The Transformation of an Avenging Angel
Date: ?
Venue: The Bowery Ballroom
Location: New York City, NY
Written by: Will Hermes

Opening a Bowery Ballroom show in her adopted home base of New York City, Polly Jean Harvey arches a flirty eyebrow and launches into "Dry," the harsh little number from 1993's RID OF ME about how her lover just doesn't get her wet anymore. Rearranged with a cello backdrop, this version swerves between male-ego pimp-slap and a kind of gentle in-joke. It's feminist punk anger reimagined as Zen koan.

Is it possible to be a serene Fury? That's the implicit question on last year's breathtaking STORIES FROM THE CITY, STORIES FROM THE SEA, an immaculate conception that found rock's avenging goddess swoonily crooning "baby, baby," (in waltz time!). But where some listeners heard the most accomplished record of an incandescent career, others wanted more of the old open wounds.

Harvey's recent live shows resolve the dilemma. The feral waif in radioactive eye shadow and outsized personae is now a grown woman in a designer dress, flaunting an enviable haircut. But she still rocks like a motherfucker. At the Bowery, with veins bulging on the back of her tiny hands and nipples visibly hard, she led a revamped band (including ex-Captain Beefheart accomplice Eric Drew Feldman) through a set tougher and more fun than the old goth kabuki.

Peace of mind will do that. "I had a lot of problems to sort out of the last five years or so if I was to carry on being alive, basically," Harvey says quietly in between gigs in London. "I'm not trying to sound new-age or hippie or anything, but I feel like more of a whole person now. And I feel very whole on stage--like I'm actually in the space right here and now. That feeling of living in the moment is a new one for me."

Being a private sort of exhibitionist, Harvey won't go into details about her transformation or its catalyst--which leaves one to ponder the identity of the "dirty little secret" she wants to watch undress in "This is Love." But she cops to the support she's had from pals. Back-porch avant-rocker Will Oldham, whom Harve calls "one of the best contemporary songwriters we have," is a reliable bar-hopping buddy in Manhattan. In Britain, Harvey calls on her more famous neighbor, Thom Yorke, who turns up on three songs from STORIES, including "This Mess We're In."

Harvey is psyched to open for U2 on their U.S. spring tour ("I've been a fan since I was 12!"). She also wouldn't mind another film role in the wake of her turn as a dark-lipsticked Mary Magdalene in Hal Hartley's 1998 short feature "The Book of Life." I enjoyed playing her--she's in the background, but she's a very strong presence," Harvey says of the world's most famous whore. "She's not in the Bible a lot, either. But you kind of feel her there."