PJ Harvey Actual Size
Written by: Bill Broun
Photographed by: Sean Murphy
Source: Alternative Press, December 2000

The former "50 Ft. Queenie" has returned from her "self-destruct mission" with a scaled-down perspective on life and her best album yet. Bill Broun sizes up the new Polly Jean Harvey.

In one of Notting Hill's quieter avenues, Stanley Gardens, the Portobello Hotel - one of the last, great rock-and-roll hotels of London - offers its famously discreet beds and late-night bar to the musical glitterati. Behind its imposing white stucco facade is an ornate, outlandish nest of pillows and carved-wood adornments, with individually planned rooms that each allude, in their own desperate way, to the long-gone days of Britain's Victorian empire. There is a painting of Valkyries flying in burning charlots on one wall. Get the picture? It's the sort of overly plush place that would make today's London designers vomit.

"Well, this has got nothing to do with me," assures Polly Jean Harvey, laughing. At age 30 and having just completed an album that is plush in a decidedly better way, Harvey fits into the Porto's ostentatious parlor like a live electric wire in a bathtub. She is everything the hotel is not: restrained, pared down (she wears a simple, form-fitting black dress) and stunningly but starkly beautiful. Gone is the angry red-satin glamour of her To Bring You My Love days. Passed away is the skinny, breast-baring fury of her Dry and Rid Of Me period; their only visual trace is a massive brass knuckle-duster worn as a ring. Surprisingly, there is a simple crucifix necklace - no, she's not Catholic - and, when she sees me noting its presence, she says, holding the cross out as if against a vampire, and chuckling: "Yes, one metal crucifix. Make sure you get that down."

The new record - Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea - is two steps forward and one step back for Harvey: the songs are her most poppy, but there is something better formed and fundamentally more physical about each one, a feature more reminiscent of 1992's Dry than 1998's transitional Is This Desire? That Rob Ellis, the band's original drummer, is back may have something to do with that. Along with bassist Mick Harvey, he's helped bring back the simpler, huskier rhythms of the Dry-era. And yet, Ellis' repatriation doesn't explain the urbane restraint and graceful tunefulness of Stories.

This album is a lot more melodic. Was that conscious?
Definitely. That was something I really set out to do with this record. I really wanted to get back to writing very simple, strong songs. I went back to writing with just a guitar and voice. The song had to be strong enough to work at that performance level. Each song is very contained. It enables an enormous amount of melody to be put on top of that without damaging the framework of the song. It's like working the other way around. Before, I was using simple melodies and then grafting the song on top of that.

The lyrics are better, too. I read somewhere that you've been writing poems, but are they just lyrics you call "poems"?
No, they are poems. Songs can actually stern from my poems. One of them went on the new album actually, "One Line." It's only been in the last couple of years that I've felt confident enough to start writing my own poems. Before that, I didn't have the confidence to even approach it. Having to make something work without music, something that's strong enough to work on a page without the support behind it, is quite a good discipline for writing songs.

It's not so uncommon for musicians these days to be successful in literary pursuits.
Are you thinking of Leonard Cohen and Nick Cave?

Yeah, and Ray Davies published a novel recently that got good reviews. You're from the very rural West Country that's a renowned literary corner.
T.S. Eliot wrote in Somerset. And John Fowles [author of The French Lieutenant's Woman] actually lives really close to where I live. For me, I was born in the country and lived there all of my formative years, up until I was 20 and I moved to a city. Obviously it's in my blood; it's very much a part of me and a part of my writing. But at the age I'm at now, I actually find I draw more inspiration from being in cities and being around the unfamiliar. It excites me more at the moment. Still, though, I do go to the countryside to write. I have developed over the years a way of writing in which I move every time I'm writing a body of work, specifically because I know it's going to throw up new creative ideas and different inspirations for me. I have tended to do that with most albums. I'll move to Bristol or move to London. This latest record, I spent quite a lot time in New York and in London, as well.

Where do you live now?
I'd probably say wherever I happen to be at the moment, more and more these days. With my work, I do travel and I'm quite a busy person, either working on my music or other people's. I've found it's a much healthier way for me to live. Wherever I am is my home, and the body I walk around in is my home. If I attach too much importance to a material place as my home, I'd spend an enormous part of my life being miserable that I wasn't there.

What would you miss about Britain if you had to leave it for good?
There's an Englishness that's hard to put into words. There are good things and bad things about it. People can be more reserved with their feelings, keep them contained. And that can actually be quite refreshing, because with modern society, that doesn't happne so much. With the media, a lot of images are very blatant and very overt. Nothing is really retaining much of its mystery or mystique anymore. And within the arts, I think there's something good about that.

A lot of Stories was written in New York. What did you think of living there?
I did become very aware of the amount of violence that is around. Every morning I'd listen to the news and hear the fatalities of that night. That really hadn't been very much in my consciousness before. I've lived in cities, but never out of England.

On the early records, you worked a larger-than-life persona with songs like "50 Ft. Queenie." In your recent interviews you seem more reflective on that past, although there are still traces of it in your music. There's the line in "Big Exit": "I want a pistol in my hand."
With this new album and my writing in general, it's become much more important for me to be writing in the moment, in the present. I think as a person, I've opened up a lot more, to be able to respond to the moment rather than reflecting on the past or looking into the future, but never quite in my own skin. I think over the last two or three years, I've probably changed quite a lot. The new album is much more to do with being in the present and responding to things out there happening as they're occurring to me. And the quality of the language is less mythological and much more real, understandable and tangible.

Did any specific events trigger this recent growth as a person?
I suppose it's been gradual over the last five years or so. I really do think a lot of it is getting older. I'm 30 now. Just having that much more experience gives you a better perspective on yourself and your position in the world somehow - seeing things in the right scale. There's an enormous sense of freeing me up. It's only been very recently that I've been able to say, "I really feel I'm on the right path," and allowing myself to enjoy doing it instead of constantly fighting or questioning, "Is this right? Should I be doing this?"

What things in the past did you think you should have been doing?
I don't know. I guess there was a certain sense of [unease]. Knowing that I wasn't as happy as I wanted to be made me question the whole nature of what I was doing. In the end I've just found out that my [unease] was coming from other things, not necessarily my writing or the fact that I was making music. It was my whole attitude to life that needed gently changing, shifting the balance a bit.

Have you done therapy? Or had a spiritual awakening of sorts?
Well, I won't go into specifics. A lot of it has been because of things that have happened in my life, positive things and things that have been really upsetting. When I first started music back in 1991, right through to the To Bring You My Love days in 1995, it was such a struggle for me learning to deal with all the other things that come along with making music and becoming publicly known. I was coming to grips with doing interviews, getting recognized by people, knowing that the songsI was writing would be heard by a lot of people - all of that. On top of that, dealing with the business side of things, the money orientation and the way that all works, and lawyers, agents - all these little things that you never realize you're going to have to deal with when you first set out. That really was very difficult for me to cope with.
As a result of all that, but also because the kind of personality I am, I did kind of end up going on this self-destruct mission right through until '95. I really wasn't looking after myself at all. I kind of hit rock bottom. Then, when you do hit that rock bottom, you know that you really have to sort yourself out. So it's been since then that I've really been looking inside myself, seeing what it is that I can change about myself to make it right, to find the happiness that I think is out there, but which I hadn't experienced.

In "Good Fortune," you write: "Things I once thought unbelievable in my life have now all taken place." What would now seem "unbelievable"? What are your goals? What are your dreams?
I don't know. I won't go into naughty personal things. What seems unbelievable to me is that I could actually be a good actress or a good poet, because those are the things I'm really interested in doing. I think everybody tends to build a safety net around the things they'd like to do but think they can't. They'll say something like, "Ah, yeah, I'd love to do acting but I don't think I'm good enough to," or the same with poetry for me. I do try and write a lot of poetry and most of it's a load of rubbish. But maybe one day when I'm older, when I'm 50, I might publish some book of poems.