Provocative Polly Jean
Written by: Dan Cairns
Source: The Sunday Times (UK), 16 May 2004

PJ Harvey has learnt to live with the endless lyric-picking of her songs. She’s even beginning to poke fun at it, and now, with the tricky name of her seventh album, Uh Huh Her, she might be having the last laugh, says Dan Cairns

The air in the hotel garden is almost sickly sweet with the scent of jasmine, the fountains lap and trickle, the beautiful people air-kiss, the helicopters with their celebrity cargoes dugger-dugger overhead. Jarringly — and boy, does such perfection cry out for jarring — a guest’s chihuahuas stand on their hind legs to beg for food from diners sheltering from the scalding sun at shaded tables, their bulbous, Village-of-the-Damned eyes and snouty noses atop unnaturally miniature torsos (the mutts, that is, not the diners; then again...).

Floating in her own distinct space between the cosmeticised flawlessness of the guests and the thick-skinned doggedness of the toy hounds sits the 34-year-old Dorset-born singer-songwriter Polly Jean (PJ) Harvey. Her trademark scarlet lipstick and coal-black hair may be as stylised as any of the carefully contrived images worn by the people around her, but — and if you think all famous people are tiny in the flesh, wait till you meet Harvey — her minuscule frame exudes power and comes covered with invisible but historically impenetrable body armour.

“People have this image of me as melancholy, depressed, dark, sad, constantly serious,” she says, referring to the stock descriptions writers have attached to the stripped-bare blues-folk music she has been making since her debut album, Dry, in 1992. “And it’s the same with my live shows. When people write about them, it’s always ‘dark queen of rock’, ‘angst-ridden’, ‘caterwauling’.”

With the exception of Morrissey, no other British musician of the past 20 years has been subjected to as much cod psychology and forensic examination, to such overanalysis and evidence-sifting, as Harvey. When she is guarded in interviews, she confirms our sense of her as enduringly mysterious and secretive, and therefore with something to hide. If she howls over a raw blues backing, she isn’t responding instinctively to the music coming through her headphones in the studio, she’s barking at the moon. Like a naked hoarding waiting to be plastered with fly-posters, Harvey and her early records seemed to invite a certain type of interpretation, fanaticism, fantasy and hostility. Her second single, Sheela-Na-Gig, was informed by a mythic Celtic woman with exposed genitalia; another early song, Happy and Bleeding, was taken to be an ode to menstruation.

Signing to Island Records and relocating to London from the hamlet she had grown up in with her artist parents, Harvey was thrown into this maelstrom of other people’s definitions and became a bit of a mythic Celtic woman of her own. Romantic entanglements — with, gossip has it, Nick Cave and the American actor/director/musician Vincent Gallo, among others — apparently vied for her time with bouts of depression, therapy, rumoured anorexia and breakdowns, as her albums marked her down as one of this country’s most uncompromising and direct singers and lyricists. In our wilder imaginings, Harvey haunts the hills of Wessex, clad in burlap, a damaged damsel in considerable distress. So why is the woman in front of me laughing so loudly? “People were for ever saying, ‘So, why are you so angry?’” she scoffs, “and I think, I wasn’t angry, I was having fun. You’re shouting at people about how much fun you’re having.” She adopts a deliberately exaggerated snarl. “I’m not angry. I’m having fun!” On The Pocket Knife, the fourth track on her new album, Uh Huh Her (her seventh), Harvey sings, “Flowers I can do without/I don’t want to be tied down”. To those who persist in seeing her output as driven entirely and solely by the needs and impulses of a diarist — and who ignore the dramatist that shares, perhaps even hogs, the driving duties — this track will, Harvey acknowledges, be meat and drink.

“People will see that song as a really serious document, won’t they,” she sighs. “I wish they would listen more to how the voice sounds. It’s singing with a really funny, strange goat voice. But they will take it as, ‘Oh, she’s always rejected marriage, and definitely this whole album is much more to do with missing out on being a mother and not getting married.’”

For all her resignation, Harvey is, she says, much more sanguine than she used to be about such matters. “I don’t actually spend time dwelling on things any more. I used to try and understand all the time, why I had behaved in this way. Whether it’s an age thing or not, I actually find that I have a better time not trying to understand myself.”

She wrote and recorded the whole of Uh Huh Her at her home on the Dorset coast, before mixing it and adding overdubs and percussion with her long-time collaborators, Head and Rob Ellis. For record-buyers whose first exposure to her work was 2001’s Mercury Prize-winning Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea (by a comfortable distance her most accessible album), Uh Huh Her may prove a rude awakening. Its 13 tracks remove the relatively lush sonic upholstery that cushioned Stories in favour of a thrilling, bone-rattling barrage, interleaved with moments of hushed, accordion-flecked intimacy whose closeness and apparent candour make you want to shield yourself from their passion.

Amid all the speculation, misattribution and lyric- unpicking, there is an inescapable essence in Harvey’s work — whether she cares to admit it or not — which is that, diary or drama (or a combination of both), her songs express things. Rapture, sadness, rage, love, lust, confusion, alienation, despair. And so forcefully and powerfully do they do this that, even as we dimly recognise that the impact they have on us is primarily due to the responses they trigger in our own psyches, we cannot help but be curious about the person who created them. A person who, according to those who know her, spends most of her time as a nomad, touring, recording, collaborating (with, recently, Josh Homme of Queens of the Stone Age, Gallo and Marianne Faithfull); who cannot settle in one place, or with one person, for long; who eats little and barely touches, today, a cup of green tea and soya milk; who stands on stage, transformed in diaphanous cocktail dresses and stiletto heels, exercising total control over her adoring audiences; who fashions time bombs disguised as albums and moves on to her next project the minute they’ve been delivered. With so much evidence of her own (artistic) self-expression to look back on, does PJ Harvey, therefore, feel expressed? Her pell-mell answer is surprising, and barely audible. “I would say that my whole life I completely choke up on words that need to be said but I cannot say them — to do with relationships with other people, not just man-woman relationships, but parental relationships. If something is wrong, I show it, I can’t not show it. But I can’t express it, no matter how much someone would ask me, ‘Tell me. What’s wrong?’ And I think the easy option would be to say, ‘Yes, but my role here is as a musician, therefore that is my form of expression, so that is why I’m like I am.’ But there’s part of me thinking that’s a cop-out.”

She’s equally clear about what she puts into and takes out of the act of songwriting. “People want it to be that this is my life; that every album I’ve made is my diary. They often ask me, ‘Is it some sort of cathartic process?’ No, it never, ever, ever feels like that. Never do I feel that I have rid myself of some feeling that was bothering me by writing a song.”

Harvey spent a lot of time last year with her dying grandmother, and the sweetness with which she talks about her makes you understand instantly what she means about the separation she maintains between her life and her music. In other words, that the former may trigger the latter — as, in the case of her grandmother’s life and death, it surely does on Harvey’s new songs You Come Through and The Desperate Kingdom of Love — but the two remain apart for all that they nourish and inspire each other.

Yet her hinterland — her lack of rootedness, her forays into acting, sculpture, poetry and ballet, her unwillingness, possibly inability, to play the rock part seven days a week — bothers a lot of people. They don’t want her (intermittent) serenity, the mischief or the humour in both her music and her personality. They want messy, complicated Polly Jean, panting “You’re not rid of me” on stage, never mind that Harvey, for all her visceral power, is also one of the most theatrical performers in rock music today.

Such people are, she says, already getting steamed up about the title and subject matter of The Life & Death of Mr Badmouth, which opens her new album. “So,” she mimics, “you’re back in your dark territory. Who was Mr Badmouth? When did this happen in your life?” For Harvey, lines such as “You’ll be in the corner crying” remind her, she says, “of school, when you’re standing in the corner with your back to people”, and playground taunts. She is, she insists, laughing about the scenario. And, being PJ Harvey, she has set this to a guitar part that somehow manages to sound simultaneously like the monster bearing down on you in a nightmare, and your leaden legs, refusing to help you flee.

There’s a touch of the provocateur about her too; yet more evidence that she’s learning both to live with and laugh at the interpretative encumbrances some fans burden her with. So, Polly, I ask, addressing the shock of scarlet and black among the sun-bleached countenances decorating the courtyard: what made you choose your album’s title? “Uh Huh Her,” she mocks, slurring the words. “She used the title Her. It’s all about her inner self again.” She starts laughing again. “I’m just really into the idea of people trying to say it. The new album by PJ Harvey: Errr, hurrr, aaaaggghhh!”