http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/feature ... 6708334.jpThe Scotsman
Interview: PJ Harvey, musician
Date: 01 February 2011
By Chitra Ramaswamy
Polly Jean Harvey has done a lot in her 41 years on this planet. She has roared like a Dorset riot grrrl in Doc Martens, barked like a dog, and wailed like a child. She has played guitars, autoharps, saxophones, and on one self-produced album she played every single instrument. For the career-defining White Chalk, her last record, she learned the piano and sang in the very upper registers of her voice, sounding like a disturbed child who had wandered out of a Victorian ghost story and become lost in a 21st century of pain. She has won the Mercury Prize and appeared topless on the cover of the NME, her back to the camera, at once revealing and holding back (a very PJ Harvey stance). She can look like "Joan Crawford on acid" (her words), a vamp, a drag queen, a serious artist swathed in black, or a Brontë sister.
Expect the unexpected is the only rule of thumb when it comes to a new PJ Harvey album. In 20 years, she has released eight wildly different records, each one defiantly not of its time, each one unmistakeably her own. Yet despite all this, Harvey feels like she's only just getting started. Her ninth, Let England Shake, may well be her best yet, but the years she's spent working on it have only made her realise how much is still left to do. "The work that has gone into this album has been like opening a new door for me," she says softly. (Harvey says everything softly, even when she's disagreeing with you, which is often.) "In fact," she continues, "so much has been uncovered that I feel I have to start from the beginning again. And my expectations have become greater. The more I learn, the better I want to write." Has writing become harder, then, or easier? "Harder," she says without a pause. "The more you open your mind to it the more you realise how far away from getting anyway near it you are."
I doubt there is any fiercer critic of PJ Harvey than PJ Harvey. Well, partly because everyone else loves her (Nick Cave apparently wrote Into My Arms, one of his greatest songs, in response to their break-up). But I wonder if it's exhausting demanding so much perfection. The lyrics for Let England Shake, the most sophisticated of her career, took two-and-a-half years to write. The past few years have seen her focus almost entirely on words, writing day in and day out, singing alone for months before even considering picking up an instrument.
Is it becoming more painful? "No," she says. "There is nothing I like better than working with words. I relish language. It gives me great pleasure. I write all the time. Every day. I consider writing to be mostly what my work entails. But it's something that doesn't come easy to me. I have to put in a lot of hours and a lot of study. That's why these things take time."
And it's why they pay off. It's Harvey's harnessing of words and the searing subject matter that make Let England Shake so extraordinary. "I feel it's becoming more important for me to address the issues of our lives," she says. "I feel more of an urgency to try to do that now. Probably a lot of that is because I'm getting older. I have a voice that can be heard and I would like to do something meaningful with it. I would like to do something good if I can."
The album is a meditation not just on Englishness, but on nationhood, history, the land, the people who protect it and – this is PJ Harvey after all – those who destroy it. Images of violence abound, set against huge energising washes of heavily effected guitars, autoharp, brass, wind, ceremonial drums, chants and bugles. On the sublime England she describes herself as a "withered vine, reaching from the country that I love". Women's arms are described as "bitter branches" as they wave their soldiers off to war. In the perversely upbeat first single, The Words That Maketh Murder, "soldiers fall like lumps of meat / Blown and shot out beyond belief".
Like White Chalk, Let England Shake touches you in that strange Polly Harveyesque place where death and darkness become oddly uplifting. Pain and beauty seem to go hand in hand for her.
"That is a very hard question to answer," she says when I ask why she has always been drawn to such violent imagery. "But I only try to write what I feel I need to hear out there in the world. I have always tried to make sense of the world around me. I think that need comes from what isn't being said. One of the things I detest most is the covering up of reality and truth. I think we should talk about the things that are happening." And does she see that covering up everywhere? "Yes," she says. "And terrifyingly so."
Harvey can speak in frustratingly abstract terms. But this is because she is keen to distance herself from her songs. She doesn't want them to be read as autobiography. As a result she is a famously reluctant interviewee, though she comes across as intense rather than difficult.
She is also very serious and only laughs once during our interview, when I ask whether the eccentric image of her strumming away on her autoharp in some cliff-top castle bothers her.
"It doesn't make me angry because I've become so used to it," she says. "I don't recognise the character that is supposed to depict me. But I do get how these ideas of people can be created when not a lot is known of their… erm… day-to-day existence." She stops. This time there is no laughter.
Let England Shake, produced by Harvey's long-standing team of Flood, John Parish and Mike Harvey, who first worked with her in 1995, is not overtly political. Harvey is more the observer on the sidelines than the speaker thumping her tub, though she did first sing the title song – "the West's asleep, let England shake / Weighted down with silent dead" – on the Andrew Marr Show to an audience that included Gordon Brown. Ouch.
"Instinctively I felt it was time to approach such subject matter because of where I've reached as a writer," she explains. "I felt I might now have the language. But also it felt right in terms of history in the making, what's happening. It felt like something I needed to try. And it had to be an impartial voice delivering the story. It had to remain outside of it."
Harvey recorded the album in – where else? – a 19th century cliff-top church in her native Dorset. Interestingly, she rarely sings at home. "I didn't sing growing up and I don't sing much for myself now," she admits. "I only sing when I have people to sing to or I'm writing a song."
Most of her writing remains as prose or poetry. Growing up on a small sheep farm, the daughter of a sculptor and a stonemason was drawn to words long before music. "I only began singing when I was 16," she says. "I bought a guitar and found I could put my words to music. But my first creative memory is of making words go together. I can remember being very young, about four, and writing stories and plays."
That lifelong desire to "make words go together" has reached its zenith with Let England Shake, a masterpiece from a writer, singer and musician at the top of her game. Harvey turned her gaze inwards for the gothic melodrama of White Chalk, but for Let England Shake that gaze shifts again to bear witness on the world.
"One piece of work seems to grow out the other," she says, returning as ever to the abstract. "It's not about them being in opposition. It's about the desire to keep trying things I haven't done before." And no doubt somewhere on a cliff in Dorset, the next voice is already stirring.
Let England Shake is out on 14 February (Island)
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