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 Post subject: Sunday Times Interview
PostPosted: Sun Mar 17, 2024 11:54 am 
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https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/pj-h ... -n68sz0rt8 promo piece with a couple of new pictures

PJ Harvey, pop’s chameleon

Who do you think of when you hear that there is to be a musical adaptation of a novel by Charles Dickens? Who could bring the grit, range and spirit of Dickens to a modern audience? The National Theatre believes it has the answer.
For her latest project, Polly Jean (PJ) Harvey has written the music for London Tide, an adaptation of Dickens’s final completed novel, Our Mutual Friend. The singer-songwriter, 54, is as surprised as anyone. “I’m not even a fan of musicals, I very rarely go to see one,” she says in her Dorset burr. “I never believe that a character would launch into a song with this silly operatic voice.”
Harvey is that rare thing, a shapeshifter. Since her first album, Dry, in 1992 (for which she was named songwriter of the year by Rolling Stone magazine), she has constantly reinvented herself, like David Bowie. Over ten acclaimed albums she has turned her hand to punk-blues, alt-rock, glacial electronica, mystical folk and war-laureate history-in-song, and she is the only artist to have won the Mercury music prize twice. There was excitement this week, when it was announced that in June, she will be playing on the Pyramid stage at Glastonbury.

In the past decade she has also become known as the woman behind the Peaky Blinders and Bad Sisters soundtracks. The sheer breadth of her career extends to work in theatre — with a Broadway staging of Hedda Gabler and a West End adaptation of All About Eve. That’s not all — there are her sculptures and expressionist paintings, and she has written two volumes of poetry. The actor Cillian Murphy, who knows her through a mutual friend and thought of her for the Peaky Blinders score, is among her many admirers and says: “Her recent book, Orlam, is a masterwork, and I Inside the Old Year Dying was my most listened to album of last year. I adore her music, but also her spirit as an artist. She is fearless and polymathic and political and no album ever sounds the same, but you always know it’s a PJ Harvey record.”
In an age of social media overshare, Harvey stands out for being mysterious, which is how she likes it. She gives few interviews and guards her private life fiercely. When we first met in Los Angeles 20 years ago, she was adamant about her separation of life and art. “People want to see every album I’ve made as my diary. They often ask me, ‘Is it some sort of cathartic process?’ No, it never, ever, ever feels like that. Never do I feel that I have rid myself of some feeling that was bothering me by writing a song.” Now, she says she’s not the sort of person to spend time reading “reams and reams of words before looking at a painting”. “It either works at that immediate level or it doesn’t. I’m a tactile, responsive person. I don’t want to have studied something first.”

Yet she is also funny. Talking about musicals in the National Theatre café, she breaks into great gusts of laughter. This sense of humour is often forgotten by those who tend to approach the singer insisting that her work is founded on autobiography. She has never had children, telling an interviewer in 1995: “I wouldn’t consider it unless I was married. I would have to meet someone that 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.” She was briefly in a relationship with Nick Cave in the Nineties, and inspired him to write the album The Boatman’s Call. (In West Country Girl Cave sings of her “crooked smile and a heart-shaped face”.) Beyond that you’re left with conjecture.
Her approach made her a perfect fit for London Tide, says its director, Ian Rickson, who has worked with Harvey on her tours. “When people ask, ‘What are you doing next?’ and you mention Dickens, you can see their eyes glaze over because they think they’re going to get something very white, very heritage, very literary and a bit posh, with a few working-class gargoyles,” he says. “But Dickens was this incredible campaigning chronicler. Polly has enabled us, like a shaman, to dig down into the book in a way that’s direct and timeless.”

Our Mutual Friend is about betrayal, deception, money, class and assumed identities. It speaks, all those involved in the project agree, loudly to our times. The River Thames plays a pivotal role, swallowing and in some cases regurgitating human beings. “I’d always loved Dickens but I wasn’t familiar with Our Mutual Friend,” Harvey says. “I got the sense from the book about the river being in charge, our time on earth being so small and the river just keeping moving on.” Twenty-three years after she won her first Mercury prize for her album Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea, Harvey brings them together in the London Tide song Embers and Ash. “The city is a sea,” the cast sings, “with wrecks upon its shore.”
She grew up not far from the sea, in Dorset, where her parents ran a stone quarry. They were deeply involved in the local music scene, counting Charlie Watts and the “Sixth Stone”, Ian Stewart, as friends. But Harvey rejects the nature-nurture suggestion that this meant she was destined for a career in the arts.

“It always amazes me how siblings can turn out so differently,” she says. “We are so much formed by our upbringing and surroundings as children. I had the parents that I had, who loved music and were artistic, but also earning a living. My father quarried stone, that’s manual labour, really hard work. My older brother and I were brought up under exactly the same conditions, and my brother was happy to continue working in the quarry his whole life, and he’s never wanted for more than that, he’s lived a very happy life, in the same village he grew up in.
“But I went in a completely different direction, always travelling, always moving. My father and mother were quite different people. I think it also comes with a lot of the individual and what you come into this world with, and are seeking or needing to unravel. And everyone is different with that. So I could have become a banker if I’d come into the world slightly differently. Even with the same upbringing and the same parents.”

Harvey learnt guitar and saxophone at school and got her start in various local bands, first at Yeovil College in Somerset then in Bristol. She views the present situation with arts funding in this country — Birmingham and Nottingham councils have just taken an axe to their support, and more will surely follow — with despair. It is important to her that London Tide is at a subsidised theatre. “Music education is being stripped away,” she says. “Without an avenue for self-expression, we become diseased — as a nation, as people. Diseased, ill at ease; and things go wrong — with the body, with the mind. It’s so crucial. And as a country we’re really good at the arts. We’re so small, yet consider the amount of art, over hundreds of years, that has gone out into the world. It baffles me that more isn’t being done to support that.”

Her enigmatic presence means fans latch on to every lyric, searching for meaning, which they will doubtless do with London Tide. Never mind that it’s inspired by Dickens. Each time she sets out to write new material, she says, she goes back to the same wellspring. “The lovely thing about when you start is that that [degree of attention] doesn’t enter your brain. But then of course if you have success with your first piece of work, from there on in you are aware that people are going to assess it. It’s almost like a trick you have to play on yourself: no one’s going to see this but me, in order to just open the gates, even. If you’re too aware of people looking at you, you’d be frozen. You’re sort of fooling yourself, but you’re also reminding yourself of where and how you began.”
I watch Harvey walking out. She looks anonymous, heading out into the rain in sensible shoes. Later, I listen back to the tape, and there it is again: that giant glorious laugh. It is as if she’s telling us, don’t be so serious.
London Tide is at the Lyttleton, National Theatre, London SE1, Apr 10-Jun 22


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PostPosted: Sun Mar 17, 2024 4:30 pm 
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Joined: Sat Feb 26, 2022 8:30 pm
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Thanks Romario, saved my trying to fight through the firewall.

They do like to pad out a few new quotes with a job lot of history don't they ...


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