Stay-at-Home

This Autumn PJ Harvey tours her soon-to-be-released album I Inside the Old Year Dying, which lifts off from the poems of Orlam. There are two London dates (so far), and I have decided not to go. This isn’t primarily because of the cost: the whole evening including travel and so on will edge towards £100, but that wouldn’t matter if I could be sure the experience would be worthwhile, and I’m not convinced it will be.

When I saw Harvey at the Albert Hall back in 2011 she was, mainly, performing Let England Shake interspersed with some songs from White Chalk and a couple of old favourites. It was an intense, but static experience, somehow eroding both the ethereal strangeness of White Chalk and the shimmering beauty – which contrasts with the bloody subject-matter – of Let England Shake, and making both more ordinary. Catching PJH at the Brixton Academy during the Hope Six tour in 2016 was a different matter. The Hope Six Demolition Project was an uneven work as a recording: it truly came alive in performance, with a bigger band than Harvey had ever worked with, the volume turned up to drown out whatever doubts there might have been about the music. The concerts were deliberately theatrical, intricately planned, and grand: it was big music making big statements about human society and global citizenship.

To judge by the first two pieces of music from the album that have been released, I think I Inside the Old Year Dying live will be more a 2011 experience than 2016, and this time I would be not sat relatively comfortably in the Albert Hall but standing for two hours in a hot and crowded Camden Roundhouse. So I will listen to the record, and enter into the strange world of the new album, which seems so much more suited to smallness and intimacy, at home, and summon the Maestra into my garden, perhaps, rather than glimpse her across a sea of heads.