Polly Jean Harvey glides on stage, skinny frame squeezed into a stuffy, Victorian dress, slings on her electric guitar and breaks into To Bring You My Love. It's a brilliant, incongruous start for the English singer who has played chameleon her whole career. She's not about to stop
now.
Tonight it's the PJ Harvey freak show as she plays on the creepy atmospherics of her eighth album, White Chalk. She crisscrosses the stage, moving between three guitars, a honky old upright piano lined with fairy lights, drum machine, harmonica she wears like a neck brace, Rhodes keyboard, tiny synth, maracas, cymbal she bashes like a petulant kid and autoharp she plays like a guitar.
"I've got a bit of a jip in the old knee tonight," she hoots, as if to make a point that all this austerity is ironic.
While she's not to be messed with in the heavy songs, she's polite and good-humoured between them. And you've got to love a woman who appreciates 80s disco lights, a hilarious gesture to accompany her oddball electroclash moment.
Then she morphs into a little girl lost who has sprung from a sepia photo to sing the ghostly When Under Ether, White Chalk and later, a haunting performance of Silence. She turns on the metronome, thumps out the chords and delivers a squeal so spine-chilling it's as though the devil in the title of the song has turned up as her accompaniment. She's even tinkered with new song Grow Grow Grow.
Dotted around the newer songs are reconfigured moments from the past. Even when it's just Harvey on electric guitar screaming over distortion, she's a picture of control. There are thrilling minimal versions of Down By The Water, Angelene, C'mon Billy, her friend and support act Mick Harvey joining in on piano before a deserved standing ovation. It's a brave, eccentric and heart-warming performance that proves Harvey has only become more loopy and adventurous with age.
The Bad Seed's support perfectly set the scene: dark sea shanties, all droning guitars and wistful imagery.
Who: PJ Harvey, with Mick Harvey.
Where: The Civic.
Reviewed by: Rebecca Barry.
