The Billen Interview
Written by: Andrew Billen
Source: The Observer, October 8th, 1995

Andrew Billen meets PJ Harvey : pop icon, fowl fancier and late

Whether patrolling the stage with a mic or unblinkingly challenging you from an album cover, a woman vocalist is usually as much an idea as a performer. From Joplin to Madonna, rock's great songstresses have embodied meanings as distinct as the feminist texts that they have been seen to amplify of confound. In PJ Harvey, British pop has produced its most prominent female icon in a decade, a wistfully thin, stridently bluesy chanteuse who sings, screams sometimes, of her sexuality. Yet there is a problem. An idea, Polly Jean Harvey undoubtedly is, but an idea of what no one knows for sure.

Some thought they had worked it out early on, when her first album, Dry, appeared in 1991. Angsty, pubescent, she worked her way through the thesaurus of female sexual metaphor: 'fig, fruit, flower, myself inside out'; when men were good at it, she was 'happy and bleeding for them'; and when they were not she told them they left her dry or hurled abuse, as in Me-Jane from her second album, Rid of Me: 'Tarzan, I'm pleading: stop your fucking screaming.' The empowered victim, she seemed to hymn feminism's latest self-projection, the Goddess Within overtly so in her song Sheila-Na-Gig, who, the office dictionary of female deities explains, is an ancient Irish carving of a naked female with her knees apart: 'vulva woman'.

The feminist interpretation was bolstered by her appearance. Harvey's original photo shoots showed her in leather and Doc Martens, her hair pulled back, her face untroubled by make-up, her body skinnily asexual. Comparisons were made with what Lucy O'Brien in her book She Bop calls Patti Smith's 'authoritative androgyny'. Pennie Smith, who said she had enjoyed photographing her namesake because Patti 'never worried about looking pretty', photographed Harvey too. It didn't look as if Polly worried either.

Then things began to fall apart for the Goddess Within theory. Harvey posed topless for New Musical Express. Taken to task, she denied that her lyrics were feminist, denied that the cause even remotely interested her. As a child she had run around with her older brother's pals and she still preferred male company. She took to wearing vampish frocks, like the bordello couture in the video of C'mon Billy. Her long eyelashes and full mouth were emphasised by mascara and lipstick as tertiary sexual characteristics. Meanwhile, her songs, which had explored most region of female perversity, from sodomy to iron knickers, ventured into wilder territory still, until they reached Down By The Water, a ghostly ballad about drowning and infanticide.

She is presently halfway through a world tour. When I catch her it is in gloomy, small town New Jersey, where she is supporting the US group, Live. I know very well what will be the problem with this interview: Harvey will refuse to explain her music. 'But that's because,' Regine Moylett, her publicist, explains, 'she can't explain it to herself either' an insight I shall hear echoed when an informed fan later posts that Harvey is 'a vessel' for something beyond herself.

The vessel is pint-sized, 5ft 4in but only seven stone [98 pounds] (although she'd prefer I wrote 12 stone so people stopped worrying: 'I am not anorexic'). In photographs it looks as if her head has been traduced by a fish-eye lens, but, in fact, when you meet her, it really is that big, or, rather, her body is really that small. She is wearing a neon pink shirt covered with silver stars, slashed open to reveal a black Wonderbra. What the right cup brims over with is substantial enough to bear a large tattoo of the word 'love'. (When her wardrobe person was recently asked what PJ stood for, she replied: `Pert Jugs.') On her right hand is a rack of toy rings, from one of whose caul-like stones a foetal doll has miscarried.

On the two burning issues ignited by her music its attitude to feminism and what, if not feminism, it's about she has two things to say, both of which I relay rather unenthusiastically in the spirit of completeness. On Burning Issue One, she says: 'Feminism is just not something I have really come up against and something I find a distraction when you could be doing your own thing and going for it.' And on BI2, having dismissed the idea that her angry-sounding music is man-hating: 'Lyrically it is much more to do with confusion and frustration and being unsettled and unhappiness.' Harvey has made her appearance in a drawing room of the Molly Pitcher Inn in Red Bank, looking as much the rock star as the town's most famous citizen, Bruce Springsteen. It takes me a little while, but eventually I realise I am not talking to an icon but a pleasantly straightforward young woman, who may sing in American but chats in West Country. She talks of the smallholding she was brought up on in Dorset, her bantams and sheep, and, when we get going, her sex life.

The most erotically explicit lyricist of her generation was a virgin until she was 21. 'It was a huge step for me,' she says.'I felt like it was the first time I had fallen in love although looking back now I don't know if I had or not.

'It was certainly a huge emotional upheaval for me. I was a very late developer. I had never had a boyfriend.' And the more you put these things off 'Exactly, the greater expectations you have. Sometimes I think I would have been a more well-balanced child if I had been going to school discos and snogging and having a different boyfriend every week like my friends were. To have got to 21 and not to have had a boyfriend is quite good going. I don't think my parents worried. I think I probably did, but my mother and father were of the opinion that when the right one came along, I'd know.' But that wasn't true.

'No,' she says.

Mr Wrong, who was 30, entered her life shortly after she had moved from her home near Yeovil to a shared flat in Hampstead, London, where she was looking forward to taking up a place at St Martin's School of Art.

'I felt: `Yes, this is the one. I am going to get married and we'll live together.' And it all went horribly wrong. My mum married my dad when she was 19. I was very close to my grandparents as well and I was brought up thinking you would save yourself for your husband. So it was all very special and seen through rose-tinted glasses. Learning it wasn't like that and that it can be messy and hurtful was quite eye-opening for me.' Although the two never lived together (she has not lived with any of her boyfriends) the relationship was intense. Within five months it had started to deteriorate. After a sixth, it was over. At some point during it, a scout from the record label Too Pure spotted her performing with a band in a local pub and signed her. She abandoned her art college plans and embarked on a series of the mini-tours. Barely out of her teens, the virgin from the sticks had become a London pop singer with a recording contract and a boyfriend problem.

The artistic result was her second album, Rid Of Me, released in 1993 by Island. In it she sang of mad desire, mad despair, mad anger and manic revenge, although not in that sequence. Reordered, the album is a narrative: 'You crawl in between my legs,' she sings in Snake; 'I'm flying, I'm flowing,' she reports in Ecstasy; then the disillusionment of You Leave Me Dry; rapidly followed by the romanticising nostalgia of Yuri-G ('I'm so lovesick I could die'); to the throat-clearing, tobacco stained, 4am revenge lyric of Legs: 'Did you ever wish me dead?. . . I might as well be dead, but I could kill you instead.' I ask what the majorly ex-boyfriend thought of all this, but her answer does not seem to contain the possibility that he might feel the aggrieved party. 'We are actually good friends now,' she says, 'and he will joke with me: 'So, you didn't like my motorbike.' It is nice it is all right now. For a while I was hurt and found it difficult to speak to him.' Rid of him, she wrote much of Rid of Me back in Dorset. 'I ran home back to what I knew and felt safe around and I did a lot of repairing for the next year. I didn't stop doing things. I was writing new songs. I was working on new material. I was fine. I didn't have a breakdown. People seem to want to imagine I went into some kind of sanatorium for a year nothing like that. I worked on building up my stamina, emotionally and mentally and physically.

'I began seeing a therapist in London who I still see now. I couldn't do without her.' Had it been difficult to get into the next relationship? 'Um, let me think,' she says, as if she genuinely has other things on her mind. 'It was quite a time, but again that is much more because I was very, very choosy. I need to be extremely attracted to someone, mentally, physically, and stimulated emotionally. I have very high demands. I haven't had many relationships.

I have had very, very few and all of them have been a long stretch apart from each other.' Has she one now? 'No, I haven't had a relationship for a year and a half. It is not about thinking too highly of yourself. I wouldn't want to waste time and energy on someone I knew wasn't right for me. Or waste their time and energy as well. And I am very involved in my work at this stage in my life, which is not to say I wouldn't make the room for somebody if they came along.' But it could be a distraction? 'I don't know. I have written in a relationship and it can be distracting, but you can also learn a lot. There is so much to learn from being with someone else.' Being with someone else was not something her childhood had trained her for. Journalists tend to spout fancifully about the Ted Hughesian rigour of her rural upbringing, red in tooth, claw and menstrual blood, creating from it a Tess of the D'Urbervilles version of PJ Harvey. It did make her unsentimental about nature: she considers it, for example, 'a nice thing to do' to fatten a sheep you have raised for your own table. But the more significant thing was not that it inducted her into country matters such an induction, as we know, happened later and in town but that it isolated her, kept her unsocialised. She was brought up not merely in a village of 600, but at its remote, hamlet end: one pub, no shops. 'I could,' she says, 'go for days without seeing anyone from outside my family.' So she peopled her imagination.

'Probably because of your lack of playmates you create your own or you create fantasies within yourself. It had the benefit of making me really explore my imagination as a child. I had imaginary friends and whole situations, and I did a lot of physically making things, making my own toys.' What may have helped here was a family tradition of making things. Her parents were not, as has been written, drop-outs from the London music scene who fled to the country, but native West Countrians. Hardly hippies they met each other while working for Westland Helicopters they were craftspeople, her father later getting work as a sculptor and her mother as a stonemason. Their daughter made puppets and gave puppet shows. Her interest in performance, she believes, was evident from the age of three when, forgetting her shyness, she would stand up and read to her family, acting out each part.

'Even now,' she says, `that desire to perform is a real compulsion for me. I need to do it and I want to do it and it is not really for the affirmation of other people's approval. It is just a need to perform, as much as in front of five people as in front of a lot of people tonight.' There is more play-acting, more make believe in Harvey's work than is commonly allowed. Some emerged from the experience of her first relationship, a lot didn't. This year's album, To Bring You My Love, is as much about being a mother, which she hasn't experienced, and about Christianity, a faith into which she is not even baptised, as about bad sex, a subject in which this relatively unpartnered young woman is presumed an expert.

'People say, particularly about the last album: 'So you have walked in the desert for 40 years?' You know: 'No, I haven't.' It is more to do with creating a feeling I have felt or wanting to put across a feeling that I have seen in other people or in something that has moved me, a painting or a photo. On a more practical level it gets boring singing about myself the whole time. I am only 25 and I haven't experienced everything.' But didn't being unhappy spur her into creativity? 'No, again that is another thing I disagree with utterly, that you have to be some sort of tortured melancholic artist in order to create. It is just a load of rubbish as far as I am concerned. I have written some of my darkest, dourest songs when I have been very happy in my life. A friend of mine, Nick Cave, often says people paint him to be this dark, morbid character. Yet he is one of the funniest, happiest people I know.' I say that this may work in reverse, too, on the listener. Even her gloomiest stuff doesn't make me gloomy. In fact, I often find it funny.

'I am glad you say that because there are a lot of songs that I have treated in a lighthearted way which have been taken on a very serious, very dark level and most of the time I am having a good old laugh at myself and my neuroses. There is a lot of humour and there is a fine line, anyway, between humour and seriousness and darkness, a very fine line. You know as well as I that you can be crying at one moment and it can turn into insane laughter the next minute.' That night the hysteria implicit in Down By The Water passes like an infection into the crowd at the open-air concert. Young American men, slack-jawed in bewilderment at what they are hearing, and their girlfriends, who seem to know Harvey's work very well, together mouth its whispered closing mantra to a drowned daughter: 'Little fish, big fish, swimming in the water' In a pastel Emma Peel catsuit, topped by a wig of black braid, Harvey is accompanied by a band of male grotesques who look like first cousins to the Addams family. As she slaps her non-existent hips with her tambourine or flirts with Uncle Fester, I wonder why we spend so much time trying to explain her. From where I am sitting, Polly offers no questions. If she resembles anything, it is a slim, pink exclamation mark.