I’m on a PJ Harvey nostalgia trip this weekend and I dug out a newspaper clipping from 2008 that I saved after seeing her live for the first time. It features a (stellar) review of her solo concert in Warsaw, as well as a short interview - no new information, really, but I thought I’d translate it and share it here for posterity (plus a faded photo from the gig).



PJ Harvey: I Didn’t Drown My Daughter

ROBERT SANKOWSKI: White Chalk has received many great reviews. But weren’t you afraid of the critics’ and fans’ reaction before releasing an album that showed such a drastic departure from your previous style?

PJ HARVEY: I had mixed feelings. On one hand I was excited exactly because it’s such a different record. With this album I really wanted to leave behind everything I had been associated with earlier.

I was disappointed in myself and in what I’d done on the previous album Uh Huh Her. I felt as if for the first time I didn’t have anything new to say. It’s probably my biggest fear - that I will end up repeating myself. That’s why White Chalk was supposed to be the exact opposite of Uh Huh Her. And I succeeded in that.

But at the same time it’s a very difficult and unusual record. Even when I play it for myself I feel a little bit confused.

It’s just human nature - we like to assign certain experiences to particular emotions, put them in order, to know what we associate them with, or what they evoke in us.

I’m still slightly unsure and perplexed by White Chalk. It’s almost as if the album came from a different world. Whenever I make a record - and I think many artists do the same - I start with an idea of a direction I want to pursue. But then the music takes over and leads me towards something totally unexpected. You need to have the courage to let it carry you there. With White Chalk I had that courage.

Is it true that you started learning the piano just a few months before recording this album?

Yes. Someone had given me a piano so I started learning. I’m not a virtuoso, I’m not going to pretend that I can play or compose well on this instrument. But the contact with it turned out to be fruitful - because I hadn’t played it before, the piano opened a vast array of possibilities for me. I suddenly started singing and writing lyrics differently.

Many musicians composing on guitar claim that playing the piano completely changes the way they think about writing songs.

I totally agree. I can’t believe it took me about 15 years to learn this.

Playing the piano has also taught me something else - that it’s worth reaching for instruments you can’t really play. It makes your almost childlike naivety come back. And naivety is such a valuable thing in music for me - just look at how many artists record their best work at the beginning of their careers, on the first or second album, when they still have a very naive approach to playing. It’s only later that certain habits kick in.

You seem to be a very calm and serene person. How much of the true PJ Harvey is there in the expressive, emotional, extraordinarily dressed character that we know from the stage or music videos?

It’s all me! When I come out on stage, I never put on a mask. Which doesn’t mean I’m the same all the time. Like every person, I have different sides to my personality that I show in different situations. I’m very typical when it comes to that.

The thing that perhaps makes me different is the passion with which I sing. But it’s not exactly an expression of myself - more an expression of how I perceive reality and what I would like to convey to my listeners.

You strongly disagree with fans equating you with your lyrics and taking them too literally. For instance, “Down by the Water”...

There used to be a few people who actually believed that - as I sing in this song - I really had a daughter and I drowned her in a river. [laughter] It’s surprising, sometimes even scary. It makes me wonder.

There aren’t that many artists whose lyrics are taken that literally. For sure Nick Cave, maybe also Marianne Faithfull, and me. A particular type of musicians. Maybe it’s a question of how we look, maybe it’s a question of other people’s ideas of our lives. I don’t know. I can’t really understand it, especially since the music that moves me - for instance Neil Young, or Nina Simone - is important to me because I apply it to my own life, and not the lives of the people who wrote it.

You went to an art school and you’ve had your sculptures exhibited. Do you still sculpt?

Yes. All my artistic activity is in a way interconnected. It doesn’t matter if I’m writing songs or sculpting - the goal is the same: to discover and express the same emotions. And to keep my hands busy somehow.



source: Gazeta Wyborcza, 23 May 2008

Never read this one before, thank you!

Thanks so much. Love reading interviews I hadn’t come across before. Really appreciate the translation!

Thank you, that's really interesting. I hadn't read her being so disparaging about Uh Huh Her as opposed to individual songs on it.

In fact ... is there anything worthwhile in the live review? It's especially interesting to read opinions that come from non-English speaking sources.

Here’s the review:



(Some context: Polly is fairly well-known in Poland, and this was her first concert here, so the review and the interview got a full page spread in the country’s biggest newspaper. The requested song that she couldn’t quite remember was “Lying in the Sun”.)

That's so kind of you, Nightingale, thank you very much indeed.

Yes, many thanks for the additional translation! I’d have loved to hear that “Lying In The Sun”, even if it was aborted. Has she ever done it outside the TBYML tour?

No, according to the gigography she's only ever played it 11 times, all during the TBYML tour in 1995.

She opened the 1995-05-11 Kentish Town Forum with it. I've always thought it was a stunning way to open the show.

Joe Gore's feedback work and the lighting on Polly are spectacularly effective.

She opened with it 7 days later at the 1995-05-18 Mayan club gig (the "Blue Girl" bootleg). For the remaining 9 gigs in 1995 she buried it further down in the setlist. Perhaps it was too much?

That brings up an interesting question. What album tracks has she never played live? Until 2016 she had never played White Chalk's "To Talk To You", but as far as I know she's never played White Chalk's "Before Departure". White Chalk is not one of her albums that I play all that much and those two tracks in particular are almost unbearably sad.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JelqPcoaAB8"

Here's a 10-second snippet, right at the beginning -- it wasn't really much longer:



IRRC the guy who requested it started asking for it after she played "Down by the Water" and she said that "Lying in the Sun" would actually work very well on the autoharp -- he then reminded her of it during the encore and she caved in, hence the acoustic guitar.



From the main albums I think "Happy and Bleeding", "The Slow Drug", "No Child of Mine", "Broken Harp" and "Before Departure" are the only ones that have never been performed live. "We Float" was only performed once, I think? "The River" hadn't been played until 2008 but it's been a staple of her two past tours.

Thank you so much for sharing the article - great read