In retrospect, PJ Harvey’s 6th album – if you
count her first collaboration with John Parish, Dance Hall at Louse Point – 2004’s Uh Huh Her, marked a pivot in her work, at least so far. She
signalled this in several ways that created a sense of valediction. Firstly,
there were the self-portraits in the record sleeve booklet, documenting the
masks and guises she had worn up till then; secondly, taking the album on the
road, she wore dresses printed with press images of herself taken in earlier
years. It was more like a farewell tour than anything else. The music itself,
while far from standing still creatively, nevertheless echoed places she’d been
before: later on she would admit it was ‘the closest I’ve ever got to
plagiarising myself’. She took the opportunity to release several old tracks as
‘b-sides’ (if you can use that archaic language) to singles: ‘Liverpool Tide’
seemed to date from a couple of years before, while the raucous ‘Angel’ and
‘Dance’ came from the early 1990s. Uh Huh
Her was the end of a number of lines. It was a mopping-up exercise, and by
the time the album actually emerged, Ms H seemed absolutely clearsighted about
what was going on. After the tour concluded, when she next appeared on stage,
at three relatively small venues in the middle of 2006, she would seem
virtually a different performer. She was alone; she wore plain black; she
played the piano. And the next album, White
Chalk, would be a total, lurching contrast, not just an evolution but a
boggling abandonment of everything that had gone before it.
Remembrance Sunday made me want to write about this. I
realised how, setting the second Parish-Harvey collaboration A Woman A Man Walked By to one side,
Polly’s three solo albums since that great mid-2000s about-face have made me
reformulate central aspects of my identity in a way that, however wonderful it
may have been, her earlier work never did. Poppies and the Last Post, of course,
reverberate with echoes of Let England
Shake, that titanic achievement from 2011. But it’s more than LES. As PJH turned deliberately away
from delving into her own imagination and reactions and instead has begun
stitching together her compositions from other materials, she has reached
further and further, redefining successively broader aspects of what it means
to be human (what it means to be her, ultimately). I want to say more about the
effect this has on me, as I understand it more deeply.
White Chalk reconfigures
Dorset. It doesn’t appear to; only
the title track refers to anything specific about that landscape, namechecking
Lyme Regis, Cerne Abbas, the chalk hills themselves. The other tracks contain
little in terms of physical setting – an oak grove, an old milestone, a
mountainside (and Dorset doesn’t have those). Yet when she spoke to the authors
of the 2006 book Dorset Women she
said clearly ‘Really now for the first time on my new album, my new project,
I’m singing about Dorset, which has never happened before … I’m embracing it
more, the older I get.’ She would write around fifty songs in preparation for
what became the baleful masterpiece of White
Chalk, and possibly the title track was the only directly Dorset-related
one that made it through; yet what survived the filtration was something less
obvious – a feeling, an atmosphere. I’ve had a go at critics who were misled by
the piano and Polly’s mutton-sleeve dress on the album cover into
characterising the album as pastiche Victoriana, but although I don’t repent
that intolerance, I can understand the error. There is something Hardyesque about White
Chalk, to be sure. The sense of regret, of fate, of something happening in
the next room, the fact that every track articulates a female experience (admittedly
Harvey would probably deny that, if pressed): it’s as though a succession of
Thomas Hardy’s heroines are drifting before us, white-clad and spectral. And
somehow when I listen to the keening line ‘Come, come, on a night with no moon’
in ‘The Devil’ I can only picture it being sung beside a dead tree next to a
rotten field gate on a hillside above Portesham, or mist-swathed Nine Barrow
Down; while the insistent, almost discordant piano of ‘To Talk To You’, sounds
to me like it’s being played on the seafront at Swanage, deserted in the rain
in about 1905. White Chalk is
notoriously comfortless listening, but from its ten songs Dorset emerges
changed: an ectoplasmic thread now links its real landscape to its sideways,
shadow counterpart, seen reflected in a rainy window pane, a place familiar and
intimate, but haunted by human sorrow. I’m not sure I felt before it that ‘these
chalk hills will rot my bones’, but I do now. I feel as though I see my county
through these visions.
Let England Shake reconfigures England. Far from being narrowly an exploration of World War One,
it decontextualises motifs from that symbolic conflict into an account of all
war, and nails the identity of England to it, insisting that the inner meaning
of Englishness is not only green fields and bucolic landscape, but blood and
ambiguity, loss and regret. ‘The Last Living Rose’ begins with cartoonish
nationalism and ends with a strange amalgam of love and anguish: England is
always something that is passing away, a tide that’s just retreated. ‘The
Glorious Land’ bolts together words from a Russian folk song and a lament for
the West’s complicity in horror and exploitation with utterly simple words that
could be mawkish if the music were not so strong: ‘O America. O England.’
(Eng-er-land, actually, to make it scan). What have you done? What have you
been? the song asks. The deformed and orphaned children of the lyrics are the
fruit of the war-scarred land, but also of the countries who bring war to it. Nothing
is stated explicitly, leaving it to the listener to write specifics into the
gaps. The starkly-titled ‘England’ is offered as a revisionist National Anthem.
Out of 1932, the sampled voice of Kurdish singer Said-el-Kurdi, an anguished
cry for a wrecked homeland, opens in a wail, around which Harvey curls her own,
repeatedly and painfully not quite hitting the note until the two voices coincide,
which is the spur for her to launch into her own lament, a series of broken,
fragmentary statements that culminate in helplessness but also utter
commitment: ‘I cannot go on as I am/I cannot leave … Undaunted, never-failing
love for you, England/Is all to which I cling’. There are flutes – actually
almost certainly electronic mimicry – in the background, referencing the flutes
on that other great pop lovesong to England, Kate Bush’s ‘England My
Lionheart’. And what has England to do with Iraq, you’re left to ask. I don’t
even know what to call this. It isn’t patriotism. It isn’t Bush’s swooning
Romanticism. Is it a sort of historicist nationalism, which recognises the
vital nature of national identity, but looks steadily and unflinchingly at the
truth of it? What I can tell you is that, as my country undergoes a collective
nervous breakdown and enters an unreal realm filled with the narcotic fumes of
imperialist fantasy, Let England Shake provides me with a means of remaining absolutely English while defying that
madness. This flag I can stand and salute.
The Hope Six
Demolition Project reconfigures global humanity. Here, Harvey uses the same
technique of mingling close focus on human experience with decontextualisation,
so the images become universal ones, owned by a common humanity. For instance,
the bluesy musical setting of ‘The Ministry of Social Affairs’, incorporating
scraps of Jerry McCain’s ‘That’s What They Want’, might make you assume the original
inspiration for the track came from the Washington stage of PJ’s journeyings;
but the original poem in The Hollow of
the Hand is clearly set in Afghanistan. The songs are not arranged in
geographical sections as would have been obvious, and as the book is: so, slamming
together disparate vignettes suggests connections and resemblances. Poverty is
not just something that exists elsewhere; destruction is not merely a foreign
experience. Episodes here and there are connected: there are networks of action
and inaction which produce them and in which we are all implicated. The singer
moves through them all, but what results is not some empyrean account,
delivered from an all-seeing, detached vantage point, but a babel of voices,
confusion, incoherence. There is no answer. All that remains is the insistence
that this matters, that this side of the world and that are linked by feeling
and by causation, that we should open our eyes and look. And I have been looking: not that I didn’t
before, but the glowing web of global interconnection is clearer now than it
was. Thinking through the imagery of Hope
Six, I find myself a world citizen, though not via anything as simple and
rationally-apprehensible as the Universal Declaration on Human Rights. Instead
my citizenship is in disjuncture and disruption, in hope and grimy reality. Of
that, I see more. The album has sharpened my sight and honed my sensitivity. I
am more alert.
Polly didn’t aim at this redefinition of ever-widening
identities: the achievement resulted naturally from the more modest interests
she wanted to run to ground. It wouldn’t have worked if she had set out to do it, and in fact would
have been disastrously vainglorious. I am filled with wonder at how this slight
woman from a West Dorset village has managed, without trying, to reshape the
entire globe around her own vision, and yet remain herself. She’s been
preserved from catastrophic egotism by always remaining in the service of
something else, and by her original, quarter-century-old determination to
eschew everything that goes with the business of stardom. Fans sometimes
complain about her lack of interaction with them, but it is exactly that which
protects her from the spiritual dangers of her ambitions, keeping her rooted in
relationships which have nothing to do with her public persona. This has shielded
her and kept her work uncontaminated by any expectations except her own; and
it’s this that’s made her the Voice of the Resistance, raising a hand and
saying No, this is not how things really are, this is not how people really
are, and the truth lies elsewhere than in your partial and skewed narratives.
At least, that’s how it seems to me, and why I become so
misty-eyed at what she’s done. I find that much of my conception of what is
most humane, most generous and good, is filtered through ten years of her work.
Of course I know that the woman herself is a different matter, separate,
sometimes – as she herself admits – as startled as anyone else by what emerges
from the recording studio; but that’s where she is. And where next? Where to go
once you’ve conquered the world? All you can predict is that she won’t think
about it like that. It will be some small thought, some feeling in the air,
that will lead her to an unexpected vista, a new and unclaimed territory.
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