Women in Rock - Trouble Girls - Oh, You Pretty Things - Polly Jean Harvey
Written by: Barbara O'Dair

Polly Jean Harvey is an anomaly: the tomgirl who shimmers as a femme fatale, the drag queenie of the moors. At the same time, she seems like a historical inevitability, one obvious outcome of three decades of rock, feminism, and the global village. She's got her own origin myth, too. But the legend that elaborates her beginnings at the knee of arty parents in a rustic paradise is nothing next to the ones she pulls from the world and sends through her own peculiar sieve. The strange tales and visions she summons mount as evidence of a mind and body in the grip of something big - obsessive desire, enveloping anguish, high wit. So if her roots are neither as humble nor naive as fantasy or Harvey herself would have them - if Polly Harvey is a lot more savvy and pop smart than all that - she is still one of the most interesting things out of England in a very long time. Maybe even more so for the slippage between the real and the imaginary in her life story. Anomalies are like that.

Harvey brought her three-person combo to tour the States behind their first record, Dry, in 1992. She came on plain and small behind a big guitar, but like an avenging spirit dropped to earth to finish some business about men and women, with blistering songs and a staggering confidence that was both unfamiliar and just right, and that established her as an important new force in alternative music. Since then, on three more releases - 1993's Rid of Me and 4-Track Demos and 1995's To Bring You My Love - and over several long tours, she's gone on to prove herself a major figure in rock. By taking sonic risks that differentiate her from her more conventionally tuneful peers, shaping combustible material to her will, and dipping back to retrofit rock's old forms - most particularly the blues - to her own thoroughly contemporary image, Harvey has ensured that the future has her name on it.

Born in 1969, Harvey grew up the second child (she has an older brother) of a sculptor and her quarryman husband in a tiny village near the small town of Yeovil in southwestern England, home of Hardy's health. Belying its name, Yeovil boasted a sophisticated roster of visiting musicians, some of whom were hosted at Harvey's home, due to weekend blues shows her mother organized. "I was very lucky to have parents with a fine, fine record collection," Harvey has said. "I was brought up listening to [John Lee] Hooker, to Howlin' Wolf, to Robert Johnson, and a lot of Hendrix and Beefheart. So I was exposed to all these very compassionate musicians at a very young age, and that's always remained in me and seems to surface more as I get older. I think the way we are as we get older is a result of what we knew when we were children."

Artistically gifted, theatrically inclined, and defiantly ungirlish as a child, Harvey entered adolescence late. "I've always been very hard on myself, partly because of that," she's said. "At school, I was a really hard worker. Then, whether I was at art college or in the music business I kept that competitive drive. I'm very, very competitive." The fruits of that ambition - Harvey's songs - are charged with the excitability of the late bloomer, not to mention the anger and bewilderment that accompany a dawning of recognition of sexual double standards.

As a teenager, Harvey played saxophone and guitar in several bands, most notably Automatic Dlamini, with which she toured Eastern Europe and Spain. Upon returning home to Dorset, she studied sculpture at Yeovil Art College and began putting together her own band - which included drummer and backup singer Robert Ellis and bassist Stephen Vaughan. In 1991, her group, PJ Harvey, released a single ("Dress") and then another ("Sheela-Na-Gig") early in 1992. Dry made for less than $5,000, was released in March 1992 on the independant label Too Pure.

The record was a stunner, and its eleven hard-headed songs about a girl made for a breathtaking first bow. Full of slash-and-burn exuberance, Dry showcased the sex-'n'-gender themes that Harvey has, time and again, made her own. While similar to other young rock lyricists who've used these subjects as primary material, Harvey doesn't describe so much as dramatize or even embody her condition; her songs comprise a visceral, living diary writ large of growing up female.

On "Dress," with a riff that pogos its way to a thrash, she sings: "Must be a way that I can dress to please him/It's hard to walk in a dress, it's not easy/Spinning over like a heavy-loaded fruit tree/If you put it on, if you put it on...," investing the act of adornment with both a threat and a dare. Summoning the Celtic fertility symbol that depicts a woman laughing as she parts her vulva, on "Sheela-Na-Gig" Harvey points out her attributes to a lover ("Look at these, my child-bearing hips/Look at these, my ruby-red ruby lips") and then puts him in his place by repeating his taunt: "He says, 'Sheela-Na-Gig, Sheela-Na-Gig, you exhibitionist!'" (And you've got to hand it to the modern diva shameless enough to quote a show tune to her own ends, as Harvey does here, with: "Gonna wash that man right outta my hair/Gonna take my hips to a man who cares.") Harvey's guitar is fierce and propulsive on her power chords, and delicate and archly strummy as on "Plants and Rags," which, in typical Harvey-ese, gives shock treatment to mourning: "Plants and rags/Ease myself into a body bag."

While her slight build, severe stance, and lugubrious features gave her a somewhat androgynous affect, Harvey's vocals were fully feminized. Replete with throaty sobs and wails, at turns charged with joy, doubt, and utter self-possession, she sounds like a womanish girl on Dry. (Interestingly, it is her drummer who sings falsetto on many of these songs.) With a timbre more pleading than pleasing, Harvey, like Janis Joplin and Patti Smith before her, has a voice that achieves its power in the dramatic tasks it's set to and the expressive limits it's pushed through.

In England the critical response to Dry was phenomenal, perhaps overwhelmingly so. The band rode the wave into the States, where it signed a deal with Island Records. After a U.S. tour and performing at England's Reading Festival, Harvey returned to London, where she had set up housekeeping in late 1991, and promptly collapsed. Hounded by reports of a breakdown and anorexia - not to mention some overblown criticism of her decision to appear topless on the cover of the New Musical Express - she consulted a therapist and repaired to Dorset, where, above a coastal cafe, she rented a flat in which to churn out songs that would result in her next album, Rid of Me.

Later in 1992, when PJ Harvey returned to the States for a second tour, she brought along her new songs. The tour ended in Minneapolis and the band stayed on, at the invitation of noise provocateur Steve Albini (Nirvana's In Utero), who agreed to produce Harvey's new record because "I thought her guitar playing was cool." Rid of Me was recorded in two weeks.

"Tie yourself/to me/no one else/no, you're not rid of me."

Released in May 1993, Rid of Me was a raw-throated, mud-soaked woundfest; its fourteen songs formed a brilliant miasma of tortured love and fractured fables. From the biblical revisionism of "Missed" and "Snake" to the hallucinatory cartoons of "50-Ft. Queenie" and "Me-Jane," the myth-making tendencies Harvey displayed on her first record are here at full tilt. On "Man-Size," Harvey relays the disturbing power of sexual difference: "I'm coming up man-sized.../Got my leather boots on/.../No need to shout/Can you hear me now?" And limns her most dicey gender dysphoria: "Get girl out of my head/Douse hair with gasoline/Set it light and set it free." From the Medusa cover art to the tracks' surface abrasion, Rid of Me is a roiling ball of gorgeous aggression. Or, as Harvey put it on "Legs": "I might as well be dead/But I could kill you instead."

Though Harvey denies that the album is about a specific person, Rid of Me sounds like the aftermath of a consuming relationship. (It also seems like Harvey the outsider's kiss-off to London.) She rubs her listeners' noses in love's excesses, her own body. "You're not rid of me... I'll make you lick my injuries/Till you say, Don't you, Don't you/Wish you'd never, never met her?" The lovesick sob sister goes hand in hand with her better half, the grinning she-devil, the dominatrix.

With "Rid of Me," Harvey said, "I definitely shifted a gear in my writing. I think it condenses everything we're doing as a band." While Harvey was talking about her work, she could have just as easily meant her life. The title song, indeed the entire record, represented a revelation, as if she'd figured that better work (and maybe mental health) might come from the primal squirm. The work was devastating; consider her tongue-in-cheek come-on, "Rub 'Til It Bleeds": "I'll make it better.../and you believe me."

And in no time at all, Harvey was back on her feet - in pumps, no less.

"I don't want to do anything that's just straight glamorous," she's said, "like 'Oh, Polly Harvey's suddenly becoming a woman.' It has to have some element of uneasiness or humor." The stage act for Rid of Me showcased a more vivacious Polly in high heels and cocktail dress wielding a bright red Gretsch guitar with an intensity as impressive as her get-up was amusing. For all the accolades the show picked up, however, Harvey dismissed Ellis and Vaughan post-tour, saying she never intended for the band to be permanent. "I've always felt like a solo artist really," she said unsentimentally. "I've always known that I want to work with different musicians for what they can bring to the songs." Island went on to release 4-Track Demos, an album of Harvey's original tapes for Rid of Me. Hailed as an intimate look at the creative process, this rougher version of her vision that exposed the skeletons of Rid's songs as well as Harvey's voice (which some critics had complained Albini buried) and included five previously unreleased tracks was even preferred by some critics to the cooked one. Meanwhile, back in the English countryside, in a recently purchased home a half hour from her parents, Harvey holed up yet again to write a new set of tunes.

About the record that emerged from this time, she said, "I suppose my new album is about the outside, the space in the countryside. I wrote the whole album from the bedroom in my house - it looks out over this huge field and hill." Indeed, in contrast to Rid of Me's urban outrage, her third album, To Bring You My Love, is suffused with natural imagery, rugged landscapes upon which passions play out as allegories. To perform the haunting, bluesy compositions she'd written, Harvey drew on her inspirations, choosing a collection of players that included her pal from Automatic Dlamini, guitarist John Parish (who coproduced the record with Harvey and U2 producer Flood); San Franciscan Joe Gore (whose guitar work with Tom Waits she'd admired); and Nick Cave sideman Mick Harvey. The instinct to surround herself with her heroes' auras showed the depth of her interest in the past.

It also allowed her to wrestle the forefathers to the mat. Although to become a full-fledged diva on the record, she sacrificed her exemplary guitar playing, Harvey took the reins on To Bring You My Love, conducting the recording sessions and subsequent tour with a firm hand. "During rehearsals, I was very pedantic about them playing exactly what I wanted," she said. "I don't like it if I find people putting in bits that shouldn't be there. And I do speak to them about it."

To Bring You My Love works as a kind of skewed song cycle in which Harvey takes on a variety of personas, in the process stretching her references - from Muddy Waters blues to Led Zeppelin hard rock. Over the title track's chugging guitar line, she sings, "I've lain with the devil/Cursed God above/Forsaken heaven/To bring you my love." In the switch-hitting deep funk of "Long Snake Moan," she warns, "Bring me, lover, all your power.../In my dreaming you'll be drowning/You oughta hear my long snake moan." The blues tropes run deep, and the sexual motifs run true - they intersect in all sorts of startling ways, particularly when you consider that the blues she refigures are man-made (there's no Big Mama Thornton on her list).

Harvey strives for a sensual mythology as thick, and an emotional landscape as menacing as that of the Rolling Stones' antihero Midnight Rambler, and then some. She has created a teeming arena in which she is, song by song, victim, aggressor, and accomplice. To Bring You My Love is chilly and shocking. By replacing her guitar parts with organ, she constructs elegiac atmospherics. The whisper that runs through is both other- and under-worldly, an effect aided by the techno shadings Flood gives the tracks.

As might have been predicted, the fine figure Harvey cut during the Rid of Me tour bloomed. After the release of To Bring You My Love, she vamped onstage like a Valkyrie, with a sleek cascade of movie-star hair and arcs of peacock-blue eye shadow, her mouth plastered in red lipstick. Harvey's array of personas and their increasing dramatic glare are due in part to video director Maria Mochnacz, a longtime Harvey collaborator, who shares the credit for Harvey's transfigurations and their developmental consistancy. Where a pair of shiny sling-backs and a pocketbook dangle in a frame of the video for "Sheela-Na-Gig," they're firmly on her feet and in her hand in "50-Ft. Queenie." By To Bring You My Love's "Down by the Water," Harvey swims, literally and figuratively, in a scarlet gown as she signs an elaborate pantomime of female gestures, her parodic take on the feminine finally fullblown.

Harvey characteristically downplays her transformations. "I've had to do a lot of growing up in front of people, which I don't mind at all," she said. "But now, it's just a very natural move for me to experiment with my looks and see how that affects my demeanor and performance." She also characteristically downplays a reputed career-long eating disorder, although a bout with anorexia was even rumored to be behind the cancellation of the last leg of a tour in early 1996. (Her handlers denied it.) "I used to be quite an ample child but I get so worked up about writing. I don't mind being this thin," she says, though she insisted oddly at another juncture: "All I can say is, 'No, I'm not ill,' and 'Yes, I have always been very small in stature.'"

If the rumor is true, however, it's hardly surprising. Harvey's flamboyance and elastic physicality have always played alongside a more mystical bend: A desire for transcendence often seems to compete with her pleasure seeking. The wish to throw off dead weight, the mess of the body, especially the feminine body, jibes with her lean and mean demeanor and her wrestle with femininity, and rubs up against her haute-femme trappings.

Finding them mannered and confusing, these trappings in their most extreme manifestation put off some fans after To Bring You My Love. The new music was met, though, with almost universal critical acclaim; Harvey, it appeared, had effectively written her next chapter, with a lock on the richest, most surprising, progressive punk blues so far, notwithstanding Nick Cave, a paramour with whom she has collaborated.

Another fruitful collaboration came later in 1996 with the release of Dance Hall at Louse Point. With music written completely by her longtime pal, John Parish, and Harvey contributing lyrics and vocals, Louse Point was recorded in Yeovil independently of any PJ Harvey band. Harvey allowed Parish to guide her voice - he took her stark and evocative vocals and set them amidst a brash and hooky, guitar-driven soundscapce. Although critically slammed as less musically ambitious - Harvey lite - than her previous work, it was a perfect kicker to To Bring You My Love's bloody glove.

Harvey's been called Dylanesque for her lyrical skills (she covers him wickedly well, too; see Rid's confident "Highway 61 Revisited"). And in keeping with both her transgressive role and the productive predilection for nodding backward, she's learned some moves from the master: "My mum makes me listen to Bob Dylan interviews," she said once, early on. "He was really clever the way he controlled things," even though she charmingly add, "When I try and do that, I fall flat on my face!" Like the young Dylan, she's been known to traffic in contradictions, one moment confessing how much time she spends on her lyrics, the next attesting, "Words are crap," preferring that the music do it all. And perhaps to offset the anxiety of influence, she maintains she'd never heard Patti Smith until recently - in a kind of reversal of Madonna's "Courtney who?"

Harvey may have gone as far as possible in twisting her torments into costume drama, but her business about men and women isn't nearly finished and probably never will be. Her own renderings of pains and passions resonate as verities. That doesn't mean, however, she's invested in any notion of sisterhood; she's too hell-bent on her own beat to make much of a common plight. While her originality, daring and compelling weirdness - her sheer subversiveness - have made her historic, those attributes have also, of course, limited her popularity. The world is not particularly kind to those who dwell in emotional extremes, particularly when they flaunt them or find in them a source of strength.

There's something else: For all of her historical inevitability (feminism's child), Harvey's dilemma is proof that gender, as it has been strictly defined, is distorted and distorting, and that the daughters of this generation continue to be damaged by it. Consider that all of her mentors are men; consider, too, that her femaleness is conveyed as a charade.

Still, in a few short years, she's created a remarkable, volatile body of work. And Polly, stranger in a strange land, spectral presence with a will to power, has said she longs for a family, to make a home.