DONT LOOK BACK
JANUARY, 1995. Polly Jean Harvey is holding rehearsals for her forthcoming tour in DeVinchies – a small nightclub in Dorset, close to where she grew up. This trip to the West Country gives Harvey’s new bandmates a chance to see at first hand where their patron came from. In between rehearsing material from Harvey’s forthcoming album, To Bring You My Love, the musicians spend time at the family home or out exploring West Bay – the picturesque coastal town where Harvey retreated two years previously to write the cathartic Rid Of Me. These new recruits – seasoned musicians who have played with Captain Beefheart and Tom Waits – are even shown round Thomas Hardy’s Wessex by Harvey’s mother, Eva; their road trips soundtracked by Eva’s bootleg cassette of Blood On The Tracks outtakes.
“TO BRING YOU MY LOVE TOTALLY SUBVERTED HER IMAGE”
JOHN PARISH
Like her hero Dylan, at this point in her career, Harvey is demonstrating her remarkable capacity for change and reinvention. Rid Of Me had been recorded by a trio – Harvey, Rob Ellis and Steve Vaughan. A raw album of frazzled nerves and frayed neuroses, it was harsher, uglier and more extreme than her 1992 debut, Dry. To Bring You My Love, meanwhile, is a more expansive, out-going album, recorded with new collaborators – musicians like Jean-Marc Butty, Mick Harvey, Flood and John Parish who are still working with her 25 years later. “To Bring You My Love was foundational to her career,” says Parish. “It really allowed her to go wherever she wanted to go. That was a pretty conscious decision by Polly. She’d been known as a guitar-playing rock singer on Rid Of Me. But To Bring You My Love totally subverted that.”
This phantasmagorical transformation was, it transpired, incredibly well realised. Up until this point, Harvey had been celebrated for a certain viscerality, for a frenzy of love and sex and retribution, that had blurred the lines between what was confessional and what was dramatic in her work. Now, Harvey was breaking free of herself, to explore larger and more extravagant truths. Songs were now narratives – featuring a roll call of filicidal mothers, serial killers and other monstaz. She abandoned her original guitar-bass-drums trio and expanding her sound to incorporate keyboards, strings and a range of other effects – including, at one stage, a plastic dinosaur. Her tours became extravagant live pageants as Harvey strutted on stage in catsuit, looking every inch the pop star; far removed from the guitar-wielding firebrand of her trio days. While Rid Of Me’s cover was a candid black-and-white portrait, To Bring You My Love featured a glossy shot of a supine Harvey in bright red dress and lipstick. It was complete reinvention – of sound, lyrics, personality and image – but every bit as serious and compelling as her previous persona. Not for the last time, Harvey found herself exploring masks and characters, trying them on for size then moving to the next.
When American guitarist Joe Gore first heard Harvey’s demos for To Bring You My Love, he realised immediately what she had accomplished. “It was a masterpiece, and it would be really hard to fuck up,” he says. “The work was done before anybody else got involved. She was like an actor creating characters and the characters were already in place.”
If the Harvey of was a character, perhaps the same could be said of the spurned and vengeful narrator from ? The issue of where Polly Jean
