ALTERNATIVE PRESS- JUNE 1995

PJ HARVEY- Girl On A Swing by Dave Thompson

"It's not good enough, it's not good enough, it should be better," exclaims Polly The Perfectionist. She knows what she wants, but does she know how she'll get it? And what will come of her career is she doesn't?
The day she stormed out of an interview, bored beyond endurance by one dumb question too many. The night she abandoned a major photo session, complaining that the photographer didn't have a clue. The time she hijacked a jumbo jet full of journalists, flew them to Algeria, and made them all squat and listen to the demos for her next three albums. She turned down Lollapalooza because she'd didn't like the other bands on the bill, she writes rude words on her forehead, and she lives in a house built on chickens' legs...Polly, put the kettle on- it'll make a lovely hat.
Smaller and shorter than her reputation suggests, she steps out of a sepia southwestern English morning like an old photo of royalty coming to life. All but lost inside thick white fake fur, she's wearing the sort of hat Bob Dylan might have sung about. A leopard-print bag is clutched to her side. She could be a Romanav daughter or a Slavic princess, those elegant ladies like proud extinct birds, haughty and feathered, spending time with the rabble. You expect her to extend one hand to be kissed. Instead, she walks in, smiles and settles, and the thought occurs unbidden. Why do people tell such monstrous lies?
Polly "PJ" Harvey's publicity shots reveal an eye for casual theatrics which would put rock's glossier shamen to deep-seated shame. Her face ghostly white, while shadow bleeds black, she could be a panda with vampiric smears, or an early Jaz Coleman of he's just learn to smile.

How long before Prince adopts this look as well, to go with the last one he borrowed from Polly?

She laughs. "I don't think Prince has even heard of me."

I doubt that.

Video footage, as well as her live presence, pull no punches in their presentation. In public, she summons up depths of dark determination: The darkness of a childhood spent imbibing Deep South blues and motorpsycho Dylan; the determination of a woman who decided very early on that her gender was never gonna get in her way. Any way.

We'll get to that later (of course), because that's how she did it. Remember her first hit, "Sheela-Na-Gig" and its opening lyric, still a masterpiece of blurred stereotyping? "Look at these, my work strong arms." She could've been the voice if the Workers' Collective, gaily reciting the latest production figures: "Look at these, my tractor-building fists."

But then the knife twisted with the savage denouement of the spurned supersexual. Snarling, "I'm gonna take my hips to a man who cares," she then slipped into childness as she plucked "dirty pillows" for breasts from Stephen King's 'Carrie,' a reference which, in terms of Polly's then-burgeoning reputation, was akin to Trent Reznor singing songs about his pee-pee. You wanna talk gender-bending?

And what exactly were sheela-na-gigs in the first place?

Pop culture rushes in where knowledge fears to tread. Rolling Stone called them ancient Celtic figures with exposed vulvae. But the name itself translates as "the old hag of the breasts," and they're actually almost a thousand years younger, eleventh-century gargoyles built into Irish cathedrals to warn of the dangers of physical lust.

Ten of them went on public display in Dublin last fall, for the first time since a revision of Catholic morals saw them stripped from the churches in the late Middle Ages. So at least you can see Sheela someplace, because you're not going to hear her on Polly's next tour.

"I actually think she's a bit of an old tart, now. I'm not going to play her again, I've had enough of her. I think of songs like they're all different people, because that's how they feel, and some of them I really like. 'Dress,' I find very unaffected and simple, and I like that. But I'm not going to play 'Sheela.' I've had enough of people shouting it out."

She's had enough of a lot of things, actually, beginning with the two-man band which powered PJ Harvey in the first place. The first signs of a split appeared during the ballbreaking tour which followed PJ's second album, "Rid Of Me," in 1993. Rob Ellis and Steve Vaughan had accompanied Polly from her west country chrysalis. "But I knew all along that I'd want to work with different musicians eventually, which is why I used my own name for the group."

The reasons were varied- sick of the format, tired of writing to the trio's limitations. "I knew I wanted to write different things, I knew I was tired of working with these people, and I knew that friendship-wise, we'd reached a point where we were getting tired of each other, and that wasn't very conducive to working together, or touring together. It was just the right time to change."

Ellis was the first to go; Steve Vaughan still figured in her bass-playing plans until relatively recently. But as Polly's own disciplines changed, so did her vision of how they would be presented. Her latest album, "To Bring You My Love," was written almost entirely on piano and keyboards. "I didn't write on the guitar much at all, and won't be playing it on the next tour either. You can't sing properly with a guitar around your neck." As the songs took shape, so did her future.

For her, losing the band was a huge relief. "I was completely reed up by not having to limit my writing to what I thought they'd be able to perform." Because that was another longstanding problem. "I always write knowing that I want to play these songs live, so they have to work with whoever I'm playing with." The original PJ trio simply stopped cutting the mustard, it seems.

Live, she'll now be accompanied by a five-piece band: two guitarists- longtime friend John Parish, and Guitar Player editor Joe Gore; keyboardist Eric Drew Feldman from Frank Black, Pere Ubu and Captain Beefheart's bands; keyboard/bass player Nick Bagnall who's played with Fatima Mansions; "and a French drummer called Jean Marc [Butty], who's just a friend really."

Parish also appears on "To Bring You My Love," alongside Bas Seed Mick Harvey, and another of Polly's "Surprise Choice of Producers," Flood. originally, she intended to return to "Rid Of Me" mastermind Steve Albini. "I do want to work with him again, and at the start of this one, when I was looking for someone to work with, I did think of Steve."

"But I knew I was only considering it because he's a close friend, and I know I'm comfortable working with him, rather than was his sound right for this album? And in the end I had to admit that it wasn't. The songs needed a different side, they needed to breathe more."

Flood arrived with the oxygen tent, and his resume was as inappropriate as Albini's ever was: U2, Tom Jones, Depeche Mode- queer bedfellows for anyone. But Polly brushes such opposition aside.

"I liked what I'd heard of him with Nick Cave, the first few albums, because they had so much of the atmosphere which I'm trying to get. Then the first time we met, I liked him instinctively felt; he's a wonderful person, and I respected that even more. And he's absolutely dedicated to what he does."

The shy girl from Dorset and the big-league producer gelled immediately. "Flood adapts to people very well, which is what makes him a great producer. I knew this was going to be the hardest album to make because, for one, every time I do something, my goals are so much higher than they were before until eventually, it seems impossible. I just keep saying, 'It's not good enough, it's not good enough, it should be better.'"

"It was also going to be difficult because I knew I was spending a long time on it, knew it was mostly going to be myself playing the instruments. So immediately, it's a lot of work. But knowing how much more of a perfectionist I've become, I wasn't going to let anything go unless it was exactly how I wanted it."

"In the past I'd kind of let things slip more. But this time, I felt so strongly about these songs, I thought they were the best things I've ever written, and I didn't want to sacrifice them in any way. Whereas before, I thought-yeah, they WERE the best songs I'd written at the time, but my standards maybe weren't so high."

Flood understood that. "He knew instinctively, in the same way that I did, what the songs needed or didn't need, so we were always trying to underplay effects, underuse things, in the same way that I tried to under-sing, under-play. The songs didn't need more than that."

Still, she found it a painful album to make. "But he understood that as well. Why one day I'd be unable to do anything but dry, and another I'd be so manic that we'd have to work till five in the morning. He was just very aware of every different change, and he would adapt to it immediately."

Very slowly, very painstakingly, "To Bring You My Love" took shape. "We spent six weeks recording, and another month mixing, which is the longest I've ever spent on a record." And the end result is an album "which I'm really, really pleased with, the most pleased I've been with a finished album. I just feel there's nothing else I could have added, nothing I could have made better if I'd had longer. I'm really, really at peace with it, I suppose."

"But at the same time, I now feel uneasy about what I'm going to do next."

This unease has already been the focus of the interviews Polly has done with the UK. press. Two weeks before we spoke, she was interviewed by the NME, for a three-page feature in which she voiced many of the same concerns (in many of the same words), as I was now hearing: her indecision about allowing her record company, Island, to put her through another year of touring and talking; the hope that in the future, she might be allowed to slip into a more relaxed kind of schedule; and the need to regain a life beyond rock 'n' roll.

Since that interview, though, she's had more time to think, more time to wonder, and more time to take stock of precisely what's happening to her. "This time, the first block is four months again. Then we get two weeks off, bloody luxury, then we do another four months, so it takes almost all this year. Then we finish up in Australia next January. A nice finish to the tour, and a nice finish to Polly Harvey as well, I expect."

One doesn't quite know how to respond to that statement. You mean it's going to kill you? Or are you going to kill it?

For a moment, she looks genuinely uncertain. Then, collecting her thoughts, she exchanges confusion for simple resignation.

"It's just that it," she says, "it" including everything from recording to touring to sitting in a pub, pouring her heart out to someone she's never met before, "is everything that I would actually not be, apart from the music making."

"I'm really an extremely quiet person who doesn't go out much, doesn't talk to people. So that's immediately at odds with everything I have to do. I'm surrounded by people, I have to talk a lot. I like being in one place, here at my home, and I'm very seldom here because I keep traveling around. I miss animals, I love animals, and I can't have any because I'm never here."

So what do you want to do?

"I really don't know. I'd just like to do something that makes me happy and content. AT the moment, I don't see anything. I don't enjoy anything, I can never just relax and enjoy the moment, which is what I want to do. So I'll just keep looking for something that's gonna let me do that."

"I've already absolutely made the decision that I won't do it this way again." If she'd thumped the table, she couldn't have made her point any stronger. "This is the last time."

She talks wistfully of her "hero" Morrissey. "I think that's why I'm drawn to him, because I can see that he feels the same way as I do."

But, while Morrissey keeps on keeping on, writing and recording and compiling new compilations, Polly can actually see a day when all the rock 'n' roll business is firmly behind her. And it's not far away.

"I expect I'll keep writing songs, but maybe I won't. At the moment I haven't even got any desire to do that. If I can, I will, but I'm not going to do the expected shebang that goes with it." Instead, she'll fill her days "doing the things that feel more natural to me, gardening, looking after animals, cooking, pickling, making jam, going for walks, reading books, and actually being able to see what's in front of me for a change."

And will she be happy?

"I don't know. Maybe it's because I can't do it that I want to do it so much. I always want what I haven't got. And I'm really aware that the way I feel is no different to the way anyone else feels. You're in some kind of office job, you're cleaning toilets from nine to five, and you're looking for a change. Sometimes I think I'm so lucky, look at what I've got and what I can do. Yet I'm still miserable."

"The last two weeks, I've been doing mostly press, and after a while it feels like it's so 'me me me, myself I' that I get bored with it! What must it be like for everyone else?"

"I don't want to sit here and talk about myself. It's just not what I'm about. Plus, the kind of questions I'm asked are so disheartening, I've done two weeks, and out of that, only one person's actually talked about the music, the content of the music. Most of it seems to be childhood, first memories. A journalist yesterday asked me about the first time I had sex. What's THAT got to do with anything?"

I have to admit, I dunno. But still, one wonders how much of this is post-album burn-out? She's already admitted that making the record was hard, and with her next year mapped out with military precision, of course she's pissed off. But she'll see '95 through, take '96 off, and before you know where you are, she'll be back on the treadmill and loving every second.

Or maybe not. Six years ago, attending art college, Polly reached a similar, despair-gripping cusp, the same point she is enduring today. "I feel so depressed, I don't want to go on. The fact that people like what I do has never meant anything to me, it's whether *I* think it's good enough. At art college, I really was quite good at what I was doing, but my tutors were having a real job keeping me there, and it's always to do with feeling that whatever I'm doing is not good enough, or not worthy enough."

* There is a little sidebar to this article called PJ on PJ*

"Dry" 1992:

"I'd definitely love to do "Unplugged", because there's songs [from Dry] that'll just slip into that setting, and it would be so enjoyable to play them at a quiet volume. A lot of my earlier songs would work in that way. I'm tired of loud. If I don continue playing, I would probably carry on going quieter still. Polly Harvey mellows out at 25!"

"Rid Of Me" 1993:

"I still feel that was completely the right album to make at that time. I think it documented that time perfectly, the situation I was in, the state of mind I was in, exactly where we made the record, it's all in there, and the way we recorded it, which was virtually live, it sounds exactly as it should."

"4-Track Demos" 1993:

"Once a song arrived in the studio, it takes on a whole different character. "4-Track Demos" is the most important of my first albums, to me, because it's the closest to how I felt at the time I wrote the songs."

"To Bring You My Love" 1995"

"It was a completely different recording technique for me. It was doing things layer by layer. What we did was, we built a lot of the album up from the demos, which captures more of the essence of a song, as it was when it was done on my own. It still had the original atmosphere that I'd intended, and I've learned that now, but only through making mistakes in the past. We also did things where I got rid of everything else, because now I understand the equipment and I can do that, which makes me feel a lot more in control, rather than selling my soul to someone else."

She laughs, half dismissively. "It's just some problem I have in my head." Then, serious again, "but I always get to the point of giving up on something, and I'm there again."

This despair is not new, then, not even this time around. It haunted her through the new album's gestation, and leeches through it still. "To Bring You My Love" is the best album PJ Harvey has yet to put her name to. But it's amongst the darkest of the decade so far.

The title track maps out her misery, resetting Bo Diddley's "Who Do You Love" theme in a storm-striken swamp, a near-biblical, and certainly apocalyptic, recounting of all the pain she's had to go through, just "to bring you my love."

It's lazy, dry, and devilish, Robert Johnson on his way to the crossroads. And two-thirds of the way through the song, the fear and frustration suddenly lash out without warning, with a split-second echo of the Stooges' "Real Cool Time", another bitter paean to gut-wrenching frustration, all dressed up and nowhere I wanna go. And beset on all sides by that bone-rattling rage, within and without her, Polly sounds so much older than her actual 25 years.

"I feel so much older! I really do! I feel like I've aged about ten years since the last time. And I felt old then."

But maybe she's always been old. Her parents spoonfed her the blues in the cradle, she counts the Rolling Stones as family friends, and early Bob Dylan is a spiritual godfather. Recording his "Highway '61 Revisited" for "Rid Of Me" remains one of her happiest memories.

"I'm really glad to have done it, because of what I learned from doing it, but also for how it increased my admiration for him. It made me hone in so closely to his words, his structure of songwriting, which then made me look at lots of other songs of his."

But it's the blues to which she always returns, whether for a Peel session version of Willie Dixon's "Wang Dang Doodle," which Radio One archivist Ken Garner promptly dubbed "extraordinary....classic...unique," or to suck the very soul of the music into her own sonic brew. Even as a screamager, she felt closer to Howlin' Wolf than Adam Ant.

She corrects me. "Actually, I did go through my rebellious phase, 'I'm not listening to this, I should be listening to what my friends are listening to.' I did buy Duran Duran records and U2 records, and things like that. And I was also very influenced by my brother, who was into Blondie and the Boomtown Rats, and I still love that music too. Between him and my parents, I had the two sides going, a real mixture."

But while "Dry" and "Rid Of Me" allowed those two sides to commingle, "To Bring You My Love" exorcises everything but the girl and her gut, until the only sound on the disc is the old blueswoman rocking to death on her porch, a guitar in her hand and a battered hat on top. Was that the direction Polly saw the album moving in?

"I'm not the kind of writer who writes in a conscious way. I just allow it out, which is much more of a spiritual process. But I can hear why you're saying that. Because I love that music, it's just natural that it would come out. I get so much input of that kind of thing that it's sort of overflowing."

"But it seems very natural to me, because it's what I'm used to. It's the only music that I have real love for, because it has such an honesty to it, and a directness that isn't hampered by any extraneous noise that doesn't need to be there. It's so straight from the music to right inside of you."

It's her own quest for that same connection which lies behind her reluctance to talk about her lyrics. "I'd rather just leave it alone and let anyone think what they want. If I try to steer it, I'm just going to be up against an endless battle, and I'll start going insane after a while. It's the same with video. I really tread very carefully with video, and try not to do anything except present the song, and let everyone else decide." The only exception to this rule if a pair of songs for which even Polly acknowledges some explanation is needed.

The first, her single "Down By The Water," sets the harrowing scene of a woman who appears to have just drowned her daughter, complete with a coda straight out of a Richard Adams' novel, "Girl On A Swing": "little fish, big fish, swimming in the water, come back here and give me my daughter." In the book, it does. In real life, Polly's never read it. "But I will now."

The other track, reminiscent, inexplicably, of Thee Headcoats' "Pocahontas," is "I Think I'm A Mother," and that seems self-explanatory. Hey Pol, you getting broody?

"Why do you say that?" She looks genuinely startled, although I later discover she's been asked this before. "It's funny, I wasn't when I wrote those songs, because I wrote them quite a while ago. But lately...very, very much. My brother is married, and they're having a baby, and seeing their excitement and seeing how happy they are, I do get those feelings. But it's something I would never consider unless I was married, and," she adds wistfully and determinedly, "off the road."

Instead, the genesis of those songs was "just another look at the sort of feelings that go through all of us, looking for someone else, needing something, anything, but not really knowing what, just scrambling about in the dark. Which is another angle of what I'm feeling."

"I know a lot of people are going to think it's about abortion, or wanting to be a mother or something like that, but it really is none of those things. It's more just me wanting some kind of protection and care, then wanting to offset something else that's unsettling."

"Down By The Water" certainly achieves that. Even Polly was shocked when it was selected to be her first single. "I was really surprised, because of that, and also because it doesn't even change, its just one riff the whole was through. They played it on Radio One last night, and the girl that was in the studio with the DJ said, 'Ooh, that's spooky!'"

Are you still surprised to hear yourself on the radio?

"No, not anymore. It's a bit sad really. I often think of that. I remember the first time, my whole family couldn't believe it. We recorded every show I was going to be on! And now we're just sitting around, 'Oh, Polly's on the radio, oh yeah,' and then carry on doing what we're doing."

And as for the suggestion that her material is distinctly at odds with the majority of British (and American) radio fare, she replies. "I don't see that at all, it sounds perfectly normal to me now. When John Peel played "Down By The Water," I thought it really sounded like everything else he plays. I thought, 'I don't know why I think I'm anything special at all. Why do I go through all that heartache and trouble to wrench it out, when it just sounds like everything else?"

How, though, can she say that, when with the possible exception of Liz Phair, she has been pushed higher up the Thinking Man's Chick stakes than anyone since Patti Smith?

"But that's exactly what I mean." Her eyes flash. "People ask if I feel part of the Women in Rock thing? No I don't! How can anyone say that to me, when we're sitting in a pub in Dorset, by the sea?"

"I am aware that my gender allows me a certain freedom, lyrically and musically, which a male writer doesn't have, although it doesn't enter my head when I', writing a song. It's just natural to write the song in that way. If I analyzed it, I could say, 'Yes, I can do that because I am a female, I am at an advantage. I'm allowed to do it.' And I think if I heard a bloke singing similar kinds of songs, I'd think, 'What an idiot!"

"But I don't know why that is. If I thought about it enough, I could probably come up with a reason, but off the top of my head, I dunno. It's not something I ponder on, just because...I don't. I'd rather just get on and do things, than sit around and wonder, 'Why, why, why can I do that?' I'd rather just get on with it."

She sniggers. "And of course, they'll have the feminists onto me because I don't spend enough time dealing with what I *should* be dealing with. I am aware that I have an advantage, and because I do, I'm gonna use it. Whatever it is. But this whole thing about 'the strong rock chick, she's tough, she wears leather pants,' I just feel a bit despairing really, and think 'not that again,' because it's laughable.

"I feel no part of it al all, and it dismays me to know that other people think I do. You can't dictate to people how you want them to take you, but it seems to me that people are taking what I do in a way which isn't the way I would have envisioned it, simply because I'm female."

She winding down now, and strangely, being wound up has perked her up. Her last words are probably the most upbeat of the day.

"People do generally get enjoyment out of what I do, so I don't really let the labeling and everything bother me. Because when you put things into perspective, it's laughable. I know what I mean, and some other people know what I mean. And that's enough for me."

I want to believe her, but somehow, I don't think I do. Right here, right now, it doesn't seem as though anything's enough for her. For the past four years, Polly's mum has been keeping a scrapbook for her, so she'll have something to remember when she grows old and gray.

But we have to let her get there, first. She has to let herself get there.