Real and Unreal Music

Musical instruments, crocheted depictions of the Nativity, Swahili with Duolingo – how many ways have people used their enforced quietude, if they’ve been able to muster up the enthusiasm, over the last ten months or so? (I haven’t). Perhaps it’s been the unusual circumstances of the time which have prompted PJ Harvey to crack on with a project her chief lieutenant John Parish mentioned as far back as 2016, the reissue of her back catalogue. Starting in July, each album has reappeared, tidied up and accompanied by a vinyl issue and, in most cases, the demo versions of the album songs. We already had these for PJH’s first album, Dry from 1992, as the first 5000 copies had been issued with an extra CD containing the demos, and in 1993 Rid of Me had been succeeded by 4-Track Demos which included some of the preliminary versions of that album's tracks along with a range of other songs.

The demo versions for Dry were already two years old and more by the time the album was released, and they are interesting because Harvey's voice has developed audibly by the time of the final treatments; some of the demos for the songs on Rid of Me sound completely different from the album, recorded as they were not in Steve Albini’s snowbound Minnesota hideaway studio in an atmosphere of exhaustion and hysteria but by Harvey on her own in a flat over a restaurant in West Bay, with bits from her landlord’s mother-in-law’s collection of old Georgian 78s added. But most of the demos that are being released now aren’t really that much removed from the album versions; we know that, at least for To Bring You My Love and Is This Desire? the final recordings mostly lifted her vocals direct from the demos with the odd tweak here and there.

The main exceptions are some of the tracks on Is This Desire? For this album Harvey was experimenting with electronic and synthesised sounds and in a couple of instances followed them to very heavy places indeed; ‘unlistenable’ has been a word not only confined to some critics but even current in the fanbase, and I appear to be the only person on earth who likes the brutal, unforgiving soundscape of ‘Joy’ whose savage nihilism appeals to a dark little corner of my heart. Obviously this couldn’t be produced live, and concerts included a version which was utterly different, featuring a muscular guitar riff and drums that were almost jazzy, while Harvey virtually reproduced the album vocal, like two separate songs being performed in parallel.

Well, the real fans now have their undiluted versions of the songs, which feature just Harvey and her guitar; and many clearly prefer them, while I find it as hard to see the point in those as I do in that of buying expensive vinyl discs just for the clunk and the hiss. There’s an issue here about authenticity, which has always been a valuable quality in ‘rock’, and which is almost the feature, allegedly, which distinguishes it from ‘pop’. Authentic rock has got guitars in it and connects with some sort of experience, though applying it to Polly Jean Harvey who has always fought very shy indeed of any sort of identification between her music and her own story is problematic if not completely beside the point. Perhaps, even when we accept that there's no genuine experience in an artwork - especially music - we still want to get close to the authentic personality, and we the idea that the initial sketches for Harvey's work, just her and a guitar, allow us to draw nearer than the finished treatments do; and vinyl is more authentic than a download. We'll see what happens when she gets round to reissuing 2007’s nightmarish White Chalk, which didn’t have a single guitar on it. (And of course what all of us really want are the b-sides, out-takes and musical doodlings which the maestra must have kicking about somewhere).

I haven’t bought any of the reissues, with one exception: the demo of ‘The Dancer’, the final track from To Bring You My Love. This is because it is a genuinely separate experience from the album version. Across a quarter of a century some more astute critics have pointed out that, far from being ‘Americana’ as lazier writers have described the rest of the recording, ‘The Dancer’ is more influenced by flamenco than anything else. And the demo has Harvey whooping, clapping and clacking castanets: the song’s overwrought Gothicism, the devastating, gut-shredding climax to the album’s haunted soundscape, emerges in the demo as a joke, a deft wielding of cliché, a glorious pastiche. Talk about authenticity.