http://www.halesowennews.co.uk/newsxtra ... d_stirred/

An early contender for album of the year, PJ Harvey releases Let England Shake on Monday, February 14. The Dorset-born songwriter talks about her new album - an examination of her home country's place in the world - and why she's always shied away from protest songs in the past.

No matter what memories you take away from your school days, there's usually one teacher who leaves a profound and lasting legacy.

The sort of tutor who, at the merest mention of their name or the subject they taught, can induce nostalgic smiles and a wealth of positive stories.

It's there with most people. Even award-winning and highly acclaimed songwriters like PJ Harvey.

Her English teacher left such an impression on her that, at the age of 41 and needing a few pointers on lyrics for her new album Let England Shake, she knew exactly where to turn.

"I had so much respect for her," she reminisces. "She was highly critical of us at school, but always pushed us to do our best work. I hadn't been in touch with her for years before I went back to see her, so I was really nervous going in."

It's difficult to imagine Polly Jean Harvey being nervous about anything concerning her craft.

Having recorded some of the most dazzling albums of the last 20 years, she's now the kind of artist talked about in hushed, reverential tones and receives the kind of praise awarded to only a handful of musicians every generation.

The Dorset-born songwriter has a Mercury Prize and a handful of Brits under her belt but, more than any piece of silverware, she also possesses a rare commitment to her artistic vision.

Aside from her sometimes extreme lyrics, knack with bleak imagery and music that veers between the brutal and sublime, it's perhaps that truth in her work that has attracted such devotion from her fans.

"Not staying true to my instinct would be a death for me," she says, reclining in the library of a London hotel. Dwarfed by a giant Chesterfield and sipping coffee, Harvey cuts a very different figure to her on-stage persona which has catapulted her, whether she likes it or not, to the position of feminist icon.

Today she's delicate and thoughtful and doesn't waste so much as a syllable when she's talking.

The fact that she's so concise when discussing Let England Shake, her phenomenal eighth album, is hardly a surprise. It's been the best part of five years in the writing. Every word on the album has been pored over.

"That's how I start writing songs now," she begins. "They're poems, really, and have to work on their own on the page before I write any music. I've begun to find it makes for a stronger song, as well as having the benefit of being a poem too."

"The beauty of human beings is that we all interpret things in different ways, but I want to get a story across in a very clear language on this album, and it has to be that way or my whole image or vision won't be clear and what I'm saying won't work."

"Words have such great scope and power, and I take care over every one, making sure not to use any that are superfluous or don't have any business being there."

With Let England Shake, Harvey is approaching the minefield of the protest song for the first time - hence needing both guidance and encouragement from her old teacher.

As she's all too aware, protest music is a genre that's been with us ever since there were things to get riled about, and has been tackled by everyone from Woody Guthrie to Eminem with wildly varying degrees of success.

"There's such a fine line between writing a good protest song and being dogmatic and preachy," she says. "That's why I've never done it before. It's very difficult and I didn't want to fall flat on my face and produce an awful piece of work."

"It's only now I've been writing songs for 25 years that I have the confidence to write about things that have always affected me hugely, but didn't feel I had the ability as a songwriter to bring them into my work."

"Humanity is the key, that was the way in for me, to keep that human and emotional quality. They're the things I feel qualified to write about. Because we can all empathise and transport ourselves into other people's shoes."

Using events from across the ages, battles in Gallipoli and Afghanistan, for example, the album paints a vivid portrait of Britain, specifically England, as it stands today.

Her stunning lyrics examine her relationship with her homeland, the nature of patriotism and frustration at the previous government's decisions, indirectly and, most importantly, without ever sounding like she's standing on a soapbox.

Themes of Britain's post-imperial delusions and yet more troops marching off to war resonate throughout the album, specifically on All And Everyone, Hanging In The Wire, and The Words That Maketh Murder.

The last-named features the bitter refrain of 'What if I take my problems to the United Nations?', a not-so-subtle snipe at the organisation and its role in the Iraq war.

Musically, Let England Shake is largely acoustic, featuring olde worlde folk instruments (autoharps and the like), with her breathtaking voice at the core.

It was recorded in a church not far from Harvey's home in the South West, although she maintains the building added little to the recording.

"I would have made the same album wherever I was," she says. "I did look around Berlin, and it can be a wonderfully unsettling place, but I couldn't find anywhere that felt right."

"Then a friend who runs the church as an art space said I could work there if I needed to."

"I chose musicians that would bring out the best of the songs, and I wanted to record live - that interaction was very important rather than overdubbing things, but by that point everything was so well-formed that I knew exactly what record I was going to make."

"I'm really looking forward to it being released and then going and playing it to people. I've a good sense of anticipation."

Extra time - PJ Harvey :: Polly Jean Harvey was born in Bridport, Dorset, on October 9, 1969.

:: She grew up on a farm with her stonemason father and sculptor mother, both huge fans of American blues music and art rock, in particular Captain Beefheart.

:: Until his recent death, Polly would send Captain Beefheart, aka Don Van Vliet, a copy of her album as soon as she had finished it and ask for his verdict.

:: Her fifth album Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea, inspired by her affection for New York, won the 2001 Mercury Prize. In a tragic twist, the result was announced on September 11, the day of the terrorist attacks on the city.

:: It was announced this week Polly will receive the Teenage Cancer Trust Outstanding Contribution To Music award at the NME Awards later this month.

:: PJ Harvey releases her new album Let England Shake on Monday, February 14.


Article includes this lovely pic:

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I don't believe this interview with The Globe and Mail has been posted yet?



http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/art ... le1947691/

LOL, she sure got defensive at the end of this. Journalists really should be more careful when trying to learn anything about Polly's private life.

Polly 1, journalist 0...

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My PJ Harvey gallery

Kind of a bitchy response—not exactly characteristic of someone who is truly happy.

Seriously. Why bother doing interviews if she's gonna say the same goddamn things about not wanting to repeat herself et cetera? I love Pollys music but she's usually a quiet boring interview subject. Was astonished by how personal and good the Mojo-interview was though

The fact that she's so unbelievably private makes me want to know all there is about Ms Harveys life. You know like they say about dogs on a leash, let them go and they'll stick around!

But I think I saw a real change during the White Chalk performances (never seen her in action but been obsessed with youtubevids). She seemed so happy and glowing (oh that sounded laame) when she played, both solo and with JP. And I think that that's the case now too. Something is definately going on in her personal life

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Don't get mad, get even

http://www.spinner.com/2011/03/28/pj-ha ... and-shake/

PJ Harvey Learns Folk Lessons From Neil Young for 'Let England Shake'
Posted on Mar 28th 2011 3:30PM by Steve Baltin

PJ Harvey's latest album, 'Let England Shake,' is another masterpiece from one of rock's most consistently important artists over the last two decades. But unlike previous landmark works like 'To Bring You My Love' or 'Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea,' 'Let England Shake' finds Harvey examining the world around her with England as the centerpiece. Spinner spoke with Harvey about how she only now, at 41, had the confidence to write this type of album, why Neil Young and the Pogues' Shane McGowan inspired her and which of her songs will live on after she's "dead and gone."

You referred to the writing on this album as being more "outward" than your previous work. What prompted that shift?

To start, the record took quite a different shape to how I usually write. I concentrated early on writing the words, for maybe one and a half, two years and didn't approach music in any way, shape or form. I just wanted to make the words work on the page like poetry and that took a long time. There were many, many songs that I threw away and many words that I threw away. I knew that to approach such weighty subject matter, the words, at the very root, had to be right and had to have the right balance and that took a long time. I can't remember exactly which was the first word that came into completion because I tend to work on maybe five, six or more pieces at the same time. But I do know that it was a choice to start addressing some of these huge issues that I have always been profoundly moved and affected by, but I'd never felt confident as a writer in my ability to discuss such things and do it well, up until this point in time when I have a little more experience now.

A lot of people get more comfortable with themselves and their abilities as they get older. You're 41 now. Did age play any part in you now feeling confident enough to write about this subject matter?

I reached the point of feeling able to approach writing about the world we live in at this stage because I'd finally found the language with which to do that. That comes about from many, many years of writing and study. I work very hard at my writing and I study it every day to try and get better at what I do. It's really a matter of the work that I've put into it that has finally got me to this place. I really didn't feel I had the craft or the ability to use language well in this way when dealing with such subject matter until now.

You've said you didn't want to be preachy on this album and that's not an easy thing to do. Were there writers or artists that inspired you with with the way they write about social and political themes without coming on too strong?

There were some artists I paid close attention to. One of them was the Pogues. Shane McGowan is a great writer, a great lyricist and also the Pogues perform a lot of very traditional, very ancient folk music. A lot of folk music is very political and wonderfully balanced, wonderfully poised in the way it delivers the words that it's saying, so that would be one person I would cite. Neil Young, throughout his career, has dealt with political issues and often done it very, very well within song, Ohio' being a prime example or 'Southern Man.' I can name many more. Then I looked to the poetry of Harold Pinter. I really admire his work as a writer and an essay writer, as well as a playwright, but particularly his poetry. I was very drawn to his work at this time.

There is a lot of juxtaposition of older sounds with current themes.

I wanted the music to be very insightful, very communal. I knew it had to be full of energy and uplifting because I wanted to offset the weight of the words in particular. I thought that the best way the words could be heard was to be heard in that environment musically. So yes, that was a conscious decision to make music that was offsetting the weight in the words.

You mentioned Harold Pinter. Who are some of the other authors that have shaped you as a writer?

Well, I certainly come back to certain writers again and again. We tend to explore and look at a lot of different writers and we always find ourselves reaching for something a number of times. People that always stayed with me that I've needed to reach for again and again would be T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, Harold Pinter, James Joyce, Ted Hughes, and more contemporary writers as well. I've been very interested in the work of a playwright called Jez Butterworth. He's an English playwright who I really think has something quite special, and a journalist called Anthony Lloyd, whose books I've been reading lately.

Are there any songs in particular from 'Let England Shake' you're excited to see how they come alive and change in front of an audience?

We rehearsed for two weeks and then played one show here in Dorset and I was very uplifted by the way all of the songs on 'Let England Shake' came to life. I couldn't just pull one song out in particular. I was surprised in a wonderful way by how well they inhabited the room and how well they communicated with the people in that room. None of those people had heard those songs before and yet they were very engaged with them and they felt very strong. They filled the room and they looked after themselves. It seemed very important to be there singing and playing those songs for people at this particular time. It seemed to be quite meaningful in a way that I haven't felt so strongly before.

Does playing it for an English audience feel more meaningful?

I don't know. I would say that although I'm an English woman and I refer to England in the lyrics, the emotional qualities that I'm dealing with are something that are much more universal than that. We all feel these feelings towards the country that we live in no matter what country that is. We all feel great love, great disappointment, that push and pull that you wrestle with of the country that you live in. I'm hoping that it's a record that can mean much for many people, not just specifically to England.

Are there older songs of yours that you have a different appreciation for now?

As songs get older, they do seem to take on their own life and seem quite different from me and those are always a joy to play. A song like 'Angelene' for instance has its own life way beyond me. Or a song like 'The Desperate Kingdom of Love,' they're always a joy to play because they're strong enough that they hold their own and they're the kind of songs that I feel will still be going long after I'm dead and gone.

http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/enterta ... 1cgxi.html

Poetry taken from the battlefield Bernard Zuel
March 31, 2011 - 11:00PM
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Harvey's folk-influenced eighth album highlights "the way history repeats itself".

PJ Harvey's career takes a politically and personally revealing bent with the war-themed Let England Shake.

IT'S not unusual to hear lines such as "death was everywhere/ in the air/and in the sounds/coming off the mound" from Polly Jean Harvey. The English singer and songwriter has never been afraid of death or violence or sex, and has at times deeply immersed herself in them through myriad stylistic changes — musical and visual — since her self-titled debut in 1992.

Drowned children and Victorian women under ether have shared space with unflinching descriptions of quite severe depression while vicious retorts and fevered sensuality have lined up alongside disarmingly straightforward character stories and snatched moments of love.

However, while it hasn't always been clear — or important to know — what was personal and what was imagined in her songs, you were generally safe in assuming some distance between day-to-day political and social activism and this slight singer whose voice has never lost its West Country burr.

Advertisement: Story continues below But this year, Harvey's album Let England Shake has simultaneously positioned her as a chronicler of history and a contemporary commentator, all within songs closely aligned with English folk music.

The lines quoted above are from the song All and Everyone, describing the Battle of Bolton's Ridge in the Dardanelles during World War I but, as with many of the descriptions across this album, a song that could just as easily be about the current battles in Afghanistan, where it is equally true that "death was in the ancient fortress/Shelled by a million bullets/from gunners, waiting in the copses . . . death was all and everyone”. With its imagery of war, the mentally and physically abused survivors of those wars and the questions it asks about pride and communal sins, nationalism and personal responsibility, Let England Shake is, in a very real sense, the most political and potentially most personal album of Harvey's career.

"That was intentional, to highlight the way history repeats itself," Harvey says of the apparent links between distant battles.

"The actual way war is described hasn't changed over the years. The actual human quality those involved feel, whether it's civilians or soldiers on either side, is the same.

"It was those qualities I was interested in talking about. And like you said, that applies today as much as it applied hundreds of years ago.”

Calling that perspective “a very simple, human point of view”, Harvey insists at first that she didn't want to sing about politics, that she “didn't feel qualified to”.

Nonetheless, “I know that I feel much about these things as a human being that's affected by the politics at some level and then at the ground level is the actual war itself and that's what I felt qualified to talk about on a very human level".

She couldn't stay out of politics, though, when she was singing about a current conflict or a historical conflict with modern resonance. Singing about them and talking about them is in itself taking a political stance.

"I would agree with you entirely. I think you could call it a political album. But the language I wanted to use is not the language of politics," she says. "I want to speak in the language of human beings who are affected by these things and that language is actually very simple."

Alongside the military and political aspects, this is very clearly an English album, from its source material to its emotions and the specific elements of nature.

It is, however, also an album rooted in ambivalence about country, compromised societies and dangerous nationalism, feelings that would be recognised in Australia or France, the US or South Africa. "I was trying to maintain an ambivalence in a lot of this material because I think it's a far more successful way of stimulating the listener to tap into what they feel," Harvey says.

"When I look at other people's work I am far more stimulated by what is left unsaid into which I read my own interpretation.

"Yes, I've used purposefully ambiguous language because I didn't want to fill up that silence. I wanted to let people make their own country and their own feelings. As you described it, a lot of the feelings I'm describing are ones that are universal and some of the works I am most moved by are [like that].

"The most obvious example is a painting like Guernica, by Picasso, about the Spanish Civil War. It resonates so deeply with me today, it makes perfect sense but it is so specific."

Although she was half-joking when she called herself this, it may be that Harvey is earning the right to be the "official song correspondent” alongside the war correspondents and artists.

"I do feel I got somewhere close to what I was trying to do. I feel also I've only just begun. This way of writing has affected my whole path as a writer and as a musician in ways I could never have imagined before embarking on this journey with this album. I realise possibilities I didn't think were there for me before. So I do feel like it's incredibly exciting and I feel like I've just begun."

http://arts.nationalpost.com/2011/04/04 ... test-song/
PJ Harvey heralds the return of the protest song

Apr 4, 2011 5:05 PM ET
By Mike Doherty


Illustration by Kagan McLeod

“Don’t you remember when you were young / How you wanted to set the world on fire?” sings Tim McIlrath on Endgame, the new album by punk band Rise Against. It sounds like a rallying cry for a generation of rockers who have been led to believe, by bling-addled hedonists and smug reality-TV judges, that popular music can’t be revolutionary.

But revolutionary-minded music can certainly be popular: Endgame hit No. 1 last month in Canada, and No. 2 in the U.S.; Lupe Fiasco’s Lasers (No. 1 in the U.S. last month), finds the rapper railing against Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Barack Obama; Green Day’s new live album, Awesome as F**k, opens with a three-song tirade against apathy and fundamentalist religion; and this year’s most critically acclaimed and widely discussed album thus far is P.J. Harvey’s war-song opus, Let England Shake.

Are we witnessing a new golden era of protest music, to accompany the global rise of protest movements? In North Africa, protest hip hop has been something of a soundtrack to revolution. But in the West, it’s unclear how much newly penned songs — even popular ones — can serve as catalyst for change. According to Dorian Lynskey, author of 33 Revolutions per Minute: A History of Protest Songs, “We’ve lost faith in the idea that rock stars might be revolutionaries.” Nonetheless, he says, there’s a “wide hunger” for politically engaged music, “as long as it’s clever.”

Lynskey’s compendious book traces the history of the protest song from Billie Holiday’s rendition of Strange Fruit in 1939 to Green Day’s 2008 American Idiot, taking into account folk, Afrobeat, reggae, punk rock, hip hop and even disco. What emerges is a repeating pattern of fervour, rallying and disillusionment. The songs never effect the immediate, widespread change in attitudes their singers hope for, but they do exert a lasting cultural influence. Some songs, such as Woody Guthrie’s This Land Is Your Land and John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Give Peace a Chance, transcend their original raisons d’être.

It’s songs such as these that are accompanying protest movements in Wisconsin and London. Meanwhile, Rise Against and their contemporaries don’t have the kind of countercultural traction attained by their predecessors. Indeed, says Lynskey, “Those moments when The Clash or Public Enemy could seem like they were dangerous or a magnet for dissent — when did that last happen? Rage Against the Machine, maybe, would be the last [group] where you felt, ‘This is actually quite a big deal.’ ”

The Internet doesn’t help: it encourages immediate backlash, via blogs, videos and forum comments. “Sometimes protest songs, to thrive, needed a little bit of time before being smothered by cynicism,” Lynskey says. Moreover, now that everyone has a platform for their views, it’s harder to imagine that musicians could give voice to the disenfranchised and, in doing so, unite people philosophically.

One solution is to adopt a less straightforward approach, as P.J. Harvey does on Let England Shake. Over the phone from her home in Dorset, England, the sweetly spoken singer offers that “protest song” is “rather a lazy term,” and that the material on her new album is “more complex. … I didn’t want to use language that would be construed as being self-important or dogmatic or preaching, or telling anybody how to think and feel.”

She does, however, admit that she “could be seen as protesting … in that I’m trying to bring to light things that I don’t feel have enough coverage.” Her lyrics owe a debt to the political poetry of Harold Pinter, the journalism of Anthony Shadid, and the diaries of soldiers in Gallipoli; she sings her nightmarish vignettes in a high, girlish register and gives them lilting rhythms. Harvey’s approach may seem perverse, but she notes, “The words are dealing with difficult, heavy subject matter as it is; I needed to somehow find music that would transport those words and lift them and carry them off to the listener in a … beautiful way.”

London’s Imperial War Museum has expressed interest in working with Harvey as a “war songs correspondent” in areas of conflict; it’s the job she’d imagine she was doing when working on the album. But now she’s unsure she’d take it: “I don’t know how much freedom one has in commissioned circumstances.”

Such skepticism of institutions and ideologies makes her music well-nigh impervious to knee-jerk Internet snark. Indeed, the same could be said of Holiday’s Strange Fruit, with its obliquely poetic take on lynching. Says Lynskey, “People sometimes assume that the protest song is there to deliver answers, whereas it’s usually not: a lot of the best ones are full of questions, ambiguity, shadows and puzzles.”

As for Harvey, she’s unwilling to “dissect” her lyrics, preferring to leave them open to each person’s interpretation. Her optimism is directed at the individual rather than the crowd: “I think this is a time of great change and movement, and of people saying what they feel and acting on those feelings. I can only hope that that’s going to continue.”

Halesowen News... are you from around those parts?

don't think P_J_C is (i can't bring my self to spell that out in full ) but it's my neck-a-the-woods

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Snetta

haha... When I first decided to register it was between "Polly_Jean_Cave" or "Nick's Black Crow Queen"

No zemonsta, I'm actually not from the Uk at all. I'm Australian

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http://www.themuse.ca/articles/45538


PJ Harvey
Let England Shake
By Sarah Blackmore

PJ Harvey
Let England Shake
Island
Alt-Rock

It probably wouldn’t do me well to begin a review of PJ Harvey’s new album, Let England Shake, stating the fact that I haven’t listened to her music heavily in the past. However, I think that’s exactly where the charm in PJ Harvey lies.

This album doesn’t take any time to get into; it simply throws all the cards on the table and doesn’t necessitate that you know anything about Harvey’s past to really love it. In this way, Let England Shake provides a rather accessible yet intelligent album that anyone could appreciate on their first (or even tenth) listen.

The fourth track on the album, “The Words That Maketh Murder,” is the epitome of this album’s witty, political commentary. Harvey doesn’t hold back when it comes to disturbing, gritty lyrics as the album tells the frightening tale of England at war.

Lyrics from this song, such as “I’ve seen soldiers fall like lumps of meat,” ensure that a vivid and gruesome picture is painted in the listener’s head. Harvey illuminates her country’s past, telling the story of how England truly was shaken up at the onset of WWI, having to readjust its vision of itself on the world stage.

Beyond the masterful lyrics, Harvey’s new vocal style for the album ventures into high and flighty ranges, though she still carries the beautiful tone that has characterized her voice for the past 20 years.

Songs like “On Battleship Hill” feature her chilling falsetto against a low and creeping melody, until she is joined by and juxtaposed against deep, male vocals. The song drives home the haunting theme of the album, and reiterates how “cruel nature has won again.”

For an album so accessible and diverse, Let England Shake tells a heart-wrenching story of a country and its people at war. I’ve listened to the album a dozen times already, and can’t imagine ever tiring of it.

A

^ that's really nice. I'm glad Battleship is getting recognition, it's absolutely flawless.

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I'll rub it, until it...