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REVIEWS
LUCY27 @THE GARDEN
wow. as the first pj gig ive been to, i hav to say wow! she was amazing! there was a very funny couple of mins when she couldnt find the right drum loop on her drum machine, and ended up not using it at all for electric light. she said she'd just had it fixed, but it still didnt work properly, she kept on playing these really cheesy beats by mistake, and then turned it off and on a couple of times. she then said she hated it, and stood it in the corner of the stage cause it was 'horrid' she also hugged her keyboard cause it ws working properly for once! she said 'you have to accept that they dont work everytime you turn them on, like most human beings really'. she also decided to throw her drum stick away half way through my beautiful leah! someone also shouted 'i love your shoes' to which PJ replied, 'yes i love my shoes too' or something like that. apart from that it was just a really good gig!
SALLYTBYML @THE GARDEN
This really was a very special show. I've been fortunate enough to attend both the Manchester and Bristol shows this year and amazing as they both were, this one really felt like the gig she's been building up to. The setlist was perfection - brilliantly showcasing Polly's unique ability to transform and to truly inhabit every song, no matter how emotionally and thematically diverse - not a false note or inauthentic expression in sight.
I was in the front-row and I sensed that she was a little nervous to start with - it wasn't until after she'd played a couple of songs at the piano that she seemed to really relax and start to enjoy herself - but that slight trepidation increased the audience's sense of her vulnerability up there alone on the big stage in the prestigious venue and there was hushed reverence in between the ecstatic clapping (and a standing ovation to finish).
The sound was flawless, as you'd expect at the RFH which has just undergone extensive renovations to improve the acoustics. It really allowed Polly to play with the dynamics of her voice - the whispers as dramatic as the wails, the growls as menacing as the moans were harrowing.
I took a couple of PJ-concert virgins with me (always a fun game to play!) and they were stunned into silence with enormous grins plastered across their faces for hours afterwards.
As Lucy mentioned, there were some endearingly playful moments where PJ reminded us that in between the emotional bloodletting and feverish intensity even musical-goddesses have to deal with malfunctioning machines (and brains) like the rest of us!
Down By The Water, Man-Size and White Chalk were the finest renditions I've heard her do of those songs and it was a real treat to hear The Piano, played ironically enough on the guitar! Silence and Grow Grow Grow left me close to tears and what a wonderful surprise to hear TBYML - losing none of it's voodoo potency amidst the delicacy of Polly's new material.
I wish all Polly fans could've been there and I know I can't do it justice with this brief review, but I hope that anybody who wasn't able to attend will have the opportunity to catch PJ on one of these solo dates soon...
HADDOCKSROCK @PJH.NET FORUMS
In my humble opinion that was one of the finest solo performances i have seen from anybody at any time. Not perfect, the odd bum note and tech problem but absolutely electrifying in atmosphere and performance. To switch instruments and styles and make it look so easy..........lost for words!
I assume that some of the audience had not heard Nina before?
And what was with the little child (?) who obviously, when told his parents were taking him to London for a big event expected to see Chelsea vs Fulham, and so vented his disappontment by making football noises between songs. Puzzled Polly enough for her to turn round and ask 'who is that?'
Set list seemed to be the same as Manchester but with the additon of (if my memory serves me correctly) Shame and then Water as one of the encores inplace of Horses in my Dreams. I could be wrong as i was just mesmorised by it all. Loved the demented Miss Haversham look too all that was missing on the stage were a few cobwebs!!!!!!!!
DJXANGEL @PJH.NET FORUMS
It was just AWESOME!... even bettering the Performance in Manchester BH...which I thought was something of a pinnacle..BETTER!
Don't ask me for set lists...I was just enthralled by the whole feeling of Warmth and Humility and LOVE yes LOVE coming off the stage... I"ve never ever experienced such a show off ANY Performer. It was like she let us in to her Bedroom and this is all her little musical gadgets..Like she was an excitable teenager, showing us her first song..and she appealed to Three thousand people like that...and then this pure voice, stripped away that image to portray the experiences of a woman who has loved, lost, experienced beauty and pain, and the darkest days of me and him.
And that Voice ..so pure and tender, to a screaming siren rising...There were points at lasts nights performance when I thought I was going to shed tears..and all she needed was a steady staccato of piano chords, or grinding guitar to accompany her, and that soaring voice voice to bring all those feelings to the audience.( the QY70 failed her miserably! or was it a QY 90..I was so close I could read the print!) That is the measure of any great artist...and Polly is truly one of those.
Thanks to the people who sold me my ticket...please let yourself be known! I was so privileged to see this performance...I think everyone there was. And Polly was just Magnificent....and this is no idle comment..as the Previous night I had been at The Eiffel Tower in Paris to see a rejuvinated Siouxsie Sioux, perform outstandingly...(hence the Siouxsie tshirt I had on when at The RFH...many there were perplexed by my choice of attire) BUT...POLLY was the most outstanding...and if Sioux would of been there last night ( and they are both fans of each other.) She would have agreed.
POLLY yes! you were truly magnificent.
SNETTA @PJH.NET FORUMS
Polly seemed so much more confident than @ Bristol, a mate near the front tells me she started off a little nervous but it didn’t show from our position.
Compared to Bristol she seemed to play the piano & sing much more confidently & relaxed, infact she seemed very happy to be there Very Happy.
Also the acoustics in the RFH were very good, but that’s the problem when sitting right @ the front I ‘spose, the sound’s never that good but you do get to see all the fun bits close up.
I’d say out of the 5 recent solo shows – Hay, Copenhagen, Manc, Bristol & now RFH, this one to me appeared to be Polly @ her most relaxed & accomplished – Brilliant.
Looking back though I think I preferred Hay out of the 5.
Purely because the show we got was unexpected, a little raw, but a pleasant surprise & more intimate.
ANDRE' PAINE @THE EVENING STANDARD
Always different, always the same might sum up the career of Polly Jean Harvey, whose dizzying South Bank retrospective took in abrasive guitar music, thudding electronica and sparse piano ballads.
Dressed in an elegant white gown, Harvey's appearance initially seemed at odds with her torrid songs. However, a glimpse of her killer heels during the opening To Bring You My Love soon corrected any impression that she might have become dainty or demure.
Harvey played the entire set solo, reworking songs from her albums in a restless fashion that meant the evening never settled in one place for long. But at least it ensured it wasn't just a selfish airing of new material from her piano-based White Chalk album.
After the unremitting, bass-heavy My Beautiful Leah, her drum machine failed and she caused unintentional hilarity by alighting on the IT mantra that maybe she should "turn it off and on again".
The laughter actually provided some welcome relief from Harvey's stark, visceral songs, such as the harrowing new single When Under Ether and the wailing The Devil.
The audience was perhaps a bit too reverential, especially during her thrashy guitar moments. Her new album may be sublimely haunting but PJ Harvey still knows how to rock.
PATRICK LENNON @THE DAILY STAR
PJ Harvey chalked up a truly blistering solo show in London this weekend.
The widely anticipated return of our national treasure saw her wipe the slate clean on a flawless career, with a breathtakingly beautiful collection of new material.
The Queen of British songwriting found herself a fitting venue in Royal Festival Hall. A departure from the spit and sawdust shows of the past perhaps, but her performance was majestic.
Die-hards were captivated by the haunting beauty of her current single When Under Ether and the title track from the new album White Chalk.
Harvey proved to all she is a highly accomplished musician, delighting us with the piano, harpsichord and drum machine alike.
Polly kept her subjects happy by strapping on the Gretsch for searing renditions of classics Rid of Me, Water and To Bring You My Love.
The best show of the decade to date. And all in a killer pair of heels. Ouch.
RICHARD CLAYTON @THE FINANCIAL TIMES
PJ Harvey's new album White Chalk swaps guitars for gothic piano ballads. Expect it to be brought to life vividly at this one-off London date. She's a beguilingly complete live performer, with a taste for theatre and costume reminiscent of David Bowie, but also an emotional directness that brings Patti Smith to mind.
For someone who says she can't play piano properly, PJ Harvey can sure captivate an audience with it. The 37-year-old only took up the instrument to make her latest album, the superbly haunting White Chalk, and regards her technique as "Hamfisted". To reassure herself, perhaps, a metronome and assorted knick-knacks - a porcelain lady, a black-and-white photo, a tiny brass bird on a wire - perch atop a stand-up version, stripped back to reveal what Harvey calls its "ribcage, teeth and tongues". She is still wary of the beast as she begins "When Under Ether". We hold our breath.
Her set had opened with two howling blues songs, "To Bring You My Love" and "Send His Love To Me" (both 1995), Harvey's guitar thrillingly feral and throaty with reverb. Such material has made her name over her seven acclaimed albums. Tonight, playing solo, she is mistress of it - raw yet sinuous, wounded but raging. What we most want to hear, though, are her newest tracks, which explore a brittle, gothic not-quite-folk and plain, unadorned "English" singing that, she says, is how the "real Polly Jean" sounds. As on the album cover, she dresses for the occasion - in a high-necked white gown, with leg-of-mutton sleeves and undiscernable graffiti scrawled on the fabric - like a jilted Victorian bride packed off to an asylum.
"When Under Ether", an abortion narrative, is more full-bodied than on CD, veering nearer her habitual, Delta growl as she concentrates on the keys. In fact, the closet Harvey gets to that purer "church voice" of White Chalk is on "Nina in Ecstasy", from her 1993 album, Rid of Me. That seems like a front-of-the-class confession by the most fiercely withdrawn girl in school, buoyed by the merest smudge of organ vibes. But all the White Chalk songs - from the stabbing, incantatory rhythm of "The Devil" to the craggy, vestigial twang of the title track - are adhesively compelling.
The latter is the gig's most transporting moment. Brushed with harmonica - "it's a bit like wearing scaffonlding, playing this,! says Harvey, who is almost chatty at times - its dour notes have a funereal insistence. "White cChalk hills will rot my bones," she sings, as Dorset and Texas become phantom musical pen pals. Rootedness, in this clammily atmospheric song, is both a source of strenght and a sentence. Here, her slightly Americanised accent puts the track on a par with the mythic yet grounded grandeur of recent Bob Dylan. Unaccompanied, it could be the definitive account.
In the interviews Harvey has done to promote White Chalk, the most novel thing we've learnt about this guarded personality is that she reached grade six on the saxophone. But her wry reprimand to a faulty drum machine - "you've just got to accept that it won't work every time you turn it on, like most human beings" - was possibly more telling. Earlier, she had used the beatbox to underpin two 1998 tracks: the dirty highway blues of "Angelene", delivered with Patti Smith-like gravitas, and "My Beautiful Leah", which became bleary, primitive trip-hop, as Harvey bashed at a solitary cymbal and strode through a sort of war dance.
Switching to acoustic guitar during the encore, Harvey closes with "The Desperate Kingdome of Love", from 2004 - half-spoken, eliding her "blues" and her "Folk" voices, bruised but riding out of Dodge with its head held high.
Her ovation is the loudest, most committed I've heard in a long while, and totally justified. Polly Jean is a rare little patch of West Country wonder.
EMMA FIELD @THE INDIPENDENT
Cast in the mould of a true artist, Polly Jean Harvey sets herself the increasingly under-valued task of reinventing her music with each album. White Chalk is the critically acclaimed result of this iconic singer-guitarist's virgin explorations on the piano at home in Dorset. In a recent interview she admitted she'd sooner have made sculptures with disembodied piano keys than actually composed on this formidable instrument.
Casually strolling on stage, her slender frame is engulfed by a white Victorian dress embroidered with black words and squiggles, her brown hair taken to tousled curls.She wears no make-up and greets us with her sweet voice and childlike smile. One must remind oneself that this woman almost single-handedly confronted the bipartisan Brit-pop of the lads from Blur and Oasis in the mid-Nineties with her visceral blues-rock guitar and songs of desire and loss - most memorably sporting a pink catsuit at Glastonbury in a vamped theatrical persona she reportedly described as "Joan Crawford on acid".
Her piano has its front panels removed to reveal its full dentures and innards. The top of the cabinet holds a metronome, a framed photo, a Japanese doll, a tiny metal eagle on the wing and there is a sheepskin on the seat. The stage is adorned with Christmas lights to complete this intimate solo show.
Strapping on a guitar, Harvey opens with the heavy swinging riff and low-pitched holler of the title track from To Bring You My Love from 1995, along with the crips gypsy guitar turns of "Send His Love To Me". She takes to the piano with graceful aplomb.
Her first single from White Chalk, "When Under Ether", is a starling change. Her vocals shift to a high and plaintive register, moving us from earthly sexually charged blues to an ethereal place, naive and exposed - a place no less unsettling than Rid Of Me.
Reminding us that many of her songs were composed first with a drum machine, she switched to it on to draw from 1998's excellent Is This Desire? in precise, one-man-band renditions on guitar and synth.
She manages to convey the brooding envy of "Electric Light" even when the drum machine breaks down and she's left with just a cymbal and a synth tone - a poetic reminder of the searing solitude conveyed by much of her work. The darkness of Harvey's subject matter is in stark contrast to her presence - she is light, chatty, almost quaint and old-fashioned in her south-west accent: "I work with analogue equipment and have to accept that sometimes they just don't work when you turn them on - like most human beings really."
The night seems to have been comprised of Harvey's own personal favourites and it's a treat. Finishing on the piano, "Silence" is the highlight of the evening. A light ballad wistfully hoping a lover would miraculously appear finally bursts into an absolutely gorgeous chorus, her satiny vocals belting out "Silence". A heartstopping introduction to her new album; stunning.
ANDREW BYRNE @THE INDIPENDENT
John Peel once described the Fall as "always different, always the same". His description of PJ Harvey remains unrecorded but "always different" would be an apt starting point. For her latest album, White Chalk, Polly Harvey becomes a solo artist accompanied by her own piano-playing .
She takes to the stage dressed in a white gown similar to that which she wears on the album cover. To counter this demure image, she straps on an electric guitar and delivers the grungy blues of "To Bring You My Love" and "Send His Love To Me".
She then moves to the piano and plays the first of her new songs, "When Under Ether". This song recounts what, for most people, would be a harrowing operation, but Harvey concentrates on the "human kindness" involved and remais defiantly upbeat.
The haunting "The Devil" and "White Chalk" are both new songs and it becomes clear that Havey0s self-taught piano-playing style is rudimentary. Yet it matches the sparse lyrics and innocent-sounding voice adopted for the new album.
She can't find the correct loop on the drum machine for "My Beautiful Leah" and sends the errant piece of technology to stand in the corner, hissing "horrid" in its direction. She briefly plays an electric harp but in a style far removed from performers such as Joanna Newsom, stamping her stilettos to provide percussions. Harvey wails her way through the snarling blues of "Snake" and "Man-Size" before accepting the applause with a shy "thank you very much, you're very kind".
"The Desperate Kingdome Of Love" sees her playing acoustic guitar in a style reminiscent of the young Bob Dylan. The way she enunciates each line, then appears dislocated from the song and its completion, echoes the Hibbing bard's early stagecraft.
Harvey plays from all her albums - a superb "Water", from her debut, Dry, is a highlight.
The similarity of subject matter from her 1998 album, Is This Desire?, to her latest sees it well represented. "Big Exit" is delivered in a choppy, staccato style, presumably to compensate for the band's absence. It's typical of Harvey's apprach - her career has been based on restlessly seeking new styles and challenges.
Presumably, the piano/vocals persona will be succeeded by another in due course. It has delivered a fascinating album and contributed hugely to this superb concert. She saves the stunning "The Mountain" until late, her voice soaring ever higher as she laments another betrayal; unusually for her, this time there's no revenge planned, as in her "own heart, every tree is broken". Always different, always sublime.
MARK PAYTRESS @LONDON LIGHT
PJ's Barmy Army is out in force tonight. "Play some Dorset!" bellows one, in a voice like a Wurzel after a vat of cider. Fifteen years and eight studio albums into her career, PJ flashes a broad, confident smile.
"I'll play some Dorset," she says, adjusting her generous Tess Of The d'Urbervilles dress before launching into a strident, sublte, magnificient Water.
The first of three encore songs, the track is a reminder both fo Polly's pedigree - all soft/hard grunge dynamics and Riot Grrrl growl - and the precision that her distressed delta blues rhythms have demanded from the start. Tonight, though, was always going to be different.
Here to promote her latest album, the piano-centric White Chalk, PJ Harvey is defiantly alone. Ever the perfectionist, she chooses piped Nina Simone as the warm-up act and scattersa few personal effects - a framed photo, a plastic cactus - atop the upright piano. A couple of woollen rugs add to the "live from an enchanted barn" setting. The effect is spellbinding. Bound by her enduring themes of love, desire and loss, the ferocious, overamped riffs of old favourites such as Rid of Me, Man-Size and the deliciously brooding opener, To Bring You My Love, blend more easily with the half-dozen or so White Chlak songs than the glowing "all-new Polly" reviews might suggest.
Like the dress, customised with black scrawl, PJ?s new material seems less austere in the live context.
Maybe it's those fairy lights - or, more likely, the graciousness with which the sometimes haughty Harvey accepts her homecoming welcome.
As she grapples with a harp, struggles with a harmonica holder, and gives up on a troublesome piece of electronic equipment, her thrill-packed one-woman show gets more interesting still. "I hate you!" she says, as another drum rhythm malfunctions. None of it matters. From start to finish, Harvey is magnificient.
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