Tuesday, 18 October 2016

A Journey with a Singer, Part 3: To Bring You My Love (1995)

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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