“Sheela-na-gig, Sheela-na-gig
You exhibitionist
Sheela-na-gig, Sheela-na-gig
You exhibitionist…”
–Lyrics of “Sheela-Na-Gig” by PJ Harvey
“…she turns herself into a pure appearance, an artificial construct with which to trap the desires of others.”
–Jean Baudrillard, Seduction
PJ Harvey turned 55 a couple of weeks ago on Oct 9. When she broke into public view with her first single, “Dress,” in December, 1991, she was 22. And though she hasn’t been out of the public eye since that time, her image has gone through a considerable transformation.
PJH’s first two albums, “Dry” (1992 on Too Pure), and “Rid Of Me” (1993 on Island) were shocking in their raw, transgressive expression of need and desire. The sound and feel of “Dry” was cold, controlled and dangerous – it reminded me of Gordon Gano’s angry, desperate, folk-punk adolescent breakdowns on the first Violent Femmes LP, especially the song “Add It Up” where everything, heart, soul, body, are put at risk: the wager is everything and you always lose.
“Rid of Me” was the same: only more so. With production by Steve Albini, the album comes off as a primal scream session, every emotion, every trauma, pushed into hyper-consciousness. The sound -the voice, the guitar- is white hot, waves of molten lava welling up under tremendous pressure from a core of chthonic hurt.
It probably wasn’t possible to keep up this pace, this risk. PJ dissolved her band, skipped 1994, and released “To Bring You My Love” in early 1995, an album of serious, polished pop/rock songs, radio friendly in a way that her earlier material had not been.
Now, at 55 years old, with ten studio albums and two prestigious Mercury Music Prizes to her credit, Polly Jean Harvey has become, improbably perhaps, a national treasure for England. Consider this note from her Wikipedia page about her 2011 album, “Let England Shake,” her second Mercury Prize winner: “Harvey began writing lyrics for the album before setting the words to music. She has cited the poetry of Harold Pinter and T.S. Eliot as influences, as well as the artwork of Salvador Dalí and Francisco de Goya, the music of The Doors, The Pogues, and The Velvet Underground and the films of Stanley Kubrick, Ken Loach and Ari Folman. She has also spoken of researching the history of conflict, including the Gallipoli Campaign, and reading modern-day testimonies from civilians and soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
That’s a whole lot of legit for a young woman who, 30 odd years ago, was on the Jay Leno Tonight Show telling stories about growing up on a farm and ‘wringing testicles’ off of sheep!
The review below for the PJ Harvey and John Parish collaboration, Dance Hall at Louse Point, is from a short lived incarnation of the many Wax Trax fanzines in the early Eighties. This one, called the Wax Trax Fax, was published in October 1996.
JOHN PARISH & POLLY JEAN HARVEY ‘Dance Hall At Louse Point ’ LP (Island/US, 1996)
Positioned closer to the corrosive hysteria of 1993’s ‘Rid of Me’ than to the lacquered mannerism of last year’s ‘To Bring You My Love’, ‘Dance Hall at Louse Point’ (the ‘louse point’ being an oblique reference to a Willem De Kooning painting) is Polly’s collaboration with John Parish who played guitar and percussion with her on last year’s tour.
Sketched out during the tour, Parish would give Polly a tape of the music he had composed and she would sing her own lyrics to that music into another tape recorder. After coming off the road, they re-fashioned these demos at Small World Studios in Polly’s home-town, Yeovil, to come up with the set of twelve songs we have here: eleven originals (this includes one instrumental, the title track) and one cover, Peggy Lee’s melodramatic ‘Is That All There Is?’, an existential torch song with obvious appeal to Polly’s sometimes (soap)operatic sense of herself and music.
Both Polly and Parish seem to want to downplay the album, emphasizing its casual beginnings, loose construction and off-hand execution. My own feeling is that Polly has taken advantage of this relative anonymity (such as putting Parish’s name first on the album) to exorcise some of her many demons. As in much of her earlier work, the sense of risk here is paramount. On songs like ‘Taut’, ‘City Of No Sun’, ‘Civil War Correspondent’ and ‘Un Cercle Autour Du Soleil’, Polly’s manic and multiple personalities take the stage: she breaks her voice into its constituent components—now guttural and threatening, shifting to high and piercing, a shriek riven with fear and desperation, now urgent, now scornful, seductive, pleading, now angry, molten, bitter…
Parish’s music is, not surprisingly, no match for this voice, for these words. It is blues based, guitar oriented and sounds very good here in this context — & because of Polly’s extraordinary and coercive voice, most of his melodies sound like PJ Harvey songs.
The album begins with Polly’s wordless keening on the brief and melancholy ‘Girl’. ‘Rope Bridge Crossing’ is a hard, clean blues, emphatic and urgent. ‘City of No Sun’ picks up the tempo as Polly pleads, ‘Love me tenderly my darling’ before breaking down into hysteria and loss, her shrieking falsetto unhinging whatever comfort can be found in love. ‘That Was My Veil’ is slow and breathy—acoustic chords with a ‘Phantom of the Opera’ style organ break mid song. ‘Urn Of Dead Flowers In A Drained Pool’ (hmm, note the doubling up of Freudian images in the title alone…) is hard and repetitive, utilizing striking contrasts of tone and range, cross-grain harmonies and shrill voices.
‘Civil War Correspondent’ is a sudden change to darker chords, a deep bass sound rumbling in the background —’words leave my heart dry, words can’t save my life.’ Love is a civil war, a struggle between those who have every reason to love one another and yet who, against all reason, fall to bitter, intractable strife and destruction. Here, everything works—the song is extraordinarily dramatic, the music and voice thick, rich and beautiful.
‘Taut’ begins with tape hiss and Polly’s high,childlike wail, ‘Jesus, save me’, before a burst of chords and dirty, ragged lead guitar. ‘Can I tell you a story?’—& oh yes she does tell us—in a thick, wrecked whisper about the boy she loved who bought a car, ‘…the first thing he ever owned apart from me.’ The song is a mini-drama on a single scary theme, ‘I would do anything but it was never enough…’ It never is.
‘Un Cercle…’ is more blues, reverb guitar and falsetto—with a great, drawn-out guitar break, slow and anguished. There is almost a sense of Polly’s voice overpowering the instruments, forcing, coercing a feeling Of hearing harmony out of the possibilities of noise that lurk everywhere at hand.
‘Heela’ is loud and amped — the ‘heela’(healer) — ’he put his hands on me and showed me what I am.’
Polly doesn’t really add much to ‘Is That All There Is?’—a song that is already a parody even when done straight. ‘Dance Hall At Louse Point’ is a brief, understated instrumental and ‘Lost Fun Zone’ closes the album with a (con)fusion of love and salvation.
Hiding behind the screen of ‘collaboration’, Polly has fashioned an extremely personal work —intense, driven, scary— only Diamanda Galas could take more risks with a voice. At her best, which is often, Polly gives the listener the eerie feeling of hearing Kurt Weill re-writing the Howling Wolf songbook—a post-modern blues coping with a world were values and beliefs have decayed into mere form, mere lip-service—but here, in this work, we hear her busy filing sharp those teeth that lie behind the lips.
0 comments