Polly's Pulling Power
Written by:
Source: Vox magazine, 1993. Typed up by Lost Fun Zone

PJ Harvey's second album, Rid Of Me, is set to send her star into the ascendancy. Critical acclaim is about to turn into mass appeal. Welcome to the 90s first true new rock star.

Polly Jean Harvey, 23-year-old art-school dropout and determined rock performer, is about to become a reluctant Big Star. Though a fiercely private person, she is nevertheless about to suffer the closest scrutiny, from a music loving public who believe-avidly-that she is the saviour of Brit rock'n'roll.

"I don't really mind what people think of me," she's decided. "I don't mind at all. Just so long as I can carry on doing what I want to do, and feel happy with myself and what I'm doing. People are always going to get things completely distorted and completely wrong; I've accepted that now. But it doesn't matter as long as I know what I'm doing."

PJ Harvey's first single hit the music business in the autumn of '91, with all the force of a meteor crashing down from the heavens. The A-side, 'Dress', and particularly the B-side, 'Dry', were both loaded with female strength, female power, female attitude. "Hers was the most distinctive voice we heard last year, by some distance," says John Peel of PJ. His view was confirmed by Rolling Stone critics who recently named PJ Harvey 'Songwriter Of The Year'. "I don't understand how things like the press work in America," admits Polly. "I don't think I can understand the impressions that people are getting of me over there, and I don't want to, either." Since PJ Harvey's first trip to the States last summer (see VOX 26), Polly has been taking singing lessons with an ex-opera performer who lives in her Devonshire village. "He's been trying to get my voice back into shape again, so I don't do it permanent damage," she says. "He says I've already damaged it quite a lot, because of having to shout so much while I'm on tour." Apart from two weeks during December spent in Minneapolis recording their second LP Polly has been holed up in the hide-out flat she rents on the Dorset coastline, writing new songs.

Sexual confrontation has become a PJ Harvey trademark. There haven't been any other English women who've been upfront enough to sing songs like 'Dry' (I'd suck it till I'm white/But you leave me dry") and 'Me Jane' ("Tarzan stop your screaming/Can't you see I'm bleeding/Don't move in on me".). The impact of lines like those is compacted by the primal rhythms laid down by drummer Rob Ellis and bassist Steve Vaughan, which make the songs sound deep, dark and downright dirty.

It's not surprising that the band were immediately picked up by indie label Too Pure and that, as soon as 'Dress' appeared, most of the majors joined the battle for their signatures. (Island went home the winners). By the time PJ Harvey the band had released their follow-up single, 'Sheela-Na-Gig', and debut LP, Dry, PJ Harvey the singer had attracted the kind of critical acclaim which most performers would quite happily retire on. Harvey also found herself at the centre of a minor controversy when she bared her breasts on the back of the album sleeve, and in a subsequent NME cover session. Although she stubbornly refused to explain why she'd taken her clothes off at the time, the raw, naked nature of the record provided a few clues.

The sleeve for PJ Harvey's forthcoming LP', Rid Of Me, provides even greater scope for misinterpretation. The front cover shows Harvey with a steely-eyed gaze and wild, almost snake-like dread-locks, looking like nothing so much as Medusa, the mythical Gorgon who represents the shadowy side of feminine nature. However, it's the photograph on the back of the sleeve that's most likely to cause a stir.

It's a close-up of Harvey's face, divided into a light and dark side, with the latter half looking sore and marked-as though a length of rope has been tightly bound around it. You wouldn't know she'd undergone any torture, though, from the calm, unblinking expression on her face (the imprints were actually made with nothing more gruesome than elastic bands).

Some people will say this image promotes violence against women, but the opening line on the LP' (a demo of which was featured on the VOX Elite tape, given away free with the March issue) are hardly the words of a victim: "Tie yourself to me/No-one else, no/You're not rid of me" Polly Harvey can't imagine anyone making a fuss about the songs or the sleeve. "I don't think it's a particularly controversial image at all-it wasn't trying to be," she says. "It's just an image for an image's sake, interesting and atmospheric. I don't know if people will think the album's controversial, but to me it seems very tame. I don't think there's anything particularly shocking about it."

Like Dry, Rid Of Me has a dark bluesy soul, but thanks to PJ's gutsy guitar and continued stalwart support from Ellis and Vaughan, the 12's heart beats with a rocker's pulse. It was produced-or in his words, "engineered"- by Steve Albini, who's currently working on Nirvana's third LP'. PJ approached him after hearing records like Jesus Lizard's Goat and the Breeders' Pod. "Those albums sound so alive and so exciting and just really raw," she enthuses. "They don't sound like they've been through a studio process at all. It's like you're stood in front of the band playing live, all the atmosphere is there, and that's the kind of sound I've always wanted to get. After speaking to Steve Albini on the phone a few times, I just knew that he was the right person."

Albini-who recently poured scorn on "bands with supposed punk rock roots trying to become popular, famous and rich, as opposed to trying to be good bands and make good records and kick ass"-was only too happy to work with PJ. 'Albini works quickly, and I like to work that way 'cos I'm impatient, and I also think that you can ruin something by working on it for too long," says Polly. "I can get too precious about things and Albini doesn't allow you to do that. He will put his foot down and say: 'No, that's a good take, leave it', whereas I might have gone on for ages trying to get a more and more perfect take, and just got further away from the best sound."

This time round, there are extremes in the music as well as the lyrics. 'Rid Of Me', 'Rub 'Till It Bleeds' and a supremely confident version of Bob Dylan's 'Highway '61' switch from near -silence to thundering great riffs that will have the faint-hearted running for their volume controls. Similarly, by plugging a microphone into her guitar amp, PJ has managed to distort her vocals on tracks like the Tom Waits-ish 'Hook', and the first single, '50 Ft Queenie'. "I suppose it's almost like putting yourself into a different character and taking on a more theatrical side," she says.

This approach certainly pays off on that aformentioned first 45; the title was inspired by the '50s sci-fi classic, Attack Of The 50ft Woman, which is about an abused housewife who (literally) rises above her unfaithful husband and eventually squeezes him to death. The film theme continues in 'Man-Size Sextet', which is reminiscent of the overture from Bernstein's West Side Story, and has strings arranged by Rob Ellis. It's also the only track on the LP that wasn't produced by Steve Albini. "Rob and I did that in Bath with Head, the engineer that we worked with on the last album," says PJ. "I played it to Steve Albini while we were in Minneapolis, and he said that we had to put it on the record."

Rid Of Me shares similarities with various forms of traditional music, mainly in its use of space, dynamics and silence. Interestingly, the first songs Polly wrote as a 17-year-old were inspired by Irish folk tunes. "I don't know if I could say that it was the actual extremes of Irish music that appealed to me, because I never thought about that at the time," she explains. "I just used to enjoy playing it because of the melodies." Whether consciously or unconsciously, the chorus line of 'Hook' ("I'll take you Kathleen/To your home and mine') echoes the traditional ballad 'I'll Take You Home Again, Kathleen'.

Last year's single, 'Sheela-Na-Gig', also had an obvious Celtic sensibility, and there's a definite pagan theme running through the lyrics of 'Yuri-G'. The title is a tribute to the first man in space, Yuri Gagarin, but the song is a eulogy to the moon: "I drew her down on me/I drew her with a smile's "My mum is very into mythology and different folklore traditions," explains the singer. "She's got a lot of books on those subjects, which I spend time reading, and that's why things like that come out. I just found it fascinating that some people used to do an incantation called 'drawing down the moon' to try and make a loved one theirs."

The Bible is another recurring source of lyrical inspiration for PJ Harvey particularly the story of Eve and how she fell from grace with God. This is the starting point for both 'Happy And Bleeding' ("Ate the fruit/Realised I'm naked") and the forceful 'Snake' ('You snake, you crawled between my legs/Said, Want it all? It's yours you bet!"). Yet PJ didn't have a formal religious education.

"I wasn't made to go to church or anything-I wasn't even christened," she says. "But I wanted to find out about religion myself, so I spent a year or so looking into it. There are so many references to the Bible every day that I felt like I was missing out on something, and reading it improved my knowledge and English language."

Whatever her various sources of inspiration, some of the songs that PJ Harvey wrote for Dry sounded like they couldn't possibly have been written by a (then) 21-year-old. "Sometimes I'll have to work at a song for three or four months to knock it into shape, and that's quite a clinical thing. But other times, songs will just pass straight through your head and literally out of your mouth. I mean, 'Ecstasy' happened like that and, on the first album, 'Hair'; whereas 'Rid Of Me' had been worked on for months and months.

"I find it hard talking about actual songwriting, because it's such an illusory thing. It feels almost like it's wrong for us to try and talk about it and put it into words, because I really do believe it's something beyond that. I'm always aware of that sounding really hippyish, but it's something you can't touch, something you can't tie down. Some- times there's a fraction of a second in a song that makes you feel a certain way inside that you can't describe, but it's times like those that make me realise why it's all worthwhile. It's those fractions of a second, where it's something beyond words, beyond your body beyond anything, that make me do what I'm doing. I don't know...," she breaks off. "I can't explain it". Like the two singer/songwriters to whom she might most easily be compared (Sinéad O'Connor and Kate Bush), PJ Harvey's work is touched with the shimmer of genius. Her many admirers include Courtney Love (PJ Harvey seem to have returned the compliment on Rid Of Me with the Hole/Babes In Toylandish 'Snake'). At the same time, however, Harvey has been criticised for continually refusing to call herself a 'feminist'.

"It's quite simple," she sighs. "I wouldn't call myself a feminist because I don't understand the term or the baggage it takes along with it. I'd feel like I'd really have to go back and study its history to associate myself with it, and I don't feel the need to do that. I'd much rather just get on and do things the way I have been doing them. Sometimes it seems to me that too much can be talked about and not enough done." Whether she calls herself a feminist or not, PJ Harvey is a strong role model for other women. She's been cited as an inspiration for the burgeoning UK Riot Grrrl scene (whose most prominent protagonists are Huggy Bear and Bikini Kill) and has even got the words 'ROCK'N'ROLL' scrawled across her face in her current press shots, but Riot Grrrl isn't a movement that she wishes to be associated with. "It doesn't interest me. It seems to be backtracking for women, just lumping them all together and calling them Riot Grrrls. I'd find it quite patronising to be called a Riot Grrrl if I was one of them, but they obviously don't think so. I just feel uncomfortable with labels being put on me which I don't think I understand or know anything about."

It's interesting to compare this statement with fanzine writer Lucy Toothpaste's memories of punk, recorded in Jon Savage's England's Dreaming "I never got one punk woman in any of my interviews to say she was a feminist, because I think they thought the feminist label was too worthy, but the lyrics they were coming out with were very challenging. Punk made women feel they could compete on equal terms to men."

As someone who was just six years old when punk first broke, PJ Harvey knows she can compete on equal terms to men. Rid Of Me will be the band's Island debut but, despite the move to a major, she still gives the impression of being a woman who is very much in control. "I pretty much set the pace my- self of what I want to do," she says. "The record company have just asked me when I would like to release the third album and, at the moment, I can call the shots."

A good example of the way things work is the fact that PJ and her photographer, close friend Maria Mochnacz, are still responsible for the band's artwork. "Polly's very easy to look after as far as marketing's concerned," says Island's Jamie Spencer. "She has a very strong identity-she knows what she wants to do and where she wants to go. For a marketing department, that's a dream come true."

This view is echoed by the label's A&R chief. Nick Angel, who signed PJ Harvey for an undisclosed sum early last year. "Polly has a very definite sense of what she wants to be, and she wants as much input and control over what's being used to represent her as possible. I don't think there's anything wrong with that; it's her career, but sometimes it'll be frustrating."

Asked how he thought people would react to the photograph on the back of Rid Of Me, Angel laughed and said: "God knows! I don't know what the criteria is for why she's done that, and I don't care. I think the front of the album is really good, but I don't know what she's trying to say with the rope marks and stuff. It's not my place to say what she can and can't do. If she feels comfortable and it means something, fine."

Dan Gallacher, PJ Harvey's one-time business adviser and recently-appointed manager, takes a similar view. "The fascinating thing is that PJ doesn't actually do anything for controversy She does it because she feels that that's what she wants to say and the visuals are done in the same way If people read a motive into why she does what she does they almost invariably get it wrong."

While everyone else is getting it wrong, PJ Harvey is busy moving on. The band recently recorded a new John Peel session, and PJ sees those songs as a stepping stone for their third LP' (which will also be recorded with Steve Albini). "I usually get very uptight when we're recording, 'cos I want to keep the idea so distilled. This time I was prepared to let other people put things into it, instead of feeling like it was getting totally out of my hands. I wasn't such a control freak, I suppose, and I enjoyed it because of that."

For now, PJ will continue her singing lessons. "The thing that interests me most at the moment is singing and what you can do with your voice," she says. "I'd like to get to the point where I'm not playing guitar, but I'm just free to sing. I'd have to learn everything all over again, because it would be like standing there naked. Then again, if I'm gonna to sing without my guitar, perhaps I should sing naked!" She laughs, but maybe she isn't joking.