| Kicking Against The Pricks Remember the first time you heard Patti Smith? Her mixed-up world of visceral youth, marked by a premature, eyes-wide maturity, vented through a newly found freedom of expression? Polly Harvey has something of that. Remember the first time you heard Th rowing Muses? The scorched-earth, defiantly feminine dynamic that battled between sense and sensuality to come to grips with the confusion of sex? Polly Harvey has something of that too. Remember the first time a bursting new talent took your breath away? Polly Harvey is exactly that. From the southwestern English town of Yeovil, near the historic Druid temple of Stonehenge, 22-year-old Polly Harvey, leader of the highly touted trio PJ Harvey, redefines sharp. In contrast to Yeovil's bucolic haziness, Harvey's music is raw and confr ontational, a jagged hybrid of folk-blues and rock tussle that lurks somewhere near the dynamics of The Pixies, with bassist Stephen Vaughan and drummer Rob Ellis retaining an a almost-jazz-trio prepunk air of dexterity. Harvey's lyrics mirror the musical mood; as the debut album, Dry, shows, feminine introspection and vulner ability are taken close to the bone. Indecision, in the face of pressure, runs rife. This isn't new in itself, but contradictions between head and heart are rarely expressed so tangibly, and no one else- certainly no one male- is mapping this terrain, thi s way, with this fever. Not every songwriter confronting tenderness and trauma embraces humor, too; both "Dress" and "Sheela-Na-Gig" scan pain and pleasure, devotion and despair, love and lust, but both solicit a clenched, check-the-irony-out-here grimace or even an ou tright laugh. "It's hard to walk in a dress/ it's not easy/ I'm spinning over like a heavy loaded fruit tree," Harvey sings, on the verge of panic, in "Dress," a violin mimicking her lament, scraping along like worn-out fingernails, as she mocks the peril s of dressing to kill (a weighted term, if ever there was one). "He said, 'Sheela-na-gig, you exhibitionist!' " Harvey, now nearly in hysterics, responds from the point of view of the (male) accuser. "He said....'Take your dirty pillows away from me.' " A nd there is something comical about the way Harvey gets red-blooded boys to sing along with "you leave me dry," a rare expression of sexual dissatisfaction. While there is an abundance of wry humor to be found in Harvey's work, she has won an early reputation for being withdrawn and difficult. Unlike Morrissey, who treats interviews as extensions of psychotherapy, Harvey won't unravel her psyche. But why? To keep us guessing? To simply be willful? To hide the awful truth? To cover up expert method acting? Her guarded opinion of "Sheela-Na-Gig" goes some way toward explaining the music's elastic tension, pulled between extremes. "A 'Sheela-Na-Gig' is a Celtic stone carving of a female figure crouching down, pulling her vagina open, and laughing insanely at the same time," explains Harvey. "What I liked about the carving was that she was laughing, and ripping herself apart. You have humor and horrific-ness. It's something that I really want to explore." "Extremes, to me, are really important," she continues. "It's what I'm particularly about as a person, and what I'm currently feeling- either really happy or really sad. Extremes of loud and quiet are also good. That's the kind of drive I want to get m usically, which didn't really work on Dry, but the next album will be better. I've done a version of Bob Dylan's 'Highway 61 Revisited' for a tribute record (to be released on U.K.'s Imaginary label) and it works really well there. Dylan's words to that song are amazing. Again, he works with extremes, like a film edit from one verse to the next, from almost biblical imagery to the modern day. The song is being taken somewhere completely different, but it's all tied up together." Another hero of Harvey's is the Pixies' Black Francis: "He can incorporate humor into a song that's still serious." But unlike Francis, who reveals more about his love of space, junk, and Latino culture than his emotions, or Nick Cave- another confesse d inspiration- who uses fictional narratives to explore his feelings, Harvey is much more direct. "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 but her delivery, words, and her articulation. Her honesty. I remember when I first heard Cave sing 'From Her To Eternity', it made me feel physically sick. I found it really frightening, really violent. That Howlin' Wolf's voice contains bo th passion and violence, at the same time, never fails to astonish me. The most important thing in my music and my lyrics is to be honest to basic feelings rather than ideas in my head." Which explains why Harvey's honesty stops short at 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.) She won't dissect lyrics or dis cuss issues that those lyrics address. Ask her why she sings "ease myself into a body bag" ("Plants And Rags") or to discuss what led her to choose the dual image of water as baptizing and drowning (more extremes) in "Water", and she'll just sit there, in this oak-beamed "Old World" Yeovil pub, faintly smiling, as if to say, I've played this game before. "I'd rather kick up the dust, as you put it, and let people think about things themselves," is all she'll say. By claiming "artistic immunity", Harvey has been called irresponsible, declining to be drawn by the term "feminism," although "I've come up man-sized/ Got my leather boots on," from the unrecorded "Man-Sized", can be construed as pointed feminist comme ntary. "I don't spend much 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 and not to think about them. You get more done tha t way." I go out on a limb, suggesting that her work confronts the conflict of female desire in a world of masculine expectations. "But nothing's as simple as that," she retorts. "Anyway, that's someone else's point of view, which isn't important to me. I don' t understand why people have this desire to pinpoint everything. It's a desire to control, which isn't necessary. Why not let it speak to you in some way, and not try and interpret it into words all the time?" She does get specific when discussing "Dry" (the first B-side of "Dress", but left off the album), and ode to sexual dissatisfaction. "A lot of the songs are about dissatisfaction and frustration. Everybody feels those things. I also called the album Dry because it's a simple, minimalist word, and a lot of the words on the album are very simple, and more powerful because of it. Dry is a word of needing something else, and a lot of the songs are about that. I also think it's funny to sing about d ry vaginas." Harvey's music walks a tense tightrope between what is revealed and what is obscured, or what appears to be revealed or obscured. Except she's not telling. Clever woman. "I'm very conscious of that tension," she admits. But where does she draw the line ? "It's an instinctive reaction, by trial and error. You learn by mistakes to find the right way of doing things. I know what I want and don't want to show. I just have to find the best way to get it across." One means of expression Harvey opted for was to simultaneously release Dry along with Dryer- the same record in demo form- Harvey stripped naked again. Why go this perplexing route? "The first thing Too Pure (the band's ex-U.K. label) hea rd were my four-track demos, so we all thought it would be nice to release them. To me, the demos are completely different songs- they're brand new, and everything is clear in my head about why I wrote them, but then things get diluted as the process move s on. But what you lose there, you gain in other ways with a band. It's more exciting to my ears to have other things happening." Typically, we end on a questioning note- will she ever answer direct queries? "No. I think I'll answer less and less, and do less and less interviews." She thinks this hasn't been a great conversation because she's feeling sad today- "Actually, I've be en felling like this for three days now." Strangely enough, I don't ask why. |
