Life and Stories

What is James Blandford doing these days? I can't find out, not that I am inclined to spend much time trying. I've always resented the fact that the only sustained piece of prose written about my great idol PJ Harvey is, as I think of it, so substandard. Published in 2004 with a slightly updated edition in 2006 (PJH produced a new album in between the two), Siren Rising does its best to offend anyone from Dorset from the get-go, and, while it's as comprehensive as anyone could have managed at the time, you don't the impression that the author is doing it for love. By the end it's very much Polly-by-numbers: in August she went here, 'September saw her doing that', and so on. He wrote a biography of Britney Spears a couple of years before (now, if he'd taken on Diamanda Galás, that would have been more of a challenge). Now and again fans plead for an updated biography of Harvey: but not by Mr Blandford, please!

During the current restrictions I decided to write my own account of the maestra. Now, over the last couple of years we have seen something of a mild lifting of the omerta which has shielded her life for so long; we all suspect that Island Records demanded she start an Instagram account and post personal playlists on Spotify as a quid pro quo for doing no interviews at all to promote The Hope Six Demolition Project (apart from two sentences exchanged with Andrew Marr on BBC TV one Sunday morning). But, miraculously, PJH seems to have got into it, posting on Instagram some lovely self-mocking images during the tour and some much more revealing ones around the time of her 50th birthday in October and afterwards. As well as this, the unimaginable expansion of the internet since 2004 has made it perfectly possible to write a respectable nearly 100,000 words without having to visit a single library, so it was an easy lockdown and nearly-lockdown project. Yesterday I printed it all off and popped it into a ring-binder. Of course, I will never do anything with it, and I will ask you, gentle readers, to keep it to yourselves; even though every word in it is derived from material in the public realm, its subject would not be happy and I still cherish fantasies of bumping into her one day at St Catherine's Chapel, or a second-hand bookshop in Bridport, without too much guilt. I might let loose a reflection or two from it, but that will be all.

The exercise has taught me a number of things. Firstly, aside from my parochial duties it does me good to write history in some shape or form, and I should build that into my life. Secondly, it won't be biography. If concentrating even on someone I love and respect was maddeningly dull at times I will not want to go in that particular historiographical direction again. Thirdly, I discovered, much to my mortification, that two of my favourite PJH stories were actually the result of me conflating in my memory entirely separate incidents and therefore were entirely fictitious, or at least half-fictitious. How did I manage that? Beware the same trap, brethren, beware.