As she moved towards 50, the musician started to wonder, “OK, should I still be doing this?”


By Michael Dwyer

January 8, 2025

Underwhelm is not an obvious place to find happiness. “Voul village in a hag-ridden hollow. All ways to it winding, all roads to it narrow. Auverlooked bog, veiled in vog, thirtover, undercreepen, rank with seepings: Jeyes Fluid, slurry, zweat and pus, anus greaze, squitters, jizz and blood…”

The Dorset dialect takes some getting used to, but that’s far enough without trigger warnings. The world of Orlam, Polly Jean Harvey’s second book of poetry, is one of nature and innocence defiled by every horror imaginable, miraculously redeemed by the richness of its language and the sheer joy of its creation.

“I’d always wanted to go and investigate the folklore of the area that I had grown up in,” she explains of the book that also yielded her latest album, I Inside the Old Year Dying.

“I was interested in going back into nature and going back into the childhood imagination. You learn to value that childlike inquiry into things,” she says. “As an artist, I always just follow where I feel I’m being led. This was always on my list of things to do. And it felt like the right time.”

It’s difficult to reconcile Polly Harvey’s breezy conversation with the unsettling intensity of her work. The first time we spoke, around the time of her mid ’90s breakthrough with To Bring You My Love, she shared her amusement about “the axe-wielding bitch character from hell” that interviewers tended to expect: one of many voices she’s since explored.

Now, 10 albums into one of the most original and lavishly acclaimed careers in British rock and beyond, her timbre has shifted again: high and fey to channel imagined nine-year-old Ira-Abel of the village of Underwhelm, abused and haunted chronicler of Gore Woods under the all-seeing dead lamb’s eye god, Orlam.

The author’s mother, Eva Jean Harvey, is thanked “for her close reading” in the book’s acknowledgments, but the obvious suggestion that little Ira’s story is some kind of homecoming to her own sheep farm childhood near the Dorset village of Corscombe is met with a dubious pause.

“It felt … rich,” she says guardedly. “I mean, there was so much information to access because it had been the place where I’d grown up and was of extra interest to me because of that.”

The dialect “is dying out”, though “you still hear a lot of it being spoken in the West Country. It was extremely easy to learn the language, [so] it obviously was encoded in me somewhere. A lot of the words are so memorable anyway, and sound often equals sense. You know, the way the words sound is what they are.”

This is true in the case of yollerheads (daffodils), tree-tears (leaves), vorehearing (premonition), winker (eyeball) and any number of less elegant body parts. But the book’s glossary is invaluable when it comes to the likes of heissen (a prediction of evil), biver (to shake with cold or fear) and ether-hunger (the hunger for earth, sometimes felt by persons approaching death).

“Some of what I wanted to explore in my examination of the country idyll is that, you know, it’s not idyllic,” she says with a laugh. “People that have grown up in the countryside know that it’s not just beauty and light and everyone’s happily engaged with nature.

“There’s a lot of bad stuff that goes on there, just as much as there is in cities. I wanted to give a little bit of a window into that. You know, humans are humans. We do bad things wherever we are.”

Orlam took eight years, Harvey says, “researching all of the mythology, researching the language and the ways of living in different eras in the West Country ... My biggest driving force is wanting to learn. To completely submerge myself in a subject and educate myself in it, then put all of that study down and let my creative brain write, that’s such a joyous thing for me.

“But no, it didn’t really feel like a homecoming,” she says firmly. “As an artist, you’re always on the outside looking in. I felt like an outsider, observing, working my way towards it. That feeling of observing keeps me separate from feeling at home anywhere, really.

“It’s not an unpleasant feeling,” she adds, but the process of observation has taken its toll over previous projects. Harvey’s last two albums have been steeped in war, from its poisoned roots in money and power to the macabre reality of limbs in trees to the endless aftermath that haunts the world.

The grim historical perspective of 2011’s Mercury Prize-winning Let England Shake was followed by Hope Six Demolition Project and The Hollow of the Hand, its accompanying book of poems with photographer Seamus Murphy, documenting travels in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Washington.

Asked how she managed to protect herself, steeped for years in live geopolitical horrors for the sake of art that is anything but easy listening, she’s momentarily taken aback. “That’s really lovely that you’ve asked that question ... I didn’t know how to protect myself,” she says.

“Prior to writing Let England Shake, I spent four or five years studying war: past wars and current wars and art that had been made around wars and everything from first-hand accounts of torture to … you know, everything. And it did affect me.”

Soon after demoing those songs, she fell ill. She remembers calling her friend Ian Rickson, the British theatre director who stages her live shows, and telling him, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I just have no energy. I can’t do anything. I literally wake up after eight hours’ sleep and I have to lie down again.

“I thought there was something seriously wrong. I went for blood tests and all sorts of tests, and no one could find anything. And it was Ian who said, ‘It’s the work, don’t you see? This is your body and emotions responding’.

“Since then, I have been more aware of trying to practise resting my brain and therefore my body and emotions from the work because it did affect me in a big way. And it still affects me.”

The Hope Six project brought more internal challenges. The field trips had been “astonishing and quite life changing”, but when she came to work on the poems and the songs themselves – “two entirely different disciplines”, she’s learnt, over a decade-long mentorship with Scottish poet Don Paterson – the writing felt like hard graft.

“When I was first beginning to craft songs at 19, 20 years old, there was a sense of absolute joy in finding a way to express things through a medium I was in love with: music and song and singing … and I began to realise how far away from that I had come.

“I do have a hard work ethic. I go to my desk and I work nine-to-five most days, but going to my desk was no longer a joy. I think also being at that stage in my life – moving towards 50 – it felt like a serious question to ask myself, ‘OK, should I still be doing this? If this is not making me very happy, I don’t feel I can be doing good work’.”

After another rigorous world tour in 2016-17, Harvey imposed a kind of gap year to ponder the question. It involved going back to music theory she’d neglected as a girl and composing for stage and screen: the tense psychodrama The Virtues, the black Irish comedy Bad Sisters, Ivo van Hove’s London stage adaptation of All About Eve.

“That was a really wonderful place to be because I wasn’t serving my own artistic journey or voice,” she says. “I was serving the director; I was serving the screenwriter, and that’s quite a different discipline. That was quite a restful place to still be studying music.

“It was through this process that I re-found my joy because part of the exercise in trying to be a better pianist or a better guitar player was to play other people’s songs. I’d try and play Nina Simone songs on the piano, or Leonard Cohen songs on the guitar, or Sandy Denny …

“In learning and playing these other people’s works, I sort of fell in love with music again and with song again; how lyrics and chord progressions can open your heart, open doors into places inside yourself you didn’t know existed. I found the power of that again, and it completely renewed how I felt.”

A rebirth at 50 is hardly a given in popular music, even if PJ Harvey’s music has mostly parted ways with rock for stranger pastures. Once again directed by Ian Rickson, the show she’ll bring to Australia in March begins with all of I Inside The Old Year Dying, before switching gears to range across a deep and demanding back catalogue.

“The reason my work sounds different, album to album, is because of that absolute craving to learn, experiment, make sounds I’ve never heard before; sing in a way I’ve never sung before, write a song in a way I’ve never written before. It’s just so curious and so interesting to me, and I’ve been like that my whole life,” she says.

“I can only say that the older I’ve got, the happier I’ve become, the more accepting of myself and others and the world I have become; the more beauty and positivity I’m able to see. I can only say wonderful things about the ageing process emotionally, but physically, as a performer … it’s not easy.”

https://www.theage.com.au/culture/music ... 5l2b8.html


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PostPosted: Thu Jan 09, 2025 8:22 pm 
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Romario11 wrote:
“Prior to writing Let England Shake, I spent four or five years studying war: past wars and current wars and art that had been made around wars and everything from first-hand accounts of torture to … you know, everything. And it did affect me.”



I think PJ is getting confused here... i know she started writing LES as early as 2009 ( probably, even earlier, in 2008!), thanks to the 2009 interviews; saying she started studying five years prior would mean she began in 2004, which is quite weird since in that year she had just decided to make a complete career change; wouldn't she be laser focused into finding the new style?

at the same time i can't see any trace of this in depth study in White Chalk: John Parish, in an interview, clearly said that he loves how in PJ's albums you can see where she's heading musically/thematically in the next album: he made the example of the Track " the soldier" (from A Woman A Man Walked By)linking it (obviously) to LES; following his reasoning i could name a song like "pocket knife", in UHH, and link it musically to White Chalk ( by the way, PJ stated in a 2007/2008 interview that pocket Knife was one of the few songs that really didn't have a typical "PJHarvey-like" sound, together with 'shame', hence the strenght of the link); i'll repeat myself, i can't see any trace of a LES-like themed song in White Chalk, unlike AWAMWB;

i think ( as i always did) that her war studies and the subsequent writing of LES to have taken place in (or around) 2008.

What do you think about it?


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PostPosted: Fri Jan 10, 2025 12:31 pm 
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I remember at the time of Uh Huh Her she claimed to be heavily inspired by Russian folk music and she also expressed a particular interest in that country, to the point of wanting to spend some time there ("next stop Russia", are her words in the Please Leave Quietly interview). This could imply she had a fascination also for its history and conflicts, and maybe that's when she started studying wars and collecting ideas for a future album.

The fact that her interest in the topic of war didn't translate on the White Chalk album or AWAMWB doesn't necessarely mean she wasn't already exploring it back then, I think. Maybe that was just the initial stage and she really dived into it only later on. In fact, she has said more than once that it took her a long long time to figure out how to tackle those issues within a musical context.

My guess is that the whole Uh Huh Her experience left her so disappointed that she sort of said to herself "Ok. It's time to try to do something with my work which is daring and meaningful (either musically or lirically)". I don't know, but putting all these pieces together, the timeline doesn't seem so implausible.


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PostPosted: Fri Jan 10, 2025 4:53 pm 
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Sebastiano Boina wrote:
i know she started writing LES as early as 2009 ( probably, even earlier, in 2008!)


Let England Shake must have already been fully written and demoed by 2009—she debuted some of the songs that summer and recorded the studio versions in early 2010. The demos LP liner notes say there were all recorded in Dorset in 2008. Polly also attended the Seamus Murphy exhibition that sparked their collaboration in the summer of 2008, which means the project must have been pretty developed by then; she also invited Seamus to a JP/PJ show in London in April 2009 and sent him some demos. So I suppose she must have been already writing some of these songs after she was done with the recording of White Chalk in early 2007.

Creative writing is an elusive process, though; there’s rarely anything “laser-focused” about its progression. I also don’t think it’s possible to draw hard lines and say when exactly a seed of a project was planted. It’s very likely that her interest in reading literature about conflict started developing in her early to mid 30s, around the time of writing of Uh Huh Her, but didn’t come out in her own writing until a few years later. She has admitted to a few failed attempts until she started getting the lyrics right. Also disagree about the lack of trackes on White Chalk—there’s a soldier character in “The Mountain”, for instance, and that one must have been written in 2005 or 2006—not a ‘war song’ per se, obviously, but you can see that certain images were on her mind already.

The Russian folk poetry link that bruise has mentioned is interesting, too, since some tracks on Uh Huh Her, White Chalk and Let England Shake all borrow lines quite heavily from a book of translations by Roberta Reeder, so there certainly is a lyrical throughline running through these albums.


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PostPosted: Fri Jan 10, 2025 6:54 pm 
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Dang, i forgot about "the mountain"!!! :blush:
Thank you both for fixing my faulty doubts, i knew about the very early 2009 LES songs and her interest for Russia in 2004 but simply didn't connect the dots...
so, in conclusion we could say that the first "seed"( applying to the term "seed" a very vague meaning) of the project was in 2004, then 2/3 years later came the first attempts, then the first writing tests, and in 2008 the"definitive" writing process started; I remember PJ saying in multiple 2010/2011 interviews that writing and composing the music happenned in two different moment maybe the latter years were dedicated to the music side of the project?


By the way, the suggestion that PJ's interest for russian history lead somewhat to writing LES opens up a plethora of images and meanings for the LES songs... just think about a chechnya setting for a song like "in the dark places"... which opens up even more the "universal meaning" of LES.
Thank you!
.


Last edited by Sebastiano Boina on Fri Jan 10, 2025 9:11 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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PostPosted: Fri Jan 10, 2025 7:32 pm 
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Sebastiano Boina wrote:
in conclusion we could say that the first "seed"( applying to the term "seed" a very vague meaning) of the project was in 2004, then 2/3 years later came the first attempts, then the first writing tests, and in 2008 the"definitive" writing process started; I remember PJ saying in multiple 2010/2011 interviews that writing and composing the music happenned in two different moment maybe the latter years werw dedicated to the music side of the project?


Again, it’s probably not the best idea for us to make bold assumptions about dates (I guess it’s all a bit more blurry and non-specific, even for her), but we do know that she wrote the words for the record first, without singing/playing anything, and that it was a long process that took a good few years. I doubt she was initially writing them with a specific ‘project’ or ‘album’ in mind—I suppose it would have been a daunting idea at the time—probably more just creatively exploring what interested her at the time. Failing a lot, sure, but steadily getting better.

Anyway, now that I think about the timeline, she was probably working on some of the early LES lyric drafts while writing material for White Chalk and A Woman a Man… (by the way, the writing of these two must have overlapped to some degree as well—IIRC she got the idea of doing another album with John while living in LA in 2005, which is where a good chunk of White Chalk was written; I guess girl can multitask well). And then 2008 was probably the year she finally felt had enough strong lyrics concerning the topic of war, so she set them to music and demoed them.

Sebastiano Boina wrote:
By the way, the suggestion that PJ's interest for russian history lead somewhat to writing LES opens up a plethora of images and meanings for the LES songs... just think about a chechnya setting for a song like "in the dark places"... which opens up even more the "universal meaning" of LES.


Interesting quote from Polly from the 2011 NME interview: “In the Dark Places,” that might be Bosnia. You don’t know where it is. I was wanting to show the way history repeats itself, really and so in some ways it doesn’t matter what time it was, because this endless cycle goes on and on and on.


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