Document and eyewitness
fter the black-booted emotional guerrilla, the self-described “Joan Crawford on acid” drag queen, the chalk-white Victorian waif and the f lamboyantly feathered salon poet, Polly Harvey’s latest look has been a surprise. For someone who has always masked and guarded her privacy fiercely, she has recently gone for a new transparency. Not only did sessions for her ninth album take place in public view, the joyfully voyeuristic Recording In Progress installation at Somerset House last year, but there’s also a clarity of purpose behind the songs. “I took a plane to a foreign land/And said I’ll write down what I’ll find,” Harvey sings on The Orange Monkey, lyrics that originally appeared in her poetry collection The Hollow Of The Hand. The Hope Six Demolition Project is the result of this pull towards the old-fashioned field trip, Harvey condensing her journeys to Afghanistan, Kosovo and the deprived neighbourhoods of Washington DC into these songs. Largely swerving the pitfalls that could have resulted in a grand tour of misery, she has created careful reportage, combing the debris of war and strife for significant detail, meaningful resonances. She’s not gone into direct battle or embedded herself with the military, but by cutting through the aftermath of violence with film-maker and photographer Seamus Murphy, she has found the traces of conf lict, listened for the echoes, visited the ruined places to see how they work – or more often, don’t. The expansion of Harvey’s work since her 1992 debut Dry has been remarkable, moving from the intimate specifics of the body, gender and sex, through personal mythology and love songs, and into the vast ugly spaces of global politics. While Let England Shake plunged into the darkness of 20th century history to understand Harvey’s homeland, The Hope Six Demolition Project widens her reach further. Her words are stark and clear: there’s little unnecessary emotional accelerant thrown on to fire up drama. Instead, she charts a terrifying landscape of lost children and tidal waste, people discarded along with syringes and stray dogs. At best, she communicates what she’s seen with crisp concision, a few strong charcoal lines. “I saw a displaced family eating a cold horse’s hoof,” she sings on A Line In The Sand, using the same high register that eerily permeated 2007’s White Chalk. The Ministry Of Defence describes the rising rubbish that mocks the title of a destroyed building: “A white jawbone/Syringes/Razor /A plastic
Aspoon.” Chain Of Keys, meanwhile, is as sharply composed as one of Murphy’s photographs, a record of a caretaker monitoring abandoned houses in Kosovo: “The woman’s old and dressed in black /She keeps her hands behind her back.” There’s an occasional clunkiness (“imagine what her eyes have seen”) and Let England Shake’s visionary fever is lacking. Yet there’s an authority in Harvey’s voice, her brisk musical and lyrical stride demanding the listener keep up. Urgent opening track The Community Of Hope makes this explicit, a nightmarish tour around a collapsing Washington DC neighbourhood. The album’s title comes from the US government’s controversial Hope VI urban renewal programme, and the song examines the reality, Harvey as guide: “Here’s the old mental institution/Now the homeland security base,” she sings, while the school is a “shithole” and MLK is the name of a deli. Something is thriving, though: “They’re gonna put a Wal-Mart here.” The structures of power loom over these songs. On the tense mellotron blare of Near The Memorials To Vietnam And Lincoln, she skirts the peripheries of the grand monuments, focusing instead on the margins: a municipal worker throwing rubbish into a “doorway to the underworld”, a boy tricking birds by pretending to feed them. More betrayals, more lack of concern for small things. The Ministry Of Social Affairs has its squalling brass underpinned by a lift from Jerry McCain’s That’s What They Want (“money, honey”) while Medicinals lyrically imagines the healing plants still growing under the National Mall. Again, people are dislocated, cut off from all kinds of roots: “Do you see that woman sitting in the wheelchair with a Redskins cap on backwards?…/She sips from a bottle, a new painkiller for the native people.” On River Anacostia, rippled through with lines from the spiritual Wade In The Water, Harvey imagines a saviour walking on the contaminated surface, “f lowing with the poisons from the naval yards.” This corruption pours through these songs, detectable in the martial beat, the patrolling percussion, the saxophones that suddenly blast into chaos. Male voices (including John Parish, Mick Harvey, Terry Edwards and James Johnston) mass in an ominous chorus on Chain Of Keys and echo through River Anacostia. On The Ministry Of Defence, Linton Kwesi Johnson declaims presidentially (“This is The Ministry Of Remains”) over hawkish guitars and Harvey’s keening vocals. The Wheel, a heavily metaphorical chant built around the sight of a fairground ride in Kosovo, is propelled by frantic handclaps, the sound of something out of control, a new destructive cycle about to spin more children into oblivion. When Harvey does apparently break her unf linching reportage, it’s in the high, unstable, etherised voice on refugee-camp lament A Line In The Sand: “What we did/ Why we did it/I make no excuse/We got things wrong / But I believe we also did some good”. It’s hard to know how to take this in the context of such a desperately bleak picture. No wonder that her record of the graffiti scrawled on The Ministry Of Defence feels less ambivalent: “This is how the world will end.” To watch, to bear witness, to report back – that is the impetus behind these vivid songs. The geopolitical web might be too tangled for anyone to unpick, but by focusing on the details, strong, clear and compassionate, Harvey once again means the world.