PJ Harvey

PJ Harvey

Polly Jean Harvey (born 9 October 1969) is an English musician and singer-songwriter. She was raised in Corscombe, Dorset and Yeovil, Somerset. Her parents were both fans of American blues music. Their record collection exposed Harvey not only to the blues but also to Captain Beefheart, which would both become major influences on Harvey’s own musical style.

Harvey is primarily a vocalist and guitarist, but is also proficient with a wide range of instruments including piano, organ, bass, saxophone, and autoharp. She began her professional career in the early 1990s by forming a band she named PJ Harvey. She recorded her first two albums with this trio, and when they broke up she continued as a solo artist. Since 1995 she has recorded her albums with various musicians including John Parish, Rob Ellis, Mick Harvey, and Eric Drew Feldman. She has also worked extensively with the producer Flood.

Musically, Harvey dislikes repeating herself, resulting in albums that can sound different from one to the next. She has experimented with such diverse musical styles as rock, pop, electronica, and folk. She is also known for changing her appearance from album to album by altering her mode of dress or hairstyle. Each look is then incorporated into the album's artwork, music videos, and live performances. She often works closely with friend and photographer Maria Mochnacz in developing the visual style of each album.

Among the accolades she has received have been the 2001 Mercury Prize (for 2000's Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea), seven BRIT Award nominations, five Grammy Award nominations and two further Mercury Prize nominations. Rolling Stone named her 1992's Best New Artist and Best Singer Songwriter and 1995's Artist of the Year, and placed two of her albums (Rid of Me, To Bring You My Love) on its 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. She was also rated the number one female rock artist by Q magazine in a 2002 reader poll and was awarded Outstanding Contribution To Music at the 2011 NME Awards.

Biography

Early life

Harvey was born in Bridport, Dorset and brought up on her family's farm in Corscombe, and attended school in nearby Beaminster. The daughter of a stonemason and a sculptor, Harvey grew up on a small sheep farm. At an early age, her parents introduced her to blues music, jazz and art rock, which, she told Rolling Stone in 1995, would later influence her: "I was brought up listening to John Lee Hooker, to Howlin' Wolf, to Robert Johnson, and a lot of Jimi Hendrix and Captain Beefheart. So I was exposed to all these very compassionate musicians at a very young age, and that's always remained in me and seems to surface more as I get older. I think the way we are as we get older is a result of what we knew when we were children." Her time was then spent listening to new romantic bands such as Soft Cell, Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet. In her teenage years, she became a fan of American indie rock bands like Pixies, Television and Slint, though not, as many critics have suspected, Patti Smith (a frequent comparison that Harvey dismisses as "lazy journalism"). More recently she has claimed inspiration from Russian folk music, Italian soundtrack composer Ennio Morricone and classical composers like Arvo Pärt, Samuel Barber and Henryk Górecki.

Early career

Automatic Dlamini (1987–1991)

At the age of 17, Harvey finished school and began writing her own songs. She contributed saxophone, guitar, and backing vocals to her earliest Somerset bands Bologna, the Polekats, and the Three Stoned Weaklings, but it was with Bristol's Automatic Dlamini where she gained extensive experience playing in a band. Formed by John Parish in 1983, Automatic Dlamini consisted of a rotating line-up that at various times included Rob Ellis and Ian Olliver (all three would go on to collaborate with Harvey on various projects). Harvey met Parish through a mutual friend in 1987 and she joined the band a few months later. Providing guitars and background vocals, she travelled with the band when they toured Europe in June and July 1989, and recorded one album with them, Here Catch, Shouted His Father, which was recorded in 1989–90 but never released. Harvey said that while in Automatic Dlamini, "I ended up not singing very much but I was just happy to learn how to play the guitar. I wrote a lot during the time I was with them but my first songs were crap. I was listening to a lot of Irish folk music at the time, so the songs were folky and full of penny whistles and stuff. It was ages before I felt ready to perform my own songs in front of other people." She also credits Parish for teaching her how to perform in front of an audience, saying "after the experience with John's band and seeing him perform I found it was enormously helpful to me as a performer to engage with people in the audience, and I probably did learn that from him, amongst other things."

Even though Harvey left the band in 1991, she formed lasting personal and professional relationships with certain members – especially Parish – who she has referred to as her "musical soul mate." Parish would eventually go on to co-produce Harvey’s albums To Bring You My Love (1995) and White Chalk (2007). He also contributed musically to several of Harvey's solo albums and has toured with her a number of times. As a duo, the pair have recorded two collaborative albums where Parish wrote the music and Harvey penned the lyrics. Rob Ellis joined the first band Harvey formed in 1991 and has also provided drum work on many of Harvey’s albums. Additionally, Parish’s girlfriend in the late 1980s was photographer Maria Mochnacz. She and Harvey became close friends and Mochnacz went on to shoot most of Harvey’s album covers and music videos, contributing significantly to her image.

PJ Harvey Trio (1991–1993)

After leaving Automatic Dlamini in January 1991, Harvey formed her own band that she named PJ Harvey. The trio consisted of Harvey on vocals and guitars, Rob Ellis on drums and Ian Olliver on bass. Olliver later departed to re-join the still-active Automatic Dlamini and was replaced with Steve Vaughan. On the naming of the group, Harvey remarked "I can't guarantee that we'll always want to play together in the same format. But I know that I'd like to continue writing songs for myself so it seemed quite a good move to keep my name for the band." The trio's "disastrous" debut gig was held at a skittle alley in Sherborne's Antelope Hotel. Harvey later recounted the event saying:

We started playing and I suppose there was about fifty people there, and during the first song we cleared the hall. There was only about two people left. And a woman came up to us, came up to my drummer, it was only a three piece, while we were playing and shouted at him "Don't you realize nobody likes you! We'll pay you, you can stop playing, we'll still pay you!"

By that time, Harvey had also completed a foundation art course at Yeovil Art College and had applied to study sculpture at Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design in London, still undecided as to her future career.

Harvey relocated to London and released her debut single "Dress" on the independent label Too Pure in October 1991. It was voted Single of the Week in Melody Maker by guest reviewer John Peel, who admired "the way Polly Jean seems crushed by the weight of her own songs and arrangements, as if the air is literally being sucked out of them ... admirable if not always enjoyable." The following spring she released an equally-acclaimed second single, "Sheela Na Gig", and her first LP Dry in 1992, an album Kurt Cobain of Nirvana cited in his top 20 favourite albums ever, from the book Journals. She also released a limited edition double LP containing both Dry and the demos for Dry, called Dry Demonstration. The trio’s raw, guitar-driven indie rock –  which mixed elements of punk, blues and grunge  – quickly won rave reviews and a strong cult following on both sides of the Atlantic, with Rolling Stone naming the then-22-year-old Harvey the year's Best Songwriter and Best New Female Singer.

She drew media attention in April 1992 when she appeared topless on the cover of the British magazine New Musical Express. Harvey quickly avoided being adopted as a feminist spokesperson, telling Vox that "I wouldn't call myself a feminist because I don't understand the term or the baggage it takes along with it. I'd feel like I really have to go back and study its history to associate myself with it, and I don't feel the need to do that. I'd much rather just get on and do things the way I have been doing them... I think I'd find it quite patronising to be called a Riot Grrrl if I was one of them, but they obviously don't think so." More recently she told Bust: "I don’t ever think about [feminism]. I mean, it doesn't cross my mind. I certainly don’t think in terms of gender when I'm writing songs, and I never had any problems as the result of being female that I couldn't get over. Maybe I'm not thankful for the things that have gone before me, you know. But I don't see that there's any need to be aware of being a woman in this business. It just seems a waste of time." She added, "I don't offer [support] specifically to women; I offer it to people who write music. That's a lot of men."

Harvey then signed to Island Records amid a major-label bidding war. In December 1992, the trio recorded the album Rid of Me, which was engineered by Steve Albini at Pachyderm Recording Studio in Minnesota. To promote the release of the album, the band toured in Europe and the United States during the spring and summer of 1993. When the tour reached America in June, friction was starting to form between the members of the trio. Deborah Frost, writing for Rolling Stone, noticed "an ever widening personal gulf" between the band members, and quoted Harvey as saying "It makes me sad. I wouldn’t have got here without them. I needed them back then-badly. But I don’t need them anymore. We all changed as people." After touring to support U2 in August 1993, the group officially disbanded. When Harvey appeared on The Tonight Show that September, she performed solo. The album 4-Track Demos, released in October 1993, inaugurated her career as a solo artist.

Solo career (1993–present)

As Harvey embarked on her solo career, she explored collaborations with other musicians. To Bring You My Love was produced by Flood and John Parish, and was a worldwide success, selling over one million copies, according to BPI. A more bluesy record than its predecessors, it saw Harvey broadening her sonic palette to include strings, organ and synthesizers. It also generated a surprise modern rock radio hit with the single "Down by the Water." The album received a glowing critical response and ended up being voted Album of the Year by The Village Voice, Rolling Stone, USA Today, People, The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. Harvey was also voted Artist of the Year by Rolling Stone. Her album was ranked third in Spin's "Top 90 Albums of the '90s", behind Nirvana and Public Enemy.

Around this time, Harvey began experimenting with her image and adopting an elaborate, theatrical, almost cabaret edge to her live shows. Where she once performed on stage in simple black leggings, turtleneck sweaters and Doc Martens, she now began performing in ballgowns, pink catsuits, wigs and garish, vampish make-up – including false eyelashes and fingernails – and using stage props like a broomstick and a Ziggy Stardust-style flashlight microphone. She denied the influence of drag, Kabuki or performance art on her new image, a look she affectionately dubbed "Joan Crawford on acid" in a 1996 Spin interview, but admitted that "it's that combination of being quite elegant and funny and revolting, all at the same time, that appeals to me. I actually find wearing make-up like that, sort of smeared around, as extremely beautiful. Maybe that’s just my twisted sense of beauty." However, she later told Dazed & Confused magazine, "that was kind of a mask. It was much more of a mask than I’ve ever had. I was very lost as a person, at that point. I had no sense of self left at all", and has never again repeated the overt theatricality of the To Bring You My Love tour. She also sang the theme song from Philip Ridley's adult fairy tale, The Passion of Darkly Noon.

Harvey wrote much of her fourth album in 1996 during what she referred to as "an incredibly low patch." In 1998, she released Is This Desire?.

She reunited with her old bandmate Rob Ellis and multi-instrumentalist Mick Harvey – who is no relation – for her 2000 album Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea. Written in Dorset, Paris and New York, the album was a critical and commercial success, selling over one million copies worldwide and taking the Mercury Music Prize in the following year. It mixed uncharacteristically lush, melodic pop rock sounds with the gritty, thrashing, guitar-driven punk energy of her earlier records. Radiohead singer Thom Yorke was featured on three of the album's songs; he took lead vocal duties on "This Mess We're In", and provided backing vocals for two others.

In 2001 she topped a readers' poll conducted by Q magazine of the 100 Greatest Women in Rock Music. Her sixth studio album, Uh Huh Her, was released 31 May 2004. For the first time since 4-Track Demos, Harvey produced it alone and played every instrument but the drums. She told Rolling Stone "when I'm working on a new record, the most important thing is to not repeat myself ... that's always my aim: to try and cover new ground and really to challenge myself. Because I'm in this for learning."

Harvey performing live during the White Chalk tour in 2007.

In May 2006, Harvey played her first UK gig of the year, revealing that her new album would be almost entirely piano-based. Later in 2006, she released her first concert DVD, Please Leave Quietly, directed by Maria Mochnacz, which contained songs from her entire career as well as behind-the-scene video clips between performances. On 23 October 2006, she released The Peel Sessions 1991–2004. In November 2006 she started working on her seventh studio album, White Chalk, with Flood, John Parish, and Eric Drew Feldman. It was released in Europe on 24 September 2007, and in the United States on 2 October. The album marked a radical departure from her usual style, consisting mainly of piano ballads. Of this album Harvey said: "When I listen to the record I feel in a different universe, really, and I’m not sure whether it’s in the past or in the future," she says, laughing quietly. "The record confuses me, that’s what I like – it doesn’t feel of this time right now, but I’m not sure whether it’s 100 years ago or 100 years in the future. It just sounds really weird."

In April 2010, Harvey made her first solo appearance in three years on BBC's The Andrew Marr Show with a performance of a new song, "Let England Shake." The song – which Harvey noted was apolitical – featured the use of an autoharp, similar to the sound of White Chalk. On 31 August 2010, collaborater and co-producer Mick Harvey revealed that Harvey's eighth studio album was completed in May 2010 in Dorset. In November 2010 it was announced that the album would also be called Let England Shake and would be released on 14 February 2011. Harvey has been chosen by Portishead to perform at the ATP I'll Be Your Mirror festival that they will curate in July 2011 at London's Alexandra Palace.

Collaborations

John Parish and Harvey performing live in 2009. Parish – who Harvey describes as her "musical soulmate" – has been working with Harvey for over 20 years.

Besides her own work, she contributed to eight tracks on Vol. 9 & 10 of Josh Homme's The Desert Sessions and appeared on Nick Cave's Murder Ballads (on the song "Henry Lee" and the Bob Dylan cover "Death Is Not the End") and Tricky's Angels with Dirty Faces (on the song "Broken Homes"). She lent guitar, bass and background vocals to Sparklehorse's album It's a Wonderful Life (on the songs "Eyepennies" and "Piano Fire"). In 1996 she recorded a collaborative album Dance Hall at Louse Point with Parish under the name Polly Jean Harvey. Parish wrote all the music, and Harvey the lyrics, with the exception of the song "Is That All There Is?", which was written by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller and made famous by Peggy Lee in 1969. Harvey has since gone on to produce Tiffany Anders' Funny Cry Happy Gift. Harvey produced, performed on and wrote five songs for Marianne Faithfull's 2004 album Before the Poison. Harvey sang vocals on two tracks of Mark Lanegan's 2004 album Bubblegum. Harvey reunited with John Parish to follow-up 1996's Dance Hall with A Woman a Man Walked By, which was released on 30 March 2009.

In January 2009, a new stage production of Henrik Ibsen's Hedda Gabler opened on Broadway, directed by Ian Rickson and starring Mary-Louise Parker in the title role, featuring an original score of incidental music written by Harvey. While the production was poorly received, little to no mention was made of Harvey's contribution.

Non-musical work

Outside her better-known musical career, Harvey appeared as Magdalena, a modern-day character based on Mary Magdalene in Hal Hartley's 1998 film The Book of Life, and had a cameo as a singing Bunny Girl in the Sarah Miles directed short A Bunny Girl's Tale. She is also an accomplished sculptor who has had pieces exhibited at the Lamont Gallery and the Bridport Arts Centre. In 2010 she was invited to be guest designer for the Summer issue of Francis Ford Coppola's literary magazine Zoetrope: All-Story. The issue featured Harvey's paintings and drawings alongside short stories by Woody Allen, Ann Packer, and others.

Personal life

Offstage, Harvey has cultivated a reputation for eccentricity to match her music; for example, Steve Albini claimed she ate nothing but potatoes while making Rid of Me. Harvey describes herself as "an extremely quiet person, who doesn't go out much, doesn't talk to people", and rejects the notion that her songs are autobiographical. She told The Times in 1998, "The tortured artist myth is rampant. People paint me as some kind of black witchcraft-practising devil from hell, that I have to be twisted and dark to do what I am doing. It's a load of rubbish". She later told Spin, "Some critics have taken my writing so literally to the point that they'll listen to 'Down by the Water' and believe I have actually given birth to a child and drowned her." In 2006, Blender included her in their list of the hottest women of rock, calling her a "blues-rock sorceress trafficking in social politics and dark, tormented songwriting." In a 2007 interview, Harvey stated that she would like to reunite with fellow artists Tori Amos and Björk, as all three were featured on the cover of Q magazine in 1994.

Harvey had a relationship and collaborated with with Nick Cave in 1996 on two songs on Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' album, Murder Ballads. Their subsequent break-up also influenced Cave's follow-up album, The Boatman's Call with songs such as "Into My Arms", "West Country Girl" and "Black Hair" being specifically about her. Harvey has said she would like to have children, adding, "I wouldn't consider it unless I was married. I would have to meet someone that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. That's the only person who I would want to be the father of my children. Maybe that will never happen. I obviously see it in a very rational way but I'd love to have children."

In April 2008, she was a guest on Private Passions – the biographical music discussion programme hosted by Michael Berkeley on BBC Radio 3 – and on the show, selected some of her favourite music, including pieces by Arvo Pärt, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Howe Gelb and Nina Simone.

Discography

Main article: PJ Harvey discography

Studio albums Dry (1992) Rid of Me (1993) To Bring You My Love (1995) Is This Desire? (1998) Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea (2000) Uh Huh Her (2004) White Chalk (2007) Let England Shake (2011) Compilations 4-Track Demos (1993) The Peel Sessions 1991–2004 (2006) Collaborations Dance Hall at Louse Point (with John Parish) (1996) A Woman a Man Walked By (with John Parish) (2009)

Further reading

• Blandford, J. R. (2004). PJ Harvey Siren Rising. London: Omnibus. ISBN 1 84449 433 0. OCLC: 56541646.
• Frost, Deborah (19 August 1993). "Primed and Ticking: PJ Harvey beat the sophomore jinx and get their mojo workin' with an American tour and a powerful new album, "Rid of Me"". Rolling Stone. No. 0663. pp. 52–55.
• Sandall, R (23 September 2007). "PJ Harvey steps into the light". Music. The Times. Retrieved 24 September 2007.
• Stieven-Taylor, Alison (2007). Rock Chicks: The Hottest Female Rockers from the 1960's to Now. Sydney: Rockpool Publishing. ISBN 9781921295065.
• Strauss, Neil (28 December 1995). "PJ Harvey". Rolling Stone. No. 0663. pp. 68–79, 144–145.
• Udovitch, Mim (14 December 2000). "PJ Harvey". Rolling Stone. No. 0663. p. 51.

External links

• PJ Harvey – official site
• PJ Harvey official site at Island Records
• PJ Harvey at MySpace
• PJ Harvey discography at Discogs
• PJ Harvey discography at MusicBrainz
• PJ Harvey at IMDb
• thegarden – fan forum