| PJ Harvey: The Only Girl in the Village Here in England, we've learned to look to North America to taste the cutting edge of female singer/songwriting--the twisting psychodrama of Throwing Muses ' Kristin Hersh, the neotraditionalism of Mary Margaret O'Hara, the folk-art weave of Jane Siberry , the currently lauded bedsitter balladry of Tori Amos . Today, from the southwest England town of Yeovil, near the ancient Druid temple of Stonehenge, Polly Jean Harvey redefines sharp. Like Hersh and Patti Smith , she is part of a group. In PJ Harvey, she punctuates her post-punk guitar grazing with slithers of slide guitar and violin, while bassist Ian Olliver and drummer Rob Ellis retain an almost jazz-trio, pre-punk air of dexterity. Harvey served a brief apprenticeship in the little known Automatic Dlamini, but otherwise their combined experience is negligible. They emerged from nowhere. In contrast to Yeovil's bucolic haziness, Harvey's music is raw and confrontational, a jagged hybrid of folk-blues and rock tussle that lurks somewhere between the dynamics of Throwing Muses and the Pixies . In her lyrics for the two UK singles "Dress" and "Sheela-na-gig" and for the debut album Dry (on Island in the US), feminine introspection, vulnerability, and indecision in the face of pressure are taken close to the bone. This may not be new, but contradictions between head and heart have rarely been expressed so forcibly, and no one else (certainly no male) is mapping this terrain in this way. As UK monthly Select sums it up: "liberation, devotion, lust, the abyss, tenderness, triumph, trauma." Harvey has won a reputation for being withdrawn and difficult. An almost insouciant smile can defeat impromptu requests for snapshots, as at this year's Glastonbury festival. Questions may meet a refusal to explain what she feels is already clear. Harvey won't unravel her psyche. Select left humor off their list. Both "Dress" and "Sheela-na-gig" scan pain and pleasure, devotion and despair, love and lust with a check-out-the-irony grimace--even an outright laugh. "It's hard to walk in a dress/It's not easy/Spinning over like a heavy-loaded fruit tree," Harvey sings in "Dress," a violin mimicking her lament, scraping along like worn-out fingernails as she mocks the perils of costume. "He said, `Sheela-na-gig, you exhibitionist!'" she sings. "He said, `take your dirty pillows away from me!'" She admits humor is integral. "Things can be much more powerful with it. Otherwise people think you're po-faced." And there is something hysterical about the way Harvey gets red-blooded boys singing along on "You leave me dry." Her comments on "Sheela-na-gig" help explain the music's tension between extremes. "A Sheela-na-gig is a Celtic stone carving, originally from Ireland, of a female figure crouching down, pulling her vagina open and laughing insanely. What I like about it is that she's laughing, and ripping herself apart. Humor and horrificness. "Extremes are important to me. It's what I'm particularly about and what I'm currently feeling. It's the kind of drive I want to get musically. It didn't always work on Dry, but next time will be better. I've done a version of Bob Dylan 's "Highway 61 Revisited" for a tribute record (to be released on UK label Imaginary) and it works really well. Dylan's words to that song are amazing. He works with extremes, too, like a film edit from one verse to the next, from almost-Biblical to modern-day imagery." Another hero is the Pixies' Charles Francis, "who can incorporate humor into a serious song. I saw him play solo in London last year. His songs are so strong with just a guitar. I enjoyed them even more than the Pixies, who I already like a lot. It's not for me to say I sound like them, but he's probably been an influence. I admire him." Harvey is more direct than Francis, who reveals more about his love of space, junk, and Latino culture than about his emotions; or Nick Cave , who uses fictional narrative to explore his feelings. "I think their power comes from the delivery of the words. It's the same with Patti Smith. I heard Horses once, and it was brilliant--not so much her music as her delivery, her words, her articulation. Her honesty. When I first heard Nick Cave sing "From Her to Eternity," it made me feel physically sick. I found it really frightening, really violent. But although "honesty is the only way I know of writing," it stops short of explaining. Is the red lipstick on the inside album sleeve a vehicle to promote feminine appeal? A mask for female insecurity? A phallic symbol? Answer, yes, probably. Harvey won't dissect lyrics or discuss issues. Ask her why she sings "ease myself into a body bag" ("Plants and Rags") or the experience that led her to choose for "Water" the dual images of baptizing and drowning , and she'll sit there in this oak-beamed olde worlde Yeovil pub, faintly smiling. Like, I've played this game before. All she'll say is, "I don't feel qualified enough about most things I feel strongly about to draw attention to these issues. I'd rather kick up the dust, as you put it, and let people think about things for themselves." The refusal to solve ambiguities raised by her work, or to qualify statements, recently created a rare scenario as the UK music press started comparing PJ Harvey features. At the start, she had appeared topless on the cover of the NME (from the back, showing a small portion of one breast, in the same pose as Siouxsie years ago), and also on the back cover of Dry, which got rival sheet Melody Maker up in arms. Do women have to take off their clothes to progress in the music business? The furore surprised her. "To me, it seemed natural to do that cover. I think it's tame, but people have reacted strongly. In my head I imagined the photo would accompany the music. Instead it was treated as a finished product. Which is my own fault. I was actually disappointed with the photo they chose, there were ones that worked better. But it's like with the back of the record. If people listen to the music, the image will make sense." NME photographer Kevin Cummins claims the idea for the feature was that Harvey would be naked on the cover, and thus vulnerable, while the inside photos around the feature would be more aggressive. Harvey has been called irresponsible for seeming to claim artistic immunity. It's also been said that the line "I've come up man-sized/Got my leather boots on" from the unrecorded "Man-Sized," can be construed as feminist commentary. "I don't spend time thinking about feminism as an issue," she responds. "To me, that's backtracking. You can talk about things too much and nothing will be done. I prefer to go ahead and do things, not think about them. I bring up "Sheela-na-gig." "The man says, `You exhibitionist.' Is he saying the female can be powerful and attractive, but mustn't appear willing?" For that, I don't get even a faint smile from Harvey. Does the question of responsibility to an audience bother her? "I don't know what I think. I never thought of myself in those terms until I saw these things in print. I've talked to close friends who agree with the journalists: I should be more aware, more responsible. But I still think it would be dangerous to express a point of view about things I'm unsure about. People seem to forget I'm only twenty-two. They treat me and the music as if we've been around for years." I ask if her work is about female desire confronting a world of masculine expectations. "That's someone else's point of view, which isn't important to me," she replies. "What is important is whether I get something out of what I'm doing, and that I'm pushing myself. I don't understand why people have this desire to pinpoint everything. To control. Why not let it speak to you in some way?" She does say that "Happy and Bleeding" isn't about menstrual periods, and that "Plants and Rags" was inspired by a book of photographs: "each double-page spread has extreme images, like light and dark; one shows the backs of houses, sheets hanging on clotheslines, sunflowers. It was very simple. I chose it for the sound of the words together." She also confirms that "Dry" (the first B-side of "Dress," not included on the album) is an ode to sexual dissatisfaction. "A lot of the songs are about dissatisfaction and frustration. Everybody feels those things. I called the album Dry because it's a simple, minimal word, and more powerful because of it. It's a word of needing something else, and a lot of the songs are about that. And I think it's funny to sing about dry vaginas." "Not very English, is it?" "No, I suppose not. But people in Europe say it isn't very shocking either. Compared to English reactions." Polly Harvey, with her huge eyes and short, black hair pulled back tight, looks more like a tiny Spanish ballerina than a typical English rose. "But I am English," she maintains. "My mother's also dark-skinned and dark-haired. No, I haven't traced my family tree." And are her family atypically English, in that you can be intimate with them? "Yes, compared to friends' families." You don't mind revealing yourself to your parents in your lyrics? "No, they've always been very encouraging. Both my parents love music, which is probably why I'm a musician. My dad got upset when he thought I was going to art college. He thought I should be doing music. I'm very lucky. Dad really loves the music. "My mum is shocked sometimes, or maybe just surprised, by what I come out with." Because nice girls from Yeovil don't? "I couldn't answer that. Dad wouldn't say if he fund something scary. He's quiet about new songs until he's heard them a bit, and then he'll comment. But we don't sit around analyzing lyrics." Harvey's music walks a tense tightrope between what is revealed and what is obscured. "I'm very conscious of that tension," she admits. But where does she draw the line? "You learn by mistakes to find the right way of doing things. I know what I want and don't want to show. But I wouldn't talk about that. The NME cover was a mistake because it didn't achieve what I wanted. If it had, I wouldn't have to explain." People want strong, steadfast role models--especially females ones, whose numbers are scarcer. Does Harvey have her own role models? "My mother. That's about it." (Her mother is a sculptor.) Not Patti Smith, another artist whose band used her name? "I'd never heard her stuff until people started mentioning her. You should see my record collection now, full of things I've been told I've got to listen to." The initial run of 5,000 copies of Dry in England came with an additional recording of the album in demo form. She explains: "My four-track demos were what Richard and Paul at Too Pure first heard of my stuff. So we all thought it would be nice to release them with the debut album. It was their suggestion, but for me too, I'd always want to see how things started out if I was really interested in an artist. "It's the way I work now: when I write a song, I record it, just to document it. Demos are completely different songs--when I record them, they're brand-new, and everything is clear in my head. Later, as the process moves on, things get diluted. You lose the intensity. Afterwards, you're just saying the words instead of the words coming out of you. "Still, you gain in other ways with the excitement and aggression of a whole band. It's the way that gives me the most excitement: in a band." We wind up talking about the difficulties of answering questions. She expects to do fewer interviews in future. Is there a difference between female and male interviewers? "Yes. A different atmosphere. With women I probably say a lot of things I wouldn't say to men. Things I'd rather not say." So does she have more male friends than female? "I have more male friends. The only way I can explain it is, it's to do with how I grew up. I was the only girl in the village." This seems implausible; then I realize she means in her own grouping. "I was a tomboy until I was fourteen, and played with my brother's friends..." Polly Harvey trails off. She thinks it hasn't been a great conversation. She's feeling sad today. "Actually, I've been feeling like this for three days now." Yup. She's twenty-two. |
