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Thanks Kujjj. That theguardian article is a great read. I've pasted it below for posterity:
Vanessa Thorpe
Saturday 2 April 2016 19.10 EDT
If there were any rules about what makes a genuine rock god, then Polly Jean Harvey has torpedoed most of them by now, and probably has the rest in her sights. Petite, ebony-browed, unswervingly avant-garde, she is a powerhouse. Yet PJ, as she has been known to her fans for 25 years, remains a decidedly unlikely rock proposition: a one-woman band from Dorset.
True, she has played and written for three decades now with John Parish, the musician she hooked up with in her first band, Automatic Dlamini. And true, for the past eight years or so she has worked closely with the photographer and filmmaker Seamus Murphy. But the fact remains that PJ Harvey, mistress of a bewildering array of instruments – from guitar and saxophone to violin, autoharp, harmonica and drums – is artistically accountable only to herself. She can take pretty much all the credit – or the blame.
“She is one of those very few musicians who strikes me as a pure artist,” said Mike Smith, vice-president of A&R at Virgin EMI. “She is someone who gets up in the morning and wants to do something groundbreaking. They are the musicians you mark your life by.”
Now, five years since her alarming and fantastically well-received album Let England Shake, which scored an unprecedented second victory for Harvey at the Mercury Awards, her new album is almost upon us. Called The Hope Six Demolition Project, it promises to be a weighty kind of travelogue, chronicling journeys she took with Murphy to Afghanistan, Kosovo and Washington DC and which she has already responded to in a book of poetry. A typical line in Harvey’s poem The Abandoned Village reads, “On a nail in the kitchen a threadbare apron.”
It is evidence of her sympathetic eye and spare lyrical skill, yet perhaps not tightly packed enough to survive as poetry. When The Hollow of the Hand collection was published last year, the Observer’s Kate Kellaway pointed out that it was not clear why these three geographic destinations had been picked. Harvey simply said she wanted “to smell the air, feel the soil and meet the people”. It could also be that, following the huge response to the anti-war sentiment running through Let England Shake, the musician felt she had to go out into the wider world.
That impulse has already got her into trouble. Critics of her poems hungered for more detail and searched for an over-arching argument, but this year it is the specifics of a new song that have caused problems. Residents of Washington DC’s deprived Ward 7 area object to lyrics they say portray them as drug-addled “zombies”. Last month a worker at DC’s non-profit organisation the Community of Hope asked Harvey in an open letter: “Have you not trashed the place that, for better or worse, is home to people who are working to make it better, who take pride in their accomplishments?” The vision of the song in question, also called Community of Hope, merely represents, some allege, a glimpse snatched through the window of a passing car.
The new album was “laid down” in odd circumstances. A year ago, Harvey joined up with Artangel to set up an art installation , Recording in Progress, inside London’s Somerset House so that visitors could watch her making the album alongside Parish and the producer known as Flood.
The musicians were visible through one-way glass and worked inside a cube as the curious looked on. Pinned to the recording studio wall were line-drawings of a herd of goats and a pack of dogs; sketches made in Afghanistan by Harvey, a former art student.
“She is very decisive and clear in what she wants and, although she listens to other people, she has the driving point of view,” recalls Artangel’s Michael Morris, who had been hoping to work with Harvey for a decade.
Harvey has intrigued interviewers because of her poise and control outside the recording studio
“She was entirely involved down to a quite granular level. She is the only artist I have worked with that reminded me of Pina Bausch,” Morris adds, referring to the great German choreographer.
“She is so rigorous about exposing herself to new experiences and she has a complete view of the way a new piece will enter the world. She is unbelievably careful and thoughtful.”
There was a crisis early in the project when Harvey worried she would be too self-conscious to work properly. “Then we came up with the idea of the one-way glass,” says Morris. The album, he thinks, sounds different, almost “communal” in tone because how it was recorded.
“This one is about global issues. Her canvas has been stretched. The text is quite dark, but it will surprise people because the melodic content is quite uplifting.”
Harvey, 46, grew up the daughter of quarryman Ray and a stonemason mother, Eva, in a remote farmhouse near Bridport, but she became accustomed to the musician’s lifestyle from an early age. Her parents were friends with early Rolling Stone Ian Stewart, and bohemian guests would often stay. Her nursery tunes were sung by Neil Young, Dylan and Captain Beefheart.
After performing in bars and village halls as a teenager, she began playing as PJ Harvey in a new trio in April 1991, at a “disastrous” debut gig in a skittle alley in Charmouth village hall. Harvey later said: “We started playing and I suppose there were about 50 people there, and during the first song we cleared the hall. There were only about two people left. And a woman came up to us, and shouted, ‘Don’t you realise nobody likes you! We’ll pay you, you can stop playing, we’ll still pay you!’”
But success was a step away. The trio’s sensitive and dramatic album Dry was met with not just critical acclaim but also intrusive questions about her own sex life. A kind of nervous breakdown followed and Harvey’s controlling attitude to her public image dates from this period.
A second album, Rid of Me, came before she launched a solo career, teaming up again with Parish and adopting a captivating series of stage personas, sometimes appearing as a pantomime version of a gothic rock chick, sometimes in Victorian garb, as a sort of Jane Eyre governess crossed with the mad woman in the attic (a Brontë reference possibly denoting the legacy of Kate Bush).
For Mike Smith, Harvey’s ability to alter and surprise her audience puts her up there creatively with the late Bowie, Damon Albarn and her former lover Nick Cave.
“At certain periods she has been both the most glamorous and the most righteous act out there,” he said. “She is blessed with skills that give her a strong grounding; one of the most powerful and evocative voices and the know-how to write songs brilliantly.”
Morris found a great sense of humour and warmth in Harvey, an idea supported by her sometimes witty lyrics. Yet some music writers, such as Emily MacKay, have difficulty with the increasingly earnest PJ.
“In earlier days, there was a lot of humour and sex and swagger in her music, and that seems very far away now,” she says, “although there is more rawness to this album than Let England Shake. The idea of The Hope Six Demolition project is very worthy, but when there’s so little context, I’m not sure how much worth there really is.”
Harvey has regularly intrigued interviewers because of her poise and control outside the recording studio. It is something she has tried to explain: “I’ve been writing songs for many years and you become more accustomed to taking care of that, knowing how much to expose yourself, knowing how to pace yourself. Just simple things like learning that when I come to approach my work every day, there’s a certain opening that has to take place and then when I finish my work for the day, I give myself time to close that down again.”
The large lurking secret could be, that, like many great musicians, PJ Harvey is at her most articulate when she performs. Being personally elusive is not a gimmick; it is an artistic survival instinct.
THE HARVEY FILE
Born 9 October 1969, in Bridport, Dorset. Her father Ray was a quarryman; her mother Eva a stonemason.
Best of times Winning her two Mercury prizes; first in 2001 for her fifth studio album Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea. (Joy was tempered by the fact it was awarded to her on 11 September and she was trapped in a locked-down Washington DC.) And then again in 2011 for Let England Shake.
Worst of times A period of shaky health after new media interest in her private life, provoked by her treatment of female sexuality in the hit 1992 album Dry.
They say “She comes from an art school ethos. Had she not secured a record deal, she would have gone on to do fine art at [Central] St Martins. She did get a record deal, but in a way she’s been at art school ever since.” Paul McGuinness, Harvey’s manager since 1993.
She says “As a creative artist it’s crucial to be open - to feel. You can’t do it with a closed heart. You almost have to hand over your soul to that action.”
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As far as I know she hasn't taken up soprano sax yet (starting at 1:13)
