‘Am I still any good? Have I still got it?’: PJ Harvey on doubt, desire and deepest, darkest Dorset
Star power is a rare thing in music today, stripped away by social media overexposure and a heritage industry that trades on former glories. But PJ Harvey has an otherworldly air as she walks into a restaurant at the Barbican in London for one of her first interviews about her music in more than a decade. A thunderstorm has broken the June heatwave, and Harvey, 53, had to shelter under a ledge to keep dry on her way here. Still, Harvey looks pristine in a black vest and tiny black leather shorts, her famous dark hair in soft, shoulder-length curls, a fine gold chain bearing two rings around her neck.
This is Polly Jean Harvey off-duty. As a musician and performer, PJ Harvey rivals David Bowie for reinvention. Her fans can plot the moment they fell for her by era-specific archetypes and sounds: was it the austere bun of her debut, 1992’s Dry? Or perhaps the lurid leopard print of 1993’s Rid of Me? For me, it was the white suit, red lipstick and gleeful strut of This Is Love from 2000’s Mercury prize-winning Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea, leering out of MTV2 and suddenly making pop music look wan.
For 30 years, Harvey’s only constant has been her dogged refusal to repeat herself. She set the bar high from day one: she was a budding art student from a farm in rural Dorset, but with her ribald, violent songs about sex and subjugation, the issue of where she had come from felt like another matter entirely. Harvey’s brawny early 90s albums satirised femininity as a burdensome form of drag (though she refused associations with the burgeoning feminist punk scene) and were intended, she said then, “to humiliate myself and make the listener feel uncomfortable”. Annie Clark, AKA St Vincent, tells me she found salvation in Harvey’s refusal of dogma. “She said: I am an artist, not a mouthpiece for whatever mercurial musings, sympathy Olympics, cause du jour. She rejected your moral purity for her own ritual obliteration.”
Nor could anyone have guessed then where she was going – Harvey’s 2011 album Let England Shake saw
