"I'm just a raunchy sex queen. Is that what you wanted to hear?" Yes, frankly. Re-introducing PJ Harvey
Written by Victoria Segal
Photographed by Kevin Westenberg

By now, ten years and five albums down the line, the conventions are clear. The writer meets PJ Harvey, expecting a damaged, tangle-haired quasi-religious visionary of the kind that infests her songs, caked in menstrual blood and Dorset mud, wide-eyed and catatonic, and who, in less enlightened times, would have been strapped to the ducking stool before you could say 'Salem'.

Instead, they are confronted with a personable, witty, thoroughly modern woman who neither twitches nor snarls, whose hair is styled and whose manner is down-to-earth without ever throwing herself on the ground. The conclusion: Polly Harvey, the force behind 'Rid of Me' and 'Is This Desire?', the author of those tales of obsessive love and desolate landscapes and sheer physical pain, is actually - who'd have thought it? - quite normal. Thank goodness for that.

It's a good story - the perfect ironic reversal, in fact. And sure enough, Polly Harvey turns up at her improbably bucolic Notting Hill hotel looking as sleek and well-groomed as a magazine photograph, extends a friendly hand and offers a convincing smile. Amoung the brocade and gilt, she's the model of the 21st century career woman. Last time round, she spoke of letting her naturally curly hair run free: this time it is straight and glossy black, a geometrically perfect fringe framing those remarkable green eyes. An efficient black dress and chunky black shoes complete the impression of unshowy style, good fashion sense, elegant normality. And often, she talks the same way. Ask how she feels towards the people who have grown up with her, who have been dragged along by her songwriting since 1992's 'Dry', and she is affectionate without being in any way mad.

"I don't spend a lot of time thinking about that - certainly not when I'm writing," she says, with her gentle, precise vowels. "On tour I'm probably much closer to it. Sometimes I'll be recognising faces in the audience - much more so these days. You know, people who have been coming since 1991. And it is wonderful. It's a good feeling to have."

Quite normal, yes. But you suspect if you told her that, she'd probably be quite insulted. Because, at a time when it's never been less fashionable, Polly Harvey paints herself as an artist. And, for the artist, normality has never been part of the plan.

She emerged in puritan black ten years ago, touted as some kind of rural feminist oddity more at home castrating calves than mixing in polite rock society. Today, however, Polly Harvey is part of a musical elite, a coterie who keep the flame of the credible artist alive in times when the act of writing poetry is likely to trigger witch-burnings.

Nick Cave, Thom Yorke, Michael Stipe: to varying extents they are all refusing to play anything so frivolous as the game, and Harvey, linked to them all in different degrees, has taken the same approach, developing a built-in gravitas that makes her a daunting presence. She's very keen on talking about "positive energy", on explaining how not all songs are autobiographical and how hard she works at her art. It fulfils the role of deft evasion, too, this focused talk of art - and you can see why she might need to be so defensive. Her earliest songs were remarkably sexual, viscerally direct: the self-loathing 'Sheela-Na-Gig', the beauty myth of 'Dress', the graphic brush-off of 'Dry' - and from then on, she was fair game for rampant psycho-sexual analysis. The astonishing psychic bleed of her second album, 'Rid of Me', saw her playing with her image - the Medusa-hair and cellophane body-wrap of the cover - but songs like '50Ft Queenie' and the restraining-order blues of the title track were still ferocious, untamed. 'To Bring You My Love', in 1995, was more measured, third-person projections bearing the brunt of the rumours about Harvey's health and mental state, and by the time of her last album, 'Is This Desire?', she had admitted being unwell, using electronic static, vague 'soundscapes' and women such as 'Joy' and 'Angelene' to mask her own increasing dislocation. Her forthcoming album, the excellent 'Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea', however, promises a new openness. Recorded with Rob Ellis and Mick Harvey, not only has she returned to guitar directness free from loops and fuzz - "It didn't quite move me in the same way," she confesses - she's rooted the songs in the dizzying brightness of the New World. One listen to the album and it's clear the 'City' of the title is New York, the lyrics roaming through Little Italy, Chinatown, Brooklyn rooftops and the lights of Manhattan. And that's before Patti Smith stalks through 'Big Exit' and 'Good Fortune' with their rangy punk energy and the recurring lyrical 'horses'. Yet Harvey, perhaps disingenuously, swerves the obvious interpretation.

"I keep trying to reinforce to people that this isn't my New York album," she sighs, not letting on the promotional photographs will later feature her standing in front of a yellow cab. "It wasn't just written there - some songs were written in London, some in Dorset. But I did choose to live there last year - I spent about nine months there.

"I'd made a film there with Hal Hartley at the beginning of 1998, so I'd built up a few connections, and it wasn't like I was going into a total vacuum. I was in the middle of writing songs towards this album and I just got to a point where I felt I was covering the same territory in the atmosphere of the music and the lyric writing. I needed a big shake-up and I couldn't get more of an extreme opposite to writing in the country."

But the album does trade on quite specific New York rock iconography...

"Really?" she asks with a warning flash of politeness. "Like what?"

Rolling out of CBGBs, leather jackets, rent boys, that kind of thing...

"That certainly wasn't in my head while I was writing it," she says carefully. "Not something I'm drawn to, really." She softens a little. "But not a bad way to sound, I would imagine."

She paints a less dramatic picture of her experiences.

"I was on about 116th and Broadway, wasy up north bordering in Harlem," she explains. "It would take me about an hour to get downtown but I liked it because it was near a park called Riverside Park so there was a place where you could get some space as well. If I walked ten blocks north I'd be in Harlem, ten blocks south and I'd be amoung all the very expensive apartment buildings that movie stars and pop stars rent. So I was right on the divide between those two."

Significantly, that seems to be Harvey's natural territory. Steeped in old-school bohemia, she's still a star in her own right, a vast distance from being tabloid fodder but no stranger to the Sunday supplements. She inhabits the kind of world where she can contact Thom Yorke and ask him to sing on the keening emotional collapse of 'This Mess We're In', yet still get away with the iconoclast tag and a song called 'The Whores Hustle and the Hustlers Whore'.

"I've always been drawn to the darker side of things artistically," she says. "It holds a greater fascination for me. It's just intriguing to see how some people live their lives. But then I'm fascinated equally by people who have lived very good lives. I'm just fascinated by people. Full stop. Whether they're doing bad or good things."

Are you a voyeur?

"I don't go around twitching curtains with a pair of binoculars," she smiles, faintly appalled. "I jsut keep my senses open wherever I am, whether it's walking or sitting - all systems are open to receiving information and if it's what I need then I'll pick up on it."

It sounds like you never switch off.

"I'm very familiar with the way I work these days. It's such a natural thing to me, like breathing, it's not something I have to concentrate on. I'm constantly like that. I do switch off as well. If I was concentrating on that 24 hours a day I would burn out very quickly."

To avoid this, it transpires she's been going to drumming classes.

"Djembe African drums; they're big round drums that stand on the ground and you play them with the palms of your hand. It's a very rewarding thing to do - it helps enormously with my rhythm guitar playing." She nods: "I did flamenco dancing for a while, too."

Recent gigs she's attended include Calexico, Giant Sand and a traditional Iranian band called The Kamkars, and she loves the latest Dirty Three album, so nothing unexpected there. "I'm not the kind of person who finds a lot in the charts and Radio1," she declares unsurprisingly.

Does she ever succumb to the guilty pleasure of Gladiator, the quick satisfaction of a Mission: Impossible?

"Hmmm. The occasions I've done that it's not often I come out feeling I've been on some sort of journey that's inspired me in some way," she says. "I just feel a bit like it was a waste of time. I need to get something from a film when I enjoy it. I rented Con Air because I was interested in John Cusack at the time. And I saw John Malkovich was in it too and thought, 'Wow, this is going to be great.' And what a dreadful movie that was."

In previous interviews it has seemed as if Polly has cut herself off from the modern world, deliberately shirking politics and current affairs as some kind of corrupting influence. She denies this: "I try to keep up - I take a very active involvement in what's going on. Culturally and politically. If I'm in cities I'll go and see things that are happening, exhibitions, whatever I can. I try and keep abreast of what's going on in the newspapers and in the world. It's important to do that - especially if you're a writer. It's our duty to keep up with what's going on. I couldn't write in a vacuum. I'd run out of steam quickly."

And for Polly, her days are filled with writing - "It's what I do with my life," she shrugs emphatically. Yet it's not just songwriting that takes up her time and discipline - at the moment, she's concentrating on poetry.

"I write an awful lot of very bad poems and amoung the bad ones are a couple of good ones, but it's something that I'm very interested in and really want to concentrate on more. I don't know where the line is between prose, writing, rambling and a poem, and some of the stuff I've been experimenting with is neither one thing or another. Readingwise, I read a lot of Ted Hughes. At the moment I'm reading a book by Osip Mandelstam and I really enjoy Billy Childish. I'm a big fan of Wilfred Owen, too - a lot of different people. When I was in New York I enjoyed listening a lot to what they call the Slam Poets. It's very exciting, a cross between rapping and poetry. There was a lot of bad poetry being performed as well but you had to find where the best clubs were."

Did you get up for the open mic?

"I'm definitely not confident enough to do that yet," she smiles. "I'd have to get a lot better at it first - I'm still a fledgling as far as poetry is concerned."

Do you consciously separate out lyrics and poetry?

"They're different, very different," she stresses. "Poetry is a lot more... vast. For me I find it a place where it's much easier to write about an enormous variety of things that I would exclude from songwriting. It seems to be that poetry writing can be a lot more bare, a lot more open, a lot more raw somehow, and can carry itself like that, whereas I think there's a limit with songwriting, with what I'll put into a song and what I won't. There's like a cut-off point of what I feel is appropriate for a song. Like, 'I wouldn't want to stand up and sing this.'"

This division seems a clear indication that - like Cave, Yorke and Stipe - Harvey doesn't quite trust her audience not to misinterpret her. It seems like a fine time, then, to confirm her worst suspicions and ask her about the blatant sexuality of 'Stories From the City...'

It is a notably tactile album: on 'This Mess We're In', she casts Thom Yorke in an uncharacteristically lusty role - "Night and day I dream of making love to you", he sighs sultrily while the euphoric intoxication of 'You Said Something' talks of "Leaning against railings... Acting like lovers" on a Brooklyn rooftop. It's the superb 50ft swagger of 'This Is Love' that's in a real hormonal whirl: "I can't believe life's so complex when I just want to sit here and watch you undress", she growls. "Wanna chase you round the table, wanna touch your head".

Naturally, Harvey recites the standard artist's get-out-clause, mark one...

"Every song has elements of fiction as well as elements of autobiographical content," she says, as you desperately will her to move on. "They're not all autobiographical, there's a healthy amount of imagination that runs through them and I thinkyou have to say that's pretty much every songwriter, really. Because there are a lot of incredible songwriters and there's no way they could have experienced everything that they're been writing for the last 30 yeras. That's the role of an artist as I see it - to use your imagination to stimulate feelings in yourself and in other people that can spark off associations they can use in their own lives."

Yes, you say, ditching the tentative approach, but there's still a lot of covert filth on the album. She hoots with laughter.

"Erm," she says, grinning warily, "I think I've opened up with my writing in other areas, so the way I'm singing about sexuality is much more open as well. It's quite a positive energy - it energises me to listen to it. I've never had a record like that in the past that can change my mood, make me feel like I'm in a good mood." She laughs again, perhaps thinking of the famously jolly 'Rid of Me'. "Everything on the record comes across in quite a positive way to me. Even the dirty love songs." She almost giggles.

Do you think it's weird that everyone seemingly wants to know - almost protectively - if you're happily in love?

"Everything that I've experienced in my life has gone into me and it'll come out at some point," she says. "It doesn't necessarily happen when I'm in a relationship - it might happen a year down the line, or even further than that. Maybe it's fascinating for people to know that kind of thing. But I'm trying to think of it from my point of view. If I listen to a record that I really like and there are beautiful love songs on there, I don't rack my brains thinking, 'Was he in a relationship then? I wonder who he's with? Is he married?' - all that kind of thing.

"It means something to me because I can relate the song to something that's going on in my life. And that's the beauty of music for me, that's what I like to give people with my records."

She pauses: "But obviously the flavour that comes across in the songs is very much through me and I'm jsut a raunchy sex queen." She raises her hands in the air and starts to laugh: "Is that what you wanted to hear?"

What more can you say?

She cackles gleefully. "Oh, I can see that's going to be the title of the piece. No, it's not - because I'm not a raunchy sex queen. I was lying."

Is it liberating to write as if you were?

"If you can get a point across without being specific it's much stronger. I was very pleased with 'This Mess We're In' because it's quite simple, but it has a very intense atmosphere and you can feel the saturation point the song's describing without having to go into real detail. Things left unsaid are much more powerful than things said."

And this is where the interview takes a turn for the worse. NME innocently asks if flirting is one of the great lost arts in an age of explicit behaviour, and whether Polly enjoys it. Not, you note, 'Do you go out and pick up strangers in bars?' and 'Are you a hussy?' Not, for a woman who spends a fair part of her life as a performer, in charge of controlling and entrancing an audience, an inappropriate question. Room temperature - not exactly a warm toasty glow as it is - sinks to the sub-arctic.

"I think that's my business," says Polly with a tight half-smile.

Right. Sorry.

In the end, of course, it's all Polly's business. There's something to be said for elusiveness - anyone quick to rummage through their psyche like they're looking for their keys is generally boring, while those who keep a mental distance are instantly granted the status of 'enigma' - and it's a lesson she's learnt well.

As she told NME earlier: "From album to album, I'm looking for where my heart and guts lie musically. It's a process of searching, and I don't think I've found it yet. But I guess that's what keeps people writing."

Not to mention waiting. It might be love, it might be desire, but it's certainly not normal.