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PostPosted: Thu Aug 12, 2021 7:35 pm 
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Here’s one more old profile of Polly for posterity, this time from the September 2007 issue of The Wire magazine. It was a cover story accompanied by Eva Vermandel’s photography. The cover tagline read “guitarless and bible black”. Perhaps some people here have never had the chance to read it – enjoy!



*



Return of the Native

Not only has PJ Harvey taken up the piano and adopted exploratory tactics for reconnecting with the primal roots of her earliest music, she’s also ended a decade of wandering by coming back to the white chalk Dorset countryside of her youth.

Words: David Stubbs

Arriving in Abbotsbury, the village in the country of Dorset where Polly Harvey grew up and to which she has returned, you’re struck by the sight of the medieval St Catherine’s Chapel. Perched austerely on top of a hill, it seems as much to be staring at you as you at it; and from here you can see all the way across to Fleet, Chesil Bank and Lyme Bay. Because of its location and its value as a navigational beacon, the chapel was spared the destruction that did for the local abbey, following the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII. St Catherine, explains Harvey, is the patron saint of spinsters, with women traditionally baking the pilgrimage up to her chapel in order to pray for husbands. Catherine of Alexandria had many edifices built in her honour, and the phrase ‘Catherine wheel’ comes from the object on which her fourth century tormentors attempted to break her, exasperated at her ability to convert all who tried to talk her out of her Christian ways, only for her to touch the wheel and reduce it to splinters.

The mind initially reels with all kinds of metaphors, conjuring no end of comparisons between the chapel and the music of PJ Harvey but, like the wheel, they tend to break up easily. What’s more powerful is the sense of the chapel silently imposing itself over the surrounding landscape, which bleakly yet comfortingly informs her new album White Chalk.

“I think with each album my mind and imagination goes into one particular area,” says Harvey. “I fall in love with an idea and go in that route. And this time it was about ‘country’, although not necessarily a particular place. With all of the songs I create this little film in my head, mostly in woodland, or on hills, or mountains. A friend asked me the other day, ‘Do you dream in the third person?’ Well, when I’m writing songs, I can be cast in the third or first person, but I’ll see an event happening over there and cast myself in that role, perhaps…”

Her aim to “try not to repeat myself” has become, ironically, a mantra for PJ Harvey, repeated prior to the release of a new album – White Chalk is her tenth, including a collection of John Peel radio sessions, since 1992. She repeated it after 1998’s Is This Desire?, which saw her de-emphasise the guitar in favour of moody dousings of electronics. She repeated it again with her last album, the under-regarded Uh Huh Her, where she played all the instruments alone in more skeletal, lo-fi arrangements, which represented a return to the working methods of her earliest work, as represented on the album 4 Track Demos. And she duly repeats it today, over tea in a picturesque little Abbotsbury pub nestling in the valley below St Catherine’s chapel. And, once again, it’s true. On White Chalk, Harvey has distanced herself from her 50 Foot Queenie mythos and the madding crowd of alternative rock, to recede into the realms of the personal, the experimental.

“I say I don’t want to retread old ground and sometimes I achieve that and other times I don’t,” she says. “But it’s always what I strive for. And I was particularly vigilant with this record. I think I did a better job than I have done for quite a few years – it did see through my initial idea. It’s too easy to get distracted, or fall in love with a song, even if it’s very much like what you’ve done before. This time around, it was to do with the plethora of music around us now and I don’t want to add anything that’s not new, there seems so little point because there is so much of everything. That’s what made me pursue the piano route.”

*

Much of the character of White Chalk is down to Harvey’s decision to dispense almost entirely with her traditional feral wash of electric guitar in favour of piano, an instrument upon which Harvey is quite conspicuously a beginner. Indeed, at a recent concert at the Bridgewater Hall in Manchester, she played the album’s opener, “The Devil”, with the aid of a metronome. “It’s almost laughable,” she chuckles. “For five months we were recording the album and that song, “The Devil”, would not be recorded, it would not be had. We couldn’t get it. And, this is technical, but I was hearing the song in three, like a waltz, and [co-producers] Flood and John Parish were hearing it in 4/4, completely on the beat. And we couldn’t marry the two at all. And we were arguing and swearing at each other for months and months. So in the end we took away the rhythm, so there isn’t a specified rhythm. But because I still hear it as a waltz, my left hand is the only anchor and my right hand can meander – so I have to use the metronome so that my right hand doesn’t go right out of time. It’s to hammer into me the way everyone other than myself hears the song. I’ve grown to quite like the metronome now, especially being such a terrible player. I use it in practice.”

With its Chopsticks-style chords, “The Devil” establishes the tone of the album, revisiting familiar, blues noir themes lyrically but delivered vocally in a high register just beyond Harvey’s natural range. When she performed the song in Manchester there was, just for a few seconds, a state of suspension among the gathered faithful as she embarked on the song, as if to say, where in Heaven’s name is she going here? However, it swiftly becomes clear that she is deliberately creating a sense of discomfiture by singing ‘above’ herself, while her decision to take up piano is down to a need to evade the pitfalls of habit and repetition that come with accomplishment on an instrument. This is a very artful form of artlessness. “The great thing about learning a new instrument from scratch is that it enables you to be more childlike, more unaffected by adulthood,” says Harvey. “When that intellectual knowledge is stripped away from you, it liberates your imagination. I don’t know how to play the piano, I’m very hamfisted at it, and I love that. In the future I’d quite like to keep grabbing at instruments I’ve never played before. It forces me into the position of listening for the first time and I find that very freeing.

“The way I sing is conscious also. Again, just trying to find new ground vocally and realising how much that affects the mood of a piece – not just the singing but playing piano. If I’d done this with guitar and a full band, the mood would have been entirely different. This way, the mood feels ‘not of a time’.”

As the album progresses, there is a sense of Harvey attempting to recreate a more open, childlike perspective, albeit with a certain maturity and at times cinematic vividness. On “Grow Grow Grow”, for instance, the lens angle suddenly widens and the full backdrop of the song is revealed in stark, glittering monochrome. “When Under Ether” could well be dream based, with Harvey imagining herself desensitised, prostrate, in an unconvincing, semi-conscious state of bliss. This song and the final track “The Mountain”, with its swooping sense of drama and mysterious sequence of lyrical ‘shots’, were conceived filmically, says Harvey. “With “The Mountain” I was even thinking of lights, angles, perspective, as I was writing it,” she continues. “You’re looking up at the gull, then you’re looking down, and you’re zooming in and looking at the soldier. For me, that song’s about being shellshocked, really, about being numbed, about existing right now in this world where this war is going on. It’s the same with “When Under Ether”. There’s a numbing out, a distancing, but they’re all written in the style you’d expect from a child’s school notebook – ‘There is an eagle!’”

*

Each track on White Chalk has its own peculiar, jagged character, albeit revealed laconically. Just three other musicians appear on the album – multi-instrumentalist Parish, who has been working with Harvey since 1988, when, prior to her solo career, she joined his group Automatic Dlamini; The Dirty Three’s Jim White (“He’s a fantastic drummer – I’d hesitate to call him a drummer, more of a ballet dancer. He’d love that!”) and keyboardist Eric Drew Feldman, whose CV, spanning four decades, includes work with Captain Beefheart, Snakefinger, The Residents and Pere Ubu.

“I experimented with quite a lot of different instruments – autoharps, harmonicas, in a lot of different ways. I wrote an enormous amount of material before I settled on these 11 songs, on loads of different instruments. And when I came to make the final selection, the ones that I chose were the ones I couldn’t relate to my previous work. They had to be brand new, lyrically as well as musically.”

“To Talk To You” sees Harvey engage in an imaginary dialogue with her grandmother, in what could well be a graveside conversation. “Everyone has had a grandmother,” she says. “I had one who lived to an old age and I learned so much from her – and again, it’s that childish thing of thinking, ‘Maybe if I lie down in this spot here, you’ll hear me…’ And even when you visit them at the graveyard it’s peculiar – ooh, there you are, under the dirt.” Again, as her voice soars painfully high, it’s as if she’s trying, pathetically, to crack the impenetrable ceiling back to the dead past of infancy.

“Broken Harp” is graced by the intimate, askew tones of the zither, which Harvey acquired on her first tour abroad, with Automatic Dlamini, to East Germany before the Wall came down. Unable to take currency out of the country, she bought a zither instead – only for it to sit unused for almost 20 years until this album. It features again on “The Piano”, which, with unintended irony, features no piano at all, but rather Aeolian flutters of zither followed by a rare burst of guitar, which is strangely heartening, rushing warmly and surprisingly through the front door.

But Harvey makes the strongest connection with the place of her birth and upbringing on the title track. “I’ve lived at various times in London, LA and Bristol but I always returned here,” she says. “I definitely feel the pull of Dorset and have no desire to ever leave it. That said, I’m also very restless and get a lot from movement and moving about – it’s a way of seeing things anew again – but I always come back to Dorset. It feels like part of my make-up. I’ll always go away and always come back.

In the song, she morbidly imagines her bones eventually residing in the chalk landscape, like those of her ancestors. Bones is a word that crops up more than once in my notes on White Chalk; there’s a sense of the brittleness of the piano based arrangements, of transience, but also of a stripping down to the skeletal essence of things. Harvey was thinking along the same lines. “There’s this great sense of excitement I get when I open a piano and to me it looks like a skeleton and I think the keys look like bones,” she says. “I moved into a house recently and the previous owners left a piano behind. It was unsalvageable, unfortunately, but I pulled all the keys off it, so I do have this enormous collection of ivory and ebony keys in a pile and they look just like bones. Growing up in the country, I forever collected dead animals and rotted them down with lime because their skeletons are beautiful.”

*

Watching PJ Harvey live, especially solo, one is struck by the apparent dis-connect between the Polly Harvey performing the songs, when she transmogrifies into some instantly summoned force of nature, a tornado of blues holler and rock noise, and Harvey in between songs, when she reverts to her gentle, courteous, self-deprecating manner, seeming a little embarrassed at her performances, as if having temporarily come over a bit unnecessary. Finishing a song, she has a way of stepping back from the microphone as she delivers the concluding notes, like she’s emulating the fadeout on a recording; it is perhaps also a way of easing herself out of performance mode and back, temporarily, into the world of pleasantry. She has been using such a technique since she first began performing in local pubs, in between sets by more established groups. In her songwriting and performance she never holds back, pitching herself to extremes, which she admits makes her music an uneasy experience even for herself to revisit. However, whether being interviewed or chatting with her audience, there’s no affected hauteur or cool, rock ‘n’ roll disdain. She’s simply very nice, well spoken with just the hint of a rustic burr in conversation – all of which, for some, eerily exacerbates her ‘strangeness’. The fundamental reason why some people are driven to create and others are not is hard enough at the best of times to fathom. With Harvey, lacking as she does the dramatic airs of the Artistic Soul In Torment, it is still more a source of curiosity.

“I don’t feel that I’m ‘not myself’, that I’m not Polly at any time when I’m on stage,” she counters. “I really enjoy singing and playing songs. I’d be doing so whether people were watching or not. It’s something that I want, need and have to do. So I feel very myself singing and playing… when I’m singing any given song, I’m absolutely inside it. But then, when I stop singing and step out of it, I step out and it’s like, OK, I’m here with these nice people and I’m going to talk to them. I read this lovely quote by Dylan the other day. He said that all you have to do with songs is just to let them be there, in the room. And I love that, because it’s exactly how I feel. In some ways, the songs are nothing to do with me and yet they come through me. I’m the conduit for them.”

*

Harvey is naturally reserved – she has admitted she’s not much of a social animal. Yet she’s driven also by her need, as a writer and artist, to set difficult challenges, confound expectations, throw provocative shapes and rub up the wrong way. This has meant that her following is devoted, dedicated, cultish. It also means that there has developed an intrusive interest in her private life, with people looking for biographical clues in her work, though she insists her songs are not “a diary”. It wasn’t long into her career, which burst into life in 1991, that fans started sending her letters addressed to “some village in Dorset”, which somehow reached her; devotees also turned up in her home village on Polly-spotting expeditions. It’s small wonder, then, that she has a reputation for evasiveness in interviews, especially when it comes to lyrics, which again only stokes the sense of enigma surrounding her.

However, as is often the case with artists consigned to eccentricity, they are simply pursuing their nature and their principles to logical extremes. PJ Harvey grew up in Dorset to parents steeped in the likes of Beefheart and raw blues. “They used to play music loud every night and still do,” she recalls. “My Mum’s putting on a band this weekend, she still does it. So I was very lucky. Such a fantastic record collection they had – and all old vinyl. They started buying when they were 20. I was listening to Howlin’ Wolf’s version of “Back Door Man” yesterday. It’s shocking me still – how could he get away with that? But the rise of his voice, it’s like nails going down your back, or something.”

As well as studying saxophone and playing guitar, Harvey completed a foundation course at Yeovil Art College. “My experiences as an art student feed through enormously into my songwriting,” she concurs. “It all comes from the same place. I work in both in the same way. I used lots of found objects but also real materials – it was always black and white, very little colour, very minimal. And, as with a song, start off with lots and lots of information and just strip it away, see how little you actually need, see how ‘bare’ you can get something, where it’s at its barest but can still deliver some sort of emotion, some sort of comment.”

By late 1991, thanks to the championing of John Peel and the now defunct music weekly Melody Maker, the 21 year old PJ Harvey was showered with acclaim on the release of her first single, “Dress”. Her early material is unnervingly raw and yet feels like the finished article. You sensed in Harvey a creature for whom rock and the blues weren’t styles to be adopted but as natural to her as drinking water. At the same time, the fear she struck into the groin of male dominated rock ‘n’ roll felt coolly premeditated. On songs like “Oh, My Lover” or “Sheela-Na-Gig”, a candid, faintly satirical articulation of female desire, ferocity and vulnerability left friction burns rather than exuding conventionally lubricious eroticism. Every emotion was writ scarily large; she tore at her guitar as if tearing out lumps of hair. It was an uneasy, physical experience, voracious and vicious. When she posed naked on the cover of NME, it wasn’t some cheap, sexual tack but an awkward exposition of flesh that was borne out in her songwriting. Songs like “50 Foot Queenie” have a certain man-baiting, role-reversing quality about them; but Harvey was always more than merely feminisit, which is why she resented being conscripted into the Riot Grrrl movement of the early 90s.

“It’s very convenient for people to pigeonhole people and doesn’t do much of a service for the diversity of people who were coming through then,” she sighs. “I never felt part of Riot Grrrl, even though I was included in it. I think what I always hated was that ‘Grrrl’ spelling. I thought it was appalling! ‘Grrr’ is a little bit pathetic. Like cavewomen in loincloths. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who felt like that.”

Harvey followed her debut, 1992’s Dry, with Rid Of Me (recorded with Steve Albini) and 4 Track Demos in 1993. By then it was becoming clear that the energies in her songs were more complex, more volatile than those who initially had her marked down as an indie tomboy/Patti Smith wannabe could have foreseen. Satan often makes an appearance in her songs, the devil that stalks the blues, signifying all that is terrible, debasing, aggrandising, monstrous about the human need to love and lust, to possess and break free. Despite her early, professed detestation of third person narratives in rock, Harvey took them up around the mid-90s, as her work became more ‘performed’. “Down By The Water”, which disturbingly involves blue-eyed daughters and drowning, is one such example. Harvey also ditched her early, tomboyish look for a disquietingly glamorous appearance – red lipstick, red dresses. She also took up vocal training in order to expand her palette of capabilities.

“My Dad’s a housebuilder, and he built this house for an opera singing couple,” she says. “They’re retired now but still teaching. I used to go and have lessons with them once a week and I learned an enormous amount, about register and placement, and breathing, and what they call the ‘mask’, the actual shape you make with your face, your mouth, your tongue, and also placement, the power of the mind, where you mentally place your voice and it will go there.”

As the 90s wore on, there hovered briefly the danger that an increasingly sophisticated Harvey, with her expanded group and fulsome rockin’ style, would be absorbed into a leftfield Hall of Fame. Which is why over the past few years she has inclined towards experimentation and musical alliances with the likes of Catalan composer Pascal Comelade, who has also worked with Pierre Bastien, Jaki Liebezeit, Robert Wyatt and Jac Berrocal, among others. “He’s done loads of albums,” enthuses Harvey. “My favourite is Traffic D’Abstraction. I worked with him in 1998/99. Wonderful, wonderful artist. He works with children’s toys and makes orchestras out of them. He makes a lot of his own instruments, plays toy pianos – it’s like the saddest fairground music you ever heard – hilarious and devastatingly sad at the same time.”

Her listening habits have, more recently, drifted into Outer Limits territory. “People submerging themselves in water for ten days recording one piano string with a metal hammer wearing a diving outfit. It’s fantastic, it’s really exciting reading about that sort of thing. It inspires me to experiment more. It’s a system that can support itself so long as enough people know it’s going on. It needs to keep going.”

*

PJ Harvey emerged at a propitious time in British and American rock, alongside the likes of Radiohead, Nirvana and My Bloody Valentine – perhaps the last period in which mainstream rock allowed for a measure of fire and innovation. “It was a very fertile time, yes,” she agrees. “There were a lot of new sounds happening. There feels like such a saturation level now, and so much repetition. Is it because I’m getting old? Was it happening already when I came out and I didn’t notice it?”

I suggest that it could be because the music of the early 90s, in all its ragged glory, was in some ways informed by the economic recession that occurred in those times. Since 1993, the UK has enjoyed a boom period, creating an economic comfort zone and with it a retrograde culture of risk aversion, moral complacency and the over-dominance of marketing departments in the dissemination of popular culture. Had she emerged 10 or 15 years later than she did, PJ Harvey might have had problems. “Never enough credit’s given to that, the way music sounds like it sounds because of what’s happening culturally, or worldwide, even,” she says. “That’s something I try to explain when people talk about my lyrics as ‘personal’.”

At one point during her Bridgewater Hall performance, Harvey turns from her piano to chat to her audience, musing on how, at 37, she and they are already in the process of “growing old together” and requesting them to come see her when she is 70. She’s joking, of course, and yet it is more than likely that she will still be performing in 2039 and there will be plenty still willing to go and see her. What will preserve and sustain Harvey won’t be her cumulative accomplishment(s), but that her every return will be like a return to the drawing board and, indeed, white chalk. “It occurred to me the other day, I am a songwriter,” she reflects. “I’m not a musician in that I won’t touch an instrument from one year to the next unless I’m performing or recording. It all goes on in here, in my brain. I write the songs in my brain and then come to the instruments at the last minute. This goes for the guitar as well. I had to practise hard for a month just to learn to play guitar again. My fingers were blistered.

“I feel much more like an explorer,” she concludes. “I’m much more excited about laying my hands on anything that’s new and that I don’t understand. That’s what’s most interesting to me at the moment. It’s a life’s work, exploring. I sometimes wake up in a panic, thinking I’ll never get to explore all these ideas I want to try before I die. It’s a lovely but scary feeling.”


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PostPosted: Fri Aug 13, 2021 7:14 pm 
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Thank you! I don't think I *had* read that interview, though the one she gave John Harris for The Guardian a week or so later says similar things.


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