HARVEY’S CRYSTAL DREAM!
The Roundhouse, London, September 28 An eldritch take on rural rock with impressively deep roots
POLLY Harvey walks on stage into a set which responds beautifully to light. At times it can seem like a wall of flaking plaster in a neglected urban space, at others a leaf skeleton. With dramatic underlighting it can resemble a bat colony, photographed in mid-flight. The immediate impression, though, is of branches – the better, perhaps, to establish her in a new context, queen of rural rock.
That, anyway, is the effect. Harvey herself emerges in the white dress she wears on the back cover of her new album – something like the Victorian sanatorium calico in which she appeared on the cover of her 2007 album White Chalk. This was the ghostly giant of an album that reconnected her with the Dorset soil after 15 years in the MTV buzzbin, and with a drama closer to home. The echo doesn’t seem accidental.
Harvey still has a sufficient audience for a big rock show, but the aim for this evening is clearly for something more intimate. Lambs are bleating and birds calling as she sets the evening’s agenda by playing her I Inside The Old Year Dying album all the way through. It’s not a tactic to win over wavering punters – but it’s not as though Harvey attracts many of those. Instead this is a show to draw us in rather than blow us away. Newly independent after 25 years on Island Records, this tour may map the road ahead for her: a concerted break with the mainstream which concludes with wild artistic experimentation and plush theatre shows, a Tom Waits move to the golden ticket model.
Indeed, Harvey seems delighted with a show pursuing changed goals. Her band (Jean-marc Butty on drums; guitarists John Parish and Giovanni Ferrario; former Too Pure/clawfist contemporary James Johnston as her price-match Warren Ellis on violin, keys and vocals) bring the minimal blues twang. She, meanwhile, slinks around the stage in contemporary dance attitudes which bring different drama to the new songs. Occasionally she retreats to a seat and a small lectern. The air of a late 19th-early 20th entertainment is also compounded with some impressive, lo-fi stagecraft. During “The Garden” later in the evening, her shadow looms above James Johnston in a manner which suggests she’s shooting for a vibe as much MR James as Captain Beefheart.
As stripped-down as is their setting, these songs aren’t luddite. Instead, they offer an alternative timeline, which can accommodate both autotune and autoharp; field recordings and the mention of Elvis Presley. As she exits the stage with the new album set complete, she leaves the band at the front in their braces and fatigues to sing “The Colour Of The Earth” from Let England Shake. They’re modern but out of time – a ragged crew awaiting final inspection by Billy Childish before embarking for Gallipoli.
The last time Uncut saw Polly Harvey in a London theatre, she was in the audience with her mum, watching Bob Dylan at the London Palladium, and it’s not too much of a stretch to see the second half of her show in terms of what Dylan was presenting then. PJ Harvey’s catalogue isn’t the same volume as Dylan’s, but it’s a 30-year career with huge depth and variation. In the second half, as she roams through recent material from Let England Shake and further back into more neglected albums like Is This Desire? (even the not much loved
Uh Huh Her) she presents her older music in a new light – not as greatest hits or deep cuts, but as a seasonal living thing, a tree with roots.
An important genealogical line in this is Harvey’s own guitar-playing, which is introduced little by little as the evening goes on. When she made the break from the Camden Falcon and her original trio, she also left the guitar behind en route to developing a more dynamic live presentation. In this context, it now assists her as she digs back into her older material, the four-track demo version of herself, things getting heavier as they go. “The Desperate Kingdom Of Love” shows how she subtly twists an apparently simple composition. “Mansize” assumes a sinister shape beyond its Rid Of Me gnarliness, which allows it to socialise alongside material from To Bring You My Love.
Given the way the band have embedded in Harvey’s older material, you might imagine a logical conclusion involving “Sheela-na-gig”; something to satisfy both the prevalent air of British mystery and the trip back into early material. That, though, would be far too on the nose. After a brief pause, Harvey plays a second encore of “White Chalk”, a devastating and minimal piece to underline what we’ve been watching. This is music seeking to reach further, humbly digging down beyond style, back into geological time.