By 1998 I was working at Wycombe, settled and secure and in
a much more stable state than I had been when Polly Harvey first came my way.
As the time came to release her next album she claimed in interviews to be a
lot happier, too, not that when Is This
Desire? finally emerged there was much sign of it. The record marked a new
departure into electronic sound, and a different texture of (mainly) dreamy,
blurred-edged images and scenarios which seemed to slip past the listener one
after another, but underlying it all was the same focus on the malign and
uncomfortable, occasionally lapsing into the old violence. But what struck me
most powerfully was one of the quieter, most intricate tracks: the third, ‘The
Wind’.
On my bookshelf now there is a framed postcard of St
Catherine’s Chapel at Abbotsbury. We’ve been going there since I was little: my
mum sent me the postcard in 1991 when I was at college, and when Polly was just
strumming her guitar for the first time as an independent artist having left
John Parish’s band to set up her own, and nobody outside her immediate circle
had heard of her. That place meant something undefinable and deep to me, as
did, strangely even before I was a Christian, the saint to whom it was
dedicated. In my old university notes there are scattered Latin lyrics to
blessed Catherine of the Wheel, copied from obscure works on liturgy and
medieval poetry. Why her? My spiritual director asked me that, and I don’t
really know. Something to do with her bloody legend (which isn’t that bloody at
all compared to some virgin martyrs), her strength, her intelligence – a big
part of the story – and that brooding chapel on the hilltop above the chill of Chesil
Beach, in some ways my spiritual home.
So I listened to ‘The Wind’ – a low blush of synthesisers,
and then, the devastating, whispered voice: ‘Catherine
liked high places, high up on the hills’. The hair on the back of my neck
prickled, and still does. ‘She built
herself a chapel – with her image – her image on the wall’. Could it be
true? This person who meant so much to me, singing about this place that meant so much to me, and this
figure (albeit turning that figure
imaginatively inside-out)? It couldn’t be otherwise, could it? Could I have got
it wrong?
Of course I hadn’t. The chapel has found its way into
Polly’s art; she mentions it to journalists who have come to Dorset to smoke
her out (as she does St Catherine – ‘patron saint of spinsters’, she remarks
deliberately); she visits it, as I do when I can. Obviously it’s nothing special:
it’s merely that two disparate people have developed the same kind of
relationship with the same landscape and the charismatic features within it.
It’s no surprise, and I’m hardly alone: twenty years later, that landscape is
now bound inseparably to the lyrics of ‘The Wind’, for everyone from Goth
novelists (Miss Gish, look her up) to the Dorset tourist board. So I tell
myself, at least, to keep my head.
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