new article with comments from collaborators
https://www.lefigaro.fr/musique/pj-harv ... e-20240528Quote:
His close guard, managers and other ruthless guards, watch over his tranquillity, for example opposing any attempt to write a biography
As strange as she is singular, as if inhabited by mysterious forces from time immemorial, the very poetic English singer divides her life between music and the countryside, her secret garden.
A pale Ophelia with brown seaweed hair floating on the water, invoking in her songs, as if emerging from a mouth of shadow, dark spells, the incantations of a Celtic witch, the prayers of a woman of the woods, the supplications of the damned, such appeared, in 1995, Polly Jean Harvey with her imperishable To Bring You My Love. This kind of masterpiece taking unknown paths, with its strange harmonies and its lyrics as if escaped from gothic tales on morphine, upsets the jaded world of rock, and more broadly the curious of all kinds reserving their listenings to sound explorations leaving the marked highways of the commonplace. The daughter of quarry operators in Dorset, a hilly region in the south-west of England, Polly Jean Harvey grew up on a farm, running through the land and woods in the manner of the Brontë sisters, jumping hedges to pet sheep, playing at war with her older brother and boys her age, a child of a wild England with a coastline bordered by windswept cliffs.
His parents were big fans of popular music with eclectic tastes: Bob Dylan often played on the turntable, as did Captain Beefheart, Neil Young and the Rolling Stones. It was Ian Stewart, the latter's pianist and a friend of the family, who gave the young girl some piano lessons. She took up the guitar at the age of 17, hesitating between a destiny as an artist or an actress. It will be music. A group that is not his own, difficult years, then his own, years of doubts and the beginning of success from which emerge the first strata of his very particular universe and in which love and nature play an important, if not preponderant, role. A fragile, incandescent and destructive love; an attractive, bewitching and disturbing nature, as if PJ Harvey were the medium in a trance of mysterious and secret manifestations that no one else can see, except her.
Renewing oneself and constantly experimenting
Ventriloquist of the lost voices of childhood, this country girl - and who has remained so, like Björk, her Icelandic colleague - uses her voice and the visions she expresses through it as if she possessed a dowsing rod conjuring up living water mixed with molten lava. In A Child's Question, July, she implores her, "Greet the hedge as it grows/Ask the hedge all it knows." Witnessing calving and lambing when you are a child forms character by being close to the eruption of life in the blood, and therefore the awareness of death. His texts are sprinkled with images of demons, snakes crawling between his legs... Very biblical images of great emotional power, especially at the time of the already mentioned To Bring You My Love, in which she presented herself as a kind of evil creature, made up in an outrageous way, like a transvestite...
A druidy inhabited by lyrics that Emily Dickinson might not have disowned, without compromise (it took her seven years of reflection between the previous album and the new one, her tenth, the bewitching I Inside the Old Year Dying), PJ Harvey seems to be telling us: "I put in the time it takes, I come back whenever I want." He is a model of an artist, of those who are constantly trying to renew themselves and make their art a field of experimentation. "I remember his first album, which I loved," enthuses Marc Collin, the producer and leader of the group Nouvelle Vague, "a demo made on a 4-track, with just a guitar and the voice. It's what we call post-punk post-grunge, a continuation of the punk spirit, with this will, this nerve, to record even if she barely knew how to play an instrument and not yet really sing. She expressed herself forcefully and had found the energy to release this album. It often happens in the music world that the artist changes and, unless you're a hardcore fan, you lose sight of him a bit, but that's never the case with PJ Harvey. I remember in particular another record where she began to sing much higher than in her usual tessitura. Every time she takes a new path, I fall for it, she's really great. He's an example for all artists."
PJ Harvey never wanted to be satisfied with a successful meeting with the public and then quietly reap the dividends. It would be too easy in his eyes. Retaining from her country childhood the love of nature and animals (she had also learned to milk cows as a child), her existence resembles a perpetual yo-yo between urban celebration, made up of recordings and tours, and meditation away from the world, in the beneficent silence of her refuge that one imagines close to the mythology of the cottage à la Beatrix Potter. His close guard, managers and other ruthless guards, watch over his tranquillity, for example opposing any attempt to write a biography. Probably in part because her love story with Nick Cave had traumatized her all the more because it had been amplified by the media echo triggered at the time of their breakup.
The singer explained it on his website The Red Hand Files: The truth on the subject is that I didn't let PJ Harvey down, it was PJ Harvey who let me down. Here I am, sitting on the floor of my apartment in Notting Hill, the sun coming through the window (maybe), feeling good, with a talented, beautiful, young singer as my girlfriend, when the phone rings. I pick up the phone, and it's Polly: "It's over," she tells me right away. I was so surprised that I almost dropped my syringe," continues with humor (very dark) the man who knew deep down that "drugs were the problem between (them), but other things as well, such as Polly's difficulty understanding the concept of monogamy. Nick Cave, and this will be the ideal conclusion to this portrait, sees in PJ Harvey a kind of double of himself: a person "ferociously creative, too absorbed in himself to be able to inhibit the same space (as another person) in any really meaningful way." A loner forever.
Mick Harvey 6 Guitarist, singer: "I entered his world through friendship""I met Polly in 1994, when I was still with the Bad Seeds and we had organised the launch of the album Let Love In in an HMV megastore in Piccadilly Circus. We had performed a few songs, and Polly had come to greet us after the show. We started talking, and our friendship was born like that. She then asked me to participate in the recordings of some tracks on To Bring You MyLove, the album she was working on at the time. Then Nick (Cave, editor's note) asked him to co-interpret Henry Lee. The beginning of their love story which, as you know, ended badly... I continued to see Polly for years, our friendship became very strong. We talked a lot about music, also talked about books and especially movies. Things like that. I admit that I have always preferred his voice and his music to his lyrics - I often find them hermetic and not really in a more accessible vein of inspiration, which corresponds more to my style of composition. His words have something too strange for my taste. I continued to tour with her and collaborate on the albums Is This Desire? and Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea. Between two shows, whether in England or abroad, we really liked to go to exhibitions. Gone are the days when rockers spent their free time screwing up their hotel rooms or throwing TV sets out of the window. It was much wiser! (Laughs) She has a very curious pace of life, excessively intense during the writing of an album, its production and the tour that follows, then she disappears to take care of her vegetables on her farm. We don't hear about it for a while."
Michka Assayas - Writer and journalist: "Something of a female Bowie""There is a savagery in PJ Harvey that is not at all the result of artificial fabrication, but that comes from something rural, telluric. Nothing about her is linked to a particular fashion. Her lyrics contain a lot of rawness, underlying sexuality, which was very unexpected for a singer in the 1990s. We can speak of dazzling brilliance both in his music and in his words. During his first concert in France - I think it was in Paris, at La Cigale - I felt a huge shock because I thought that rock had lost some of its splendour. His arrival had called everything into question. I was intrigued by the fact that she could not be classified into a particular musical genre: she went it alone and carried everything in her path, with a certain studied savagery. I followed every step of his transformations, each album fascinated me. I was lucky enough to be able to talk to him. She told me, among other things, that she had stolen a practice from an actress who couldn't really put herself in the shoes of a character and who ended up putting a blanket over her head to rehearse her role. He is someone who knew how to use theatre very early on in the presentation of his music, and not only for concerts and shows, but also in the way he staged himself in the studio. She is a bit of a female Bowie - he too had made a name for himself with impressive stagings. PJ Harvey also told me that at the time of confinement, she had seriously thought about giving up music. Her new album was actually quite accidental, because she was planning to write a tale illustrated by her own drawings, a story set in a very old, somewhat imaginary England, inspired by the Dorset dialect. And finally, in creating this story, the music came back gradually, without her really expecting it."
Jean-Marc Butty - Drummer: "It's not her who sings, it's her soul""We met in 1991, when I was living in Bristol with his friend and musical accomplice John Parish. We hung on well. Polly was not yet known. She was shy and reserved, but you could already feel her extraordinary creative potential. She contacted me a few years later to participate in the recording of To Bring You My Love, her third album. I worked with her again in 2009, on the tour of A Woman a Man Walked By, then on the recordings of Let England Shake and The Hope Six Demolition Project. What has always struck me is that she knows what she wants. I remember when we were recording our first song together, she turned to me and said, "The sound of the snare drum isn't good and the cymbal isn't in the right place there." I was amazed. She has an overall vision of her work which means that the set and stage clothes are in complete adequacy with her musical universe. As a child, she put on shows on her own that she performed in front of her parents. She managed everything from the clothes to the décor. This is still the case with his concerts. On a more personal note, she has kept the same habit since I have known her: never go to bed late. She observes a great discipline in her life, perhaps because she has experienced long and painful periods of anorexia that she has learned to manage. He's someone who is curious about others. She has created two cosy cocoons, in London and Dorset, where she has a very artistic country house, both pleasant and warm. Paintings, books, furniture, carefully gleaned objects create a special atmosphere, as if she were composing her interiors in the same way as she composes her pieces. Polly came to music with something unique, it's not her singing, it's her soul."
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