All About Eve: soundtrack by PJ Harvey (2019)

We were quite surprised when PJ Harvey’s soundtrack for the West End production of All About Eve emerged so quickly, less than two months after the show opened and not much longer after the reverential documentary about the composition of the soundtrack broadcast by Radio 4 – so reverential, in fact, that had its subject not been the humble person we know her to be it would almost have been unbearable. As it is, she plonks at her piano in her London flat apparently unaware of the adulation swirling around her. In contrast to PJH’s previous three studio albums, which took years to put together, the gestation of All About Eve has been a mere handful of months if you accept her statement that she began talking to play director Ivo van Hove about it late in 2018. The play, in fact, is still being performed, and I suppose having the music out at the same time makes sense in marketing terms.

PJH’s involvement in scoring theatre goes back to 2009 when she provided two items for Ian Rickson’s production of Hedda Gabler in New York, a show which flopped badly although nobody blamed the composer; Harvey worked with Mr Rickson again on his version of Hamlet at the Young Vic in 2011, on Electra in 2015, The Nest in 2016 and The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? in 2017. All of her output for these plays was incidental music or themes with one exception: a song – or maybe songs - written for Vinette Robinson to perform as the maddened Ophelia in Hamlet, accompanying herself on a lute. It’s a shame that only theatre attenders have ever heard any of this material; someone from thegardenforum.org who went to see Electra described Polly’s themes as ‘sounding like a Morricone-ish Western placed in Ancient Greece’ and although you can hear snippets on Youtube it would be well worth experiencing the whole thing. So this is the first extended score she has produced, and the first time she’s felt it worth putting out to the public.

PJH describes the score as opening out of the inclusion in the 1950 film of All About Eve of Franz Liszt’s 'Liebestraume', though typically from that one source she spins a variety of quite different pieces of music. There are also two complete songs written for the main actors, Gillian Anderson and Lily James, to sing, attempting to capture the characters’ emotions at particular points.

'Traume' is slightly reminiscent of Ryuichi Sakamoto, but the bigger influence lurking behind All About Eve is Mica Levi whose acclaimed scores for Under The Skin and Jackie PJH has expressed admiration for in the past. It would be hard to describe even the 10 instrumental pieces as ‘incidental’ music: like Levi’s work, despite being often abstract and arrhythmic (although, I would argue, less monotonous than hers), they are strongly flavoured and I can understand why some critics felt the score was a little overwhelming.

However, as always, Harvey is her own woman. The main tone across the whole score is a combination of the gentle and the baleful, heard most clearly in the six pieces which are organised around simple piano chords: they exploit very carefully the contrasting qualities of those chords in a way which strongly recalls that eerie masterpiece from 2007 White Chalk, but with more muscular and conventional orchestration around the keyboard work. ‘Descending’ and ‘Ascending’ form a pair, though the second doesn’t have Kenrick Rowe’s dramatic drumming to power it along, like the first. And the songs are a separate matter again. Gillian Anderson’s ‘The Sandman’ is an appropriately dreamlike waltz, but not a very comforting one: you get the impression that the Sandman is not someone you really look forward to encountering: ‘the Moon appears/One thousand fears arise’. Meanwhile, Lily James’s song, ‘The Moth’, is a great Goth pop track, swirly, romantic and deliciously melancholy. It could almost have been written by – wait for it – All About Eve, and I wonder whether that’s deliberate Harveyan mischief. Harvey sings backing vocals on both songs and thereby manages to make them sound almost exactly like herself anyway.

‘I’ve always loved stories’, says the singer on her website about this album, but the non-specificity of the songs demonstrates that although she claims merely to be illustrating musically the text of the play, she’s actually using it as a point of departure to somewhere else – her customary approach to any source material, going right back to her Biblically-inspired works of nearly thirty years ago. All About Eve marks a breathing-space, an exercise, though in preparation for what I doubt Harvey herself knows yet.