Dark Side of the Country Girl
'I've no desire to show my private matters to the world." In aggressive boots and vivid jumper Polly Jean Harvey cuts a strikingly unapologetic form. Winner of the prestigious Mercury Music prize and darling of the indie Press, this is an artist who has earned the right to her challenging interview style and unpredictable musical output.
A Dorset country girl, Harvey first emerged on the industry radars in 1992 with her debut album Dry, a fierce and exciting work that marked her out as a singer-songwriter to watch. Accolades and award nominations followed with each subsequent recording, but it wasn't until her sixth album Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea that she found real mainstream attention, becoming the first Mercury win by a female artist. That record was one full of elegantly crafted guitar melodies and soaring, love-struck lyrics, yet it is a personal backlash against its very success that seems to have driven Harvey's career since.
New converts to the PJ cause who were expecting another Stories from her latest record Uh Huh Her were sorely disappointed: "For Cities my experiment was to write pop songs," Harvey explains: "I thought 'can I do it?' Verse, chorus, middle eight. I wanted to make it all sparkly sounding and lovely." And lovely it was too, producing such uplifting songs as Good Fortune. However, having dipped her toe into the more conventional waters of commercial acclaim, Harvey decided to change course: "If I'm honest, the success of that album did make me think: 'Right I'm going to go completely in the opposite direction now.' With every album I want to go into new ground." So, reacting violently to her most successful album to date, Harvey set about trying to get as far away from that style as possible.
Even with all her years of songwriting experience, Harvey still finds the task of producing new material a testing time, often marked by self-doubt and criticism: "I think lyrically, writing is the biggest challenge," she admits: "It's so difficult not to repeat yourself. You find yourself writing the same song really, but just slightly different to one you did three years before." With the driving force behind her creative process being change and difference to what had gone before, it was no wonder she found it a frustrating time: "As I get older, I become more judgemental both of the words and whether they're of any importance, whether they're worth saying. So I find myself editing things away a lot more than I would have done."
Although the resultant Uh Huh Her divided fans and critics, and has certainly been the less commercially successful of the two, Harvey appears to prefer the 'ugly' sparse energy and intense emotion to her Stories output.
At her most enthusiastic - and in particular when discussing the experimentalism that went into the record - Harvey is most proud of the thorny songs - Kingdom of the Desperate Lovers and Slow Drug: "They challenge me when I listen to them," she declares passionately: "They make me feel something very strongly; they excite me."
A deep emotional connection to her music is the vital element of her writing, and she vows that she is unswayed by commercial concerns: "The most important thing is to do what's right for me as the writer. People respond to real qualities in music, as long as it makes them feel." The contradiction of vehemently denying the songs are autobiographical and then espousing her emotional connection to them is lost on her.
In spite of her anti-commercial concerns, Harvey cannot help but be aware of her more obvious assets in a fickle industry: an attractive and charismatic woman, she draws almost as much comment from her vivid fashion sense as from her music. Evasive, she unconvincingly denies awareness of these matters, saying only: "If you're comfortable in your skin and in the clothes you're wearing, and don't take yourself too seriously, then that's quite a sexual thing." Playing down her role in inspiring a generation of female music icons such as Karen O from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, she rejects gender as an element in her career: "I've never considered myself as at the forefront of any kind of movement. I mean, I feel un-gender [sic] specific myself." However, you've only to witness her sexually aggressive live performances and listen to her seductively brutal lyrics for that denial to ring hollow.
With all her talk of new challenges and a hunger for learning, Harvey exudes a restless air. In addition to writing songs for a new film by Terry Gilliam, she has recently produced and written for Marianne Faithfull's new album.
The quest for new challenges has taken her to a number of musical collaborations in recent years: Thom Yorke on the track The Mess We're In, Josh Homme for his Desert Sessions and a live performance with Vincent Gallo among them.
"The thought of the Desert Sessions was terrifying, so I immediately did it," Harvey states, revealing again her contrary personality.
And the future? "It might be a while before we see another album," she explains: "I feel like I need to go into a few different areas before I come back to just concentrating on my music."
With Harvey still itching to try something even more different to her past work, only she knows what might emerge.
14th Oct 2004