| SONGWRITER PJ HARVEY IS REACHING OUT TO
HER FANS If Polly Jean Harvey had her way, she wouldn't be calling from Vancouver to talk about herself. She could think of better ways to use the two-day respite from touring that she spent last week in the Canadian port city. Maybe she'd go off to the aquarium or zoo. ("I'm in dire need of seeing some wildlife.") Perhaps check out the museum of anthropology or lounge on the nudist beach. Or just take a leisurely stroll in the park. But this is the rock-and-roll business. And though Harvey is uncomfortable with serial public self-examination -- "I don't talk to people about the way I'm feeling," she has said, "I wouldn't be writing music if I could" -- she views chatting herself up as a necessary evil. "I see it as a means to an end, really," says the 25-year-old Englishwoman, who will don a satin dress and perform as PJ Harvey with her brand-new five-piece band at the Trocadero on Friday night. (The show, with Bristol, England's trip-hop sensation Tricky opening, is sold out.) "Obviously, I'd rather not do it, but I don't let it bother me. Maybe in the future I can wind down doing interviews. But I'm very aware that with this album, this is the time to reach as many people as possible. Then I can disappear and go away by myself again." The album she refers to is _To Bring You My Love_ (Island), the stunning blues-fired collection of menacing, measured tales that marks Harvey's emergence as a mature solo artist and realizes the promise of _Dry_ (1991) and _Rid of Me_ (1992), each of which were recorded with a power trio that went by the name of PJ Harvey. _To Bring You My Love_'s tightly coiled songs play out parables of feminine rage, rapture, hunger and deliverance on a mythical landscape, strewn with biblical imagery. Coproduced by Harvey, multi-instrumentalist John Parish, and Flood, the British knob-twiddler who's worked with U2, Nine Inch Nails, Tom Jones and Harvey favorite Nick Cave, this work is free of the stop-start auditory assault tactics that made the Steve Albini-helmed _Rid of Me_ such a difficult listen. The album's accessibility speaks to Harvey's desire to reach a sizable audience. And a listen to title cut, aimed at her fans ("I've traveled over dried earth and floods/ Hell and high water/ To bring you my love") is convincing evidence of the sacrifices she's made to get the job done. And though _Bring_ reaches out with uncompromised, primal power, it's a work that the former art-school sculptor forged in isolation, "away by myself." She composed _Bring_'s 10 songs (plus 10 more that didn't make the album) on keyboard and guitar in her seaside house three hours from London on Britain's southwest coast, not 15 minutes from Yeovil, the village where she was raised by a quarryman father and sculptor mother. "My house is completely in the countryside," says Harvey of the place she purchased with _Dry_ and _Rid of Me_ royalties. "I have no neighbors. When I look out the window, all I see are fields. And I think you can hear that when you listen to the album. There's a lot of space there." Harvey grew up on a small farm with cows and sheep, and received a musical education from her parents' Bob Dylan, Howlin' Wolf and Captain Beefheart albums, from seeing the R&B artists that her mother promoted in town and from the punk-rock bands playing the Electric Broom Cupboard, the local club. She toured Europe for two years with the band Automatic Dlamini, playing saxophone and guitar, and studied sculpting in London in 1991. That was long enough to form PJ Harvey, and to generate a big enough buzz with _Dry_ singles "Dress" and "Sheela-Na-Gig" to return to Dorsetshire with her musical career under way. Harvey doesn't have time to sculpt these days -- "I'm taking on music, head on," she says -- but she thinks of music-making and visual art in similar terms. "It relates very much to the way I write songs," she says. "I start off with a large mass of material and strip it down to the bare essentials. I try to finish with the minimal amount you need." She returns to London as little as possible. "I didn't enjoy it," she says. "It was just something that I needed to do. I needed to live away from home." But it irks her to read about her "idyllic childhood" in the countryside. "I get quite fed up with people assuming that because I grew up in the country that my life was easy. Life is hard wherever you grow up. There are downsides to living in the country. You're cut off from the outside world. It's quite insular and quite slow." When she was younger, Harvey says, she felt "extremely trapped." "I wondered how I was ever going to get out," she says. "I felt starved of input. I didn't know what people were doing creatively." And Harvey says she grew up as a "very shy child," but she always felt compelled to perform. "It's a very great need," she says. "Long before I started writing songs, when I was 4 or 5 years old, I would read poems or perform with marionette puppets in front of whoever came over to the house. It's just a desire to show people what I can do." She was slated to open for R.E.M. in Europe this spring, but that tour was canceled. But Harvey will be out on the road showing American and European audiences what she's got for the bulk of the year. She opened for bob Dylan in Los Angeles this month. After her current club jaunt is through, she'll hit the road over the summer, opening for York, Pa.'s, Live. Audiences will see a PJ Harvey who's much changed. Gone is the black hair worn in a neat bun and the Mona Lisa smile; this year, she's done up in fiery red, gothic makeup and long flowing do. She's been taking lessons from an opera singer, and has ditched her guitar to concentrate on her vocals and theatrics. "The guitar was quite a restriction," she says. "Now, I'm using my whole body to sing, and it frees me up to use all the stage space and think about the lighting and the design." And as with her music, Harvey's show is presented in big, bold primary colors. "It gets back to the idea of stripping things down," she says. "I'm always drawn to strong colors. It's got to be red or it's got to be green. There's absolutely no purple allowed anywhere. It has to be one extreme or the other." |
