Sunday Times Magazine, May 21st, 1995
[copied without permission from The Sunday Times Magazine 21/5/95]

Before the advent of Polly Harvey, or PJ Harvey as she modestly styles herself for professional purposes, the county of Dorset featured hardly at all in the Who's Who of British rock 'n' roll. But since 1991, when Harvey rose without trace to beguile and baffle everybody who thought they knew what modern female rock stars ought to look and sound like, Dorset has cropped up every time she puts an album out. The journalists who beat a regular path to her door arrive armed with much the same list of questions: why, when London and Los Angeles are agog to put her on every guest list in town, and Michael Stipe of REM rings her at home, does she choose to live alone in a part of the world where nearby Yeovil counts as a metropolis? Why, if she's so shy, does she strike such provocative and disturbing poses in her videos and photo sessions? Most popular of all there is a thinly disguised line of inquiry which runs as follows: "What's a nicely brought up young woman like you, living close to her parents in the heart of chocolate-box rural England, doing writing angst-ridden songs that scare the wits out of people who firmly believe inner cities to be the natural home of fascinating scariness?"

Time was when Polly Harvey used to find all these questions deeply upsetting. Interviews in her local, the Fox Inn, were likely to stall into silence, or petulant outbursts about how "paranoid" she felt, and how it wasn't "fair". She particularly hated explaining her lyrics, with their weird references to body bags, pagan fertility symbols and sexual fluids - or the lack of such, as outlined on the title track of her debut album Dry. Inquiries about where she stood in relation to the feminist cause were likewise met with flustered denials, and a vague protest that, well, perhaps it wasn't such a good idea to have appeared on the cover of a rock weekly naked to the waist. Her glam costumes, and a series of videos in which she appeared to be trying on every louche female persona known to man - from high-tack housewife to baby vamp - aroused a frenzy of speculation which she simply blanked.

"I don't even think of myself as female half the time," she said, two years ago, "and when I'm writing songs I never write with gender in mind. I write about people's relationships to each other, both sexual and imaginary." The suggestion that Polly Harvey might be becoming some sort of new-fangled female role model didn't go down at all well. At times it was only the amicable joshing of the Fox's landlord, who would assure visitors that she was in fact "the sweetest girl who ever walked the earth", that kept tears at bay.

But four years of interrogation, amid steadily mounting success, have mellowed Polly Harvey. She still looks young for her age - 25 - and she talks about her parents far more than most twentysomething rock celebs, but she no longer seems burdened by the one conviction that the world doesn't understand. For one thing, having bought hundreds of thousands of copies of her four albums, the world does at least sympathise. The fevered interpretations of her work, which used to make her feel queasy, have become a bit of a joke: "I know in a lot of articles I'm the mad bitch woman from hell," she says. "I don't read them. I just look at the pictures to check I don't look like an old hag."

With the recent release of her most immediately likeable album so far, To Bring You My Love, her reputation has gone up another notch. Despite not having a major hit, she has appeared in the States on networked TV chat shows. REM phoned up to invite her to support them on their European tour this spring, and when that was cancelled due to the sudden collapse of REM's drummer, Michael Stipe himself rang her in Dorset to break the news and apologise.

And so here we are, in the posh Kesington Hotel where she is staying for a couple of nights on the eve of what is now PJ Harvey's headlining European tour. The old air of austerity and earnestness, which she used to accentuate by wearing her thick curly hair scraped back tight against her head, has mysteriously vanished, along with that hairstyle. She doesn't look as neurotically skinny as she did, thank goodness, and she grins a lot now, even when she is explaining how she "does get quite fed up, actually, with the way people go on about country life being idyllic, and talk about my upbringing as though it must have been perfect. There are just as many problems down there, but different ones. People seem to think that just because you're brought up in the country you should be a stable, wholesome, happy person. Which gets on my nerves, frankly."

Get her onto the dark side of life in the country, though, and Polly Harvey is off - about the sheep she used, as a teenager, to have to cut open when things went wrong during lambing, about animals found dead in the field in suspicious circumstances, about the awesome predatory instinct of foxes (whose hunting she vigorously supports). At times she begins to sound like a spiritual descendant of one of Thomas Hardy's heroines, a modern throwback to pagan Wessex. The darkness of the human heart, as recounted in folk songs and folk tales, both fascinates and inspires her.

On a recent single, Down By The Water, she sang of a mother and her drowned daughter. "There are a lot of very strange things that go on down in the country, things that in a city would seem quite extreme and abnormal," she says. "You are much more in touch with the dirtier side of life, basically, which I like. I am fascinated by things that might be considered repulsive or embarrassing. I like feeling unsettled, unsure. And I like music that operates physically, that shifts me about inside."

Blame it on her parents. Mr and Mrs Harvey were archetypal 1960s "heads", r'n'b enthusiasts originally, who decided to move from London to the West Country at that time when hippie pastoral, and the getting-it-together-in-the-country movement, were all the rage. He worked as a stonemason, she as a sculptor. At weekends they would organise gigs in the village hall, inviting bands down from London and putting the musicians up in the family home. "Every weekend the house was full of them. It still is. And when I was little I used to hate having all these strange people everywhere."

Equally stressful to the young Polly and her older brother was their parents' fondness for playing obscure old blues records, quite loudly, at meal times, "which made me feel really sick." Add to this the anguish she felt, aged six, upon hearing Pink Floyd's Dark Side Of The Moon - "that could never be played at home because I'd be in floods of tears" - it is a wonder that she ever thought about becoming a musician. But by 11 she was playing saxophone, and at 18 she started on the guitar, writing songs, and joined a local rock band.

What she really wanted to do at that time though was sculpt, like her mother. So having been accepted at St Martin's School Of Art she moved up to London, keeping her latest, self-named three-piece group going as a sideline. Life in the big city proved a mixed blessing. After only their third gig at a pub in West Hampstead, PJ Harvey were taken up a highly fashionable independent label, Too Pure, and long before the album called Dry appeared to rave reviews in 1992, companies with much larger chequebooks that Too Pure's were waving them in her direction. She duly signed to Island Records. Two things then happened: the fine art course got put on hold indefinitely, which wasn't a problem, and she broke up with her boyfriend, which was. The combination of this failed relationship - her first, "I was a late starter" - and the pressures of sudden and unexpected success drove her back to Dorset and to the edge of what she concedes might have been a nervous breakdown, "but I'd rather say I just got ill." It also led to a second album, titled, with autobiographical bitterness, Rid Of Me, which was full of jagged squalls of guitar noise and vocals that occasionally called to mind that gut-wrenching sound made by the devil in The Exorcist.

Two years on, the music and the woman who maps out every word and note of it herself exude a more quietly confident air. She dissolved the PJ Harvey trio last year, because of "personality differences", and now says that she doesn't "feel like I'm in a rock band", which she isn't. After she has written and recorded a song in her home studio she takes it to an informal jury which includes her parents and a few close friends. She won't countenance any changes or amendments but a firm thumbs down from any of them is enough to junk the track, and she pays close heed to her father's advice about which songs ought to be released as singles.

She works obsessively, and at present there doesn't seem to be much time for a life for Polly away from the business of being PJ. When she's on the road, which she will be from now until next February, "I'm very boring, I go to bed early, don't smoke, don't drink." She says she missed the hand-rolled Golden Virginia and the cognac, "but they can wait". The last proper holiday she took was two years ago, when she and her mother flew to Barbados and lay in the sun, but she has no plans to jet off anywhere exotic when the current tour ends next year. Home in Dorset with her chickens, goats and four-wheel-drive Land Rove is where she longs to be: "Spending more time there is what I'm actually working towards. I love my home. It's a big old barn with high ceilings and stone walls, good for singing. And it's got a 50ft well in the kitchen floor." She giggles. "Oh yes. The girl who sings about drowning babies has got a well in her kitchen. Doesn't that sound idyllic?"