I can pinpoint the very day I bought Rid Of Me, as it’s in
my diary – coincidentally, October 30th, also the day I saw Polly
perform five years ago, and the day I will (D.V.) this year, too: and from
Square Records in Wimborne, as well, a more appropriate place than any bar
Beaminster, perhaps. I wrote then that the album was ‘proving wonderful’, but gave
no hint why I chose to buy it. I must have heard John Peel playing tracks from
it, and may also have worked out by then that Ms H was Dorset-born. That’s
nice, I thought, nothing much has come out of Dorset since Thomas Hardy.
And I suppose that was the appeal. Why should this woman’s
work, this murderous music which opened out of a very definitely female
experience (though not ‘feminist’, as she always wanted to stress), mean
anything to me, an Oxford-educated male museum curator? She didn’t even dress
it up in swirly Gothic romanticism like some of my other enthusiasms, but
preferred straightforward brutality. In fact, looking back at my diary then,
1993 seems to have been a turbulent year. I was halfway through my first proper
job at the Priest’s House Museum in Wimborne, busily applying for others, and
still convulsed with the same anxieties that had plagued my adolescence – it
would take a year or two yet before I began to calm down emotionally. I was
bewildered by a series of abortive attempts to attract the interest of various
women I met, and negotiating relationships with friends, the presence of my
only ex-girlfriend and what was going on in her life, family illness, politics,
and religion. There was a lot happening: though exactly why I might have felt
such deepseated anger which found sympathy in the parallel anger of a young
woman from Corscombe I can’t really guess from this remote standpoint, but it
did.
And so it stayed, for a while. I didn’t read the music
press, didn’t keep up with the publicity, had no idea what anyone was saying
about PJ Harvey and how she was perceived: all I had was the music, and that
was probably a good thing.
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