Saturday 29 October 2016

A Journey with a Singer, part 11: 'The Hope Six Demolition Project' (2016)

In the long gap between albums, PJ began pursuing different paths. You remember the time she took over the Today programme on Radio 4: how it was denounced by the Telegraph as ‘incomprehensible liberal drivel’, and how she very clearly took delight in tweaking the nose of Tory England. I was off work that day, and when I first turned on the radio I thought there’d been a strike or something so the normal programme wasn’t being broadcast; when I realised what was happening, I almost ran round the house waving my hands about. It was delicious. More than that, I maintain it’s a work as significant and revealing as any of her music. It not only made her politics pretty clear (‘People complain that the BBC is run by lefties’, one commentator said, ‘this is what the BBC would sound like if it was really run by lefties’), but it also showed her using her celebrity to shelter others so they could share their non-mainstream views, not just the Assanges and Pilgers who didn’t really need it, but people nobody had much heard of. There was poetry, too, and a range of other projects, to occupy her time.

I was increasingly warm towards this new PJH. Rock-chick Polly I’d never felt much in common with, greatly though I might have admired what she did; arty, leftie, literary Polly was more sympatico. What I wasn’t aware of was the work she was doing in preparation for the next recording: travelling with Seamus Murphy to Afghanistan, Kosovo and Washington, staying in somewhat rougher hotels than she’d have been used to, talking to people who would tell them disagreeable things, and writing them down in poems and prose. ‘She’s a musician, not a journalist’, commented Murphy later, ‘she’s not used to people crying when she asks them questions’. She saw human bones in a ruined building, confronted sorrow and need, faced her own inability to help. She didn’t have to do this: she could have stayed safely at home writing about the dire consequences of political decision-making, and done it all from books, newspapers and the TV. If nothing else, Hope Six is an unparalleled act of engagement. No mere singer has ever done anything like it.

The resulting album was (as I’ve said elsewhere) almost inevitably uneven as she tried to reformulate those observations and conversations into music, tried to express anger, sorrow and compassion without being patronising, and not always managing it completely comfortably. But it had the power to move perhaps unlike anything she’d done before, because of the reality that underlay it. My first encounter was watching the video accompanying ‘The Community of Hope’, and what I saw – bearing in mind that not everyone did – was a profoundly humanistic, compassionate vision of people creating hope and love in a society that militated against both. Yes, it made me cry, and much of the rest of the album did too: out of it, PJ Harvey emerged as not so much a musical force as a moral one. Some of my feelings have certainly become more definite, more emboldened, as a result.

Strange things were going on at the same time. This most private of artists, who once upon a time refused to use email, now had an Instagram account of all things (possibly due to the influence of her new management), and seemed happy to begin posting monthly playlists on Spotify (‘Brexit Blues’, the second one was entitled). Of course we now live in a world in which everything goes online, and Polly was apparently relaxed about the fact that her friends were going to snap her and upload the results for the globe to see. There she was picnicking with the band in Switzerland, on a beach near Los Angeles in a big hat, or on the hillside next to St Catherine’s Chapel on a beautiful, hot Dorset day. There were nice moments of self-mockery. Interesting for fans in their own right, all these images revealed something else: how her friends love her. The greatest testament to a person’s character is their ability to keep their friends, and Polly has had many of hers for decades, holding their affection, their allegiance.

As I worked to get my head round Hope Six I decided to re-listen to the whole of PJ’s output, the sum of the last quarter-century of This Woman’s Work. I heard subtleties that I’d missed, things I’d overlooked, and now listening to any part of it I couldn’t quite forget the rest. How far she has come. The angry young woman taking blues as far as blues could go and beyond has become something else; and as I watched her sing a Christian folk song at a support event for Julian Assange in June this year –

I wonder as I wander out under the sky
How Jesus our Saviour was born for to die
For poor ord’n’ry people like you and like I

and gesture towards the audience and then to herself, the ‘something else’ settled into the word transfigured. The past is not abandoned, it becomes the raw material for something grander, and greater. There are fans who desperately want her to give up the politics, but there's a sense in which everything up to this point has been a preparation for what she's doing now. I can’t really say more than that – because there is more I could say, but they aren’t things you can say out loud, not while someone is alive.

My great fear – other than that of some dreadful event, a downed plane, a crashed tour coach, or a lunatic taking a pot-shot at a concert – is that she’ll give up. Her own great idol was Captain Beefheart, Don van Vliet, another challenging musician who eventually abandoned music in favour of art. But she did speak, back in 2007, about being ‘on a lifelong journey to explore what it means to be human through music’, and from that I take comfort. It’s not over just yet, please God.

And that's it, for now. All being well, we'll be at the Brixton Academy tomorrow evening for the real thing. Although I've now so thoroughly built it up I am half-convinced something will go horribly wrong ...

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