On stage, she's a sex siren in a pink catsuit. In person, PJ Harvey is serene, self-contained and undaunted about turning 40. Amy Raphael met the English singer down at her local ...
Early for our interview, I encounter Polly Jean Harvey in the freezing toilets of a pub in Somerset in the west of England. She is locked in a cubicle, changing outfits and shivering. I drop the toilet paper and it rolls under the partition. She laughs and pushes it back.
She is chatty, friendly even, suggesting a visit to the local church
in East Coker where TS Eliot's ashes are buried. She thinks his heart may be here but the rest of him elsewhere.
A little later we meet formally and sit at an old wooden table near the back of the pub. Next to her is John Parish, her old friend, musical soulmate and sometime collaborator. He has co-produced several of her albums, including her last - the beautiful, piano-driven White Chalk. In 1996 they made Dance Hall at Louse Point, with Parish writing the music and Harvey the lyrics. Now they're back with the bruising, brilliant A Woman A Man Walked By. Harvey luxuriates in Parish's presence, not only as a musical peer but also as a protective force: "Interviews are less draining, less intense with John."
All the same, Harvey would rather not be at this table, talking about herself or her music; when we first met in 1995 she confessed to an almost paralysing shyness. As she lets loose on stage, whether in a long white dress or, most memorably, in a figure-hugging pink catsuit at Glastonbury, so Harvey writes lyrics without any notion of self-censorship. Since forming the band PJ Harvey in Dorset in 1991, she has sung about sex and menstruation ("Tarzan
... stop your screaming/ Can't you see I'm bleeding?" on Me-Jane), about murder and longing (Down by the Water). But, she will insist, these are just stories. And even if they're told in the first person, they are not personal. Early on, Elvis Costello observed that all her songs "seemed to be about blood and [expletive]", and for a while she was cast as the female Nick Cave.
If Harvey's lyrics were really taken straight from her diary, I suggest, she'd be a serial killer by now. She laughs. "Absolutely. The sexual metaphors in the early songs were coupled with being a much younger woman who was beginning to explore those areas.
"I write differently now because I've covered a lot of ground and I don't feel I need to cover it again."
Harvey is always tough on herself musically; most of all she is loath to repeat herself. So each record is different. Rid of Me was defiantly non-commercial, from its black-and-white cover image of an androgynous Harvey flinging wet hair around to its abrasive, claustrophobic music. Yet by the time she wrote Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea in New York in 2000, she was ready to embrace pop (her most successful album, but it left her feeling "unsatisfied").
Both Harvey and Parish have an old-fashioned approach to music, preferring tape to digital in the studio, vinyl to iTunes at home. They are both strong-willed and brutally honest with one another, which occasionally leads to week-long impasses. In the end, however, it means they are completely happy with their creative output.
The bigger question, perhaps, is this: In the year she turns 40, is Polly Harvey any more content?
She had a happy if sheltered childhood in Dorset, where she was the only girl in the village. She kept her hair cropped and was happy to be mistaken for a boy until, at 14, she became interested in the opposite sex. Her parents often woke Polly and her brother by playing Captain Beefheart and Bob Dylan at 3am. She saw Dylan and the Stones before she was 10. As a teenager, she played the saxophone and guitar in bands but "never entertained music as a vocation".
In the early 90s, she moved to London to study sculpture but ended up deferring for a year when offered a record deal. What happened next is unclear: old interviews talk of a first nervous breakdown around the time of Rid of Me and another in 1995. In the past she has been quoted as saying, "I was not well," and, "I was very mixed up."
When I met her back in 1995, Harvey talked about the end of 1991 as a time when her first big relationship ended and London proved overwhelmingly alienating. She told me that she returned to Dorset, locked herself away in a flat above a cafe and wrote Rid of Me (although she now has a flat in LA, she still spends most of her time in Dorset).
At some point during the interview, the barman, who had known Polly most of her life, told her she was "too thin to go on tour". If she's had an eating disorder in the past, Harvey is not going to discuss it. She looks great now and perhaps she considers the matter private, history, irrelevant.
Years of reticence have made Harvey a mysterious figure in the way few pop stars are these days. Bjork memorably said that she reminded her of Clint Eastwood: "Everything is understated." We do know, however, that she dated Nick Cave and broke his heart (as documented on his 1997 album The Boatman's Call). She was once seen running around with actor Vincent Gallo, but both have denied a romance. In 1995, she said she was broody - is this still the case?
Harvey looks horrified. "Did I say that?
Gosh! Hmmm. I definitely feel ..." She sits perfectly still. "It's not something I need to go out and pursue. I feel open ... if it was the right moment and all of that. It's all some of my good friends wanted to do, have kids. I've never had that feeling. Then again, I don't rule it out."
Harvey is a mass of contradictions. Right from the start of her career, when she was in her early 20s, she has been in control ("I've always had a very clear idea of what I want to do musically"), and yet she has always refused to label herself a feminist. Even now she can't think of a single moment where she's been discriminated against as a female rock star. "Maybe I'm just purely lucky. If I've come up against obstacles I've always found another way around it."
Parish acknowledges that female artists are usually packaged differently to male artists, but insists that Harvey stands outside the norm. "We could talk about Duffy, Adele and the new wave of female artists in the same sentence; you can't do that with PJ Harvey because there isn't anyone else. Polly has always been in control of her career and was never going to be manipulated like so many women are."
The pub is ready to shut. There is time for one more question, so I ask how she feels about turning 40. She grimaces. "I remember turning 30 and it feeling really not OK. It was so hard ..." Then she catches herself and smiles quickly. "But 40 feels OK. It's going to be all right."
LOWDOWN
Who: PJ (Polly Jean) Harvey
Albums: Dry (1992), Rid of Me (1993), To Bring You My Love (1995), Dance Hall at Louse Point (1996), Is This Desire? (1998), Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea (2000), Uh Huh Her (2004), PJ Harvey: The Peel Sessions (2006), White Chalk (2007)
Latest: New album, A Woman A Man Walked By, is out now
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