PJ Harvey
Sui generis groundbreaker. By Victoria Segal.
In her current form, PJ Harvey is the singing chronicler of war zones who performs on The Andrew Marr Show, and the poet who reads from The Hollow Of The Hand, her recent collection inspired by travels in Kosovo and Afghanistan. She has travelled a very long way since the trio that bore her name released their 1991 debut single Dress, a song about the complexities of living in a female skin. From a subject that could not have been any closer to her heart to distant global calamities, Harvey has, over the course of nine albums, dramatically widened her reach, becoming one of those rare artists who combine ongoing creative vitality with a kind of stately gravitas (she even accepted an MBE in 2013). Emerging through the clamour of grunge and riot grrrl, Harvey initially displayed trace elements of modish early-’90s aesthetics – big boots, loud guitars – yet quickly became a wholly distinctive presence: rural, bohemian, fierce yet notably reticent. Raised in Dorset by artistic Captain Beefheart fans, she joined John Parish’s Bristol-based collective Automatic Dlamini in 1988 before leaving to form her own band. Originally planning to study sculpture at Central Saint Martins, her art school path was disrupted by the success of Dress and the visceral debut album Dry. If this unexpected attention was the original impetus for using props and costumes as a distancing mechanism, Harvey became a natural at reinvention. Since 1993’s brutal, brilliant Rid Of Me, she has found new ways to express her great themes of physical longing and its betrayals, the need for self-preservation, the desire for control. The rogue blues diva of To Bring You My Love, the electronica anchoress of Is This Desire?, the historian-poet of Let England Shake – each incarnation has tapped into new and compelling power sources. Whether she’s looking inwards or out, it’s been a formidable display of vision.
“EACH INCARNATION HAS TAPPED INTO NEW AND COMPELLING POWER SOURCES.”