21st April, 2009. An extraordinary sound is filling the sold-out auditorium of the Shepherd's Bush Empire. It is cracked and plaintive, the voice of an old crone on her deathbed. On stage is a frail figure, dressed in black, hunched over the microphone. She is utterly absorbed in the song, which is accompanied by the seasick lurching of a fairground organ. At times, her cry fades almost to a whisper: "I don't know what silence means/ It could mean/ Anything."
The last chord hangs in the air for a few seconds. Now the singer turns and looks directly at the audience, eyes wide. The old crone is gone and in her place stands a strutting dominatrix: "He had chicken liver balls/ he had chicken liver spleen/ he had chicken liver heart/ made of chicken liver parts… I want his fucking ass/ I WANT YOUR FUCKING ASS." After two minutes of venomous squealing she bows sweetly to the audience and smiles. "Thank you very much indeed," she says, in a soft west country burr. "Thank you for listening."
The inimitable Polly Jean Harvey—she uses her initials for her stage name, PJ Harvey—is an uncannily adept shapeshifter. During the course of a live performance she adopts and discards characters as frequently as Beyoncé might change her hotpants. At times her thin frame looks so fragile you could blow her over; at others she is terrifying and as tightly coiled as a spring. During the course of a career spanning almost 20 years she has been likened, with varying degrees of inaccuracy, to many things: Patti Smith (a comparison she dismisses as "lazy journalism"); Medusa; a gender-bender; a vamp; the first lady of British indie rock. She has flirted with each successive incarnation, only to dismiss it with some scorn and move on.
Yet from these inauspicious beginnings Harvey managed, within a year, to come up with one of the most startling albums of the 1990s: Dry, a stripped down record that came out on the small indie label Too Pure in 1992. When she was just 22, Rolling Stone proclaimed her both the year's best new songwriter and best female singer. For a performer who had thought this album might be her one shot at musical expression, the future had suddenly arrived.
Harvey herself—hardly a woman of mild tastes—has described Dry as her most extreme record. The cover featured a close-up photograph of her bruised-looking mouth, as if the songs had subjected her to a beating. In a voice that veered from a whisper to a screech to a deep groan, she sang about the rawest and least palatable aspects of femininity: the blood and hair, the vulnerability, the violent desires. Tracks such as "Happy and Bleeding" ("I'm happy and bleeding for you") and "Dress" ("filthy tight the dress is filthy") drew unselfconsciously on a sexuality that was both damaged and aggressive, pleasure-seeking and self-harming.
It should have been unlistenable, yet there was something about this raw, aching sound. Like Nirvana, whose seminal album Nevermind was released the previous year, Harvey knew exactly when to pull a song back from the brink of chaos with a compelling riff or burst of melody. Indeed, Nirvana's front man Kurt Cobain later named Dry one of his favourite 20 albums.
With Lily Allen and Amy Winehouse currently the most provocative female artists in the charts, it is easy to forget how radically some rock acts challenged assumptions about women in the early 1990s. Performers like Courtney Love and her band Hole muscled their way into the grunge scene, wearing ripped baby-doll dresses and living the rock'n'roll lifestyle to the full (and later paying for it: their bassist, Kristin Pfaff, eventually died of a drug overdose, while Love has been in and out of rehab for many years). The music press grouped a number of female rock acts together into a movement that came to be referred to as "Riot Grrl." This included, at the more extreme end, L7, who pelted their audiences with used tampons and bared their—not exactly gym-toned—buttocks on the late-night television show The Word.
Closer to a mainstream position were Björk and Tori Amos, with whom Harvey posed on the cover of Q magazine in 1994. For sheer bloody-minded strength of character and artistic conviction, Harvey perhaps has most in common with Björk— another female musical pioneer whose work has repeatedly crossed established boundaries. Harvey's image and music, however, have always been more explicitly sexual than Björk's. Moreover, while she was happy to provoke with images and music—she once caused outrage by posing, skinny and nude, on the cover of the NME—she always reacted defensively to any attempt to categorise her politically. "I wouldn't call myself a feminist because I don't understand the term or the baggage it takes along with it," she told one interviewer. "Sometimes it seems to me that too much can be talked about and not enough done." She drove nails into the coffin of her androgynous image in 1995, when she appeared at Glastonbury wearing a pink catsuit and lashings of red lipstick.
Towards the end of the 1990s, Harvey seemed intent on proving that she could break out of the art-rock fringe and succeed as a mainstream act. She moved to America and produced Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea, an album of much softer, less original songs that included collaborations with Radiohead's Thom Yorke. The album won the Mercury Music Prize in 2001 (in a typically dark piece of timing, Harvey received the news on 11th September), but also marked a creative low point. "It did what I was trying to do, which was to make an album full of great pop songs," she said recently. "But that's not really where my heart is."
Unusually for a female performer, she seems ever more creative and committed to her art as she approaches the end of her thirties. In 2007, in the most subtle and self-confident of her reinventions to date, she brought out White Chalk—a haunting, ethereal album on which she played piano (an instrument she had to learn from scratch) and sang like an angel on Valium. For the first time, she had found a sound that was at once beautiful, eminently listenable and faithful to her dark artistic vision.
Harvey no longer discusses her private life, but it has been widely remarked upon that she still lives alone in the Dorset countryside and that her only relationship on record was a brief one, with Nick Cave, an Australian singer with similarly gothic tendencies. Her songs have always been filled with children, usually drowned or otherwise lost, but Harvey herself has chosen to channel all her creative energies into her work. "When Under Ether" from White Chalk was a heart-stopping song that seemed to be about an abortion: "lay down on the table/ waist down undressed/ Look up to the ceiling/ feeling happiness/ Something's inside me/ unborn and unblessed/ disappears in the ether/ one world to the next."
This March, she released another new album, A Woman A Man Walked By, her second collaboration with John Parish. It does nothing to challenge White Chalk's position as her finest work, but nevertheless confirms that she is an artist confident enough to put out interesting experiments as well as fully-formed show-stoppers. The first single, "Black-Hearted Love," is a rip-roaring return to indie territory, and there is a healthy dose of slower, more menacing tracks such as the eery falsetto "California Kills Me." "Pig Will Not," which has been much remarked-upon in all the reviews because it includes a section in which Harvey barks like a dog, coming close to self-parody—one hopes intentionally.
It's in this latest album that she's taking on tour tonight. And, as the Shepherd's Bush show starts to draw to a close, Harvey stops the barking and the cussing, and her voice softens into "Passionless, Pointless," a tender and beautiful portrait of a relationship in its death throes: "you slept/ facing the wall/ and you wanted less than I wanted." The auditorium is silent; the audience have entered fully into her world. And, for all its darkness and difficulty, it is a surprisingly exhilarating place to be.
