Around these years I was first identifying myself as both a
‘person of Gothic sensibility’ and as a Christian: I was confirmed in May 1995.
Not unnaturally I looked around for kindred souls who might give expression to
similar interests. That sort of combination was there in Diamanda Galás, it was
there (mildly as far as religion was concerned) in Siouxsie Sioux, it was there
in Nick Cave whose music I’d been introduced to by a university friend five
years before. I wasn’t sure the punky, aggressive Ms Harvey quite belonged in
that company, though I would have been very pleased to think she did.
The Banshees’ final album, The Rapture, came out early on in 1995, followed within a month by To Bring You My Love. It was a complete,
gorgeous shock, as though the baton had been handed on. Harvey had – not for
the last time – almost completely reinvented her musical approach, having
ditched her band and producing a silken, velvety record which exchanged rage
for sorrow and anguish, a soaking swamp-blues soundscape that, as if to confirm
everything I so wanted to be true, was drenched in Gothic and smoked dry again
in a desperate, deathbed religiosity. ‘I’ve lain with the Devil, cursed God
above’, Polly growled on the title track: Well, haven’t we all one way or another, I thought. ‘He
came dressed in black with a cross bearing my name’, she moaned on ‘The
Dancer’, and the overwrought, luscious melodramatics made me fall apart a little inside. It
was everything I could possibly have wanted it to be, and I felt like swooning
whenever I listened. This was the baleful soundtrack to my heart (or a part of
it).
A few months later I and two visiting friends were sat in my flat in Chatham watching my ridiculous tiny black-and-white TV: a
late-night music show, I can’t recall what. We looked on open-mouthed as PJ Harvey
and Nick Cave duetted on ‘Henry Lee’, coiling round each other as they crooned
about vengeance and murder. Oh, come on. What was happening? Was she somehow psychically
following a script that we were all writing for her?
Of course it didn’t last, and that pitch-perfect
Polly-and-Nick haute Gothique coupling was over within months, very much not fun for either of
them. What remained was the sense that we were all part of this uncanny
community of feeling that was locked together by what she was doing. But she
wasn’t going to be contained by our expectations: she had other places to go,
and it was up to us whether or not we followed.
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