Extra Solemn

The annual task of veiling the church for Passiontide is something I normally look forward to as a sign that Lent is mostly past, even if the taxing time of Holy Week is yet to come. I especially like putting the panels that show the Instruments of the Passion onto the reredos, covering the mosaics that are usually visible; I don't know any other church that has anything quite the same, and ours are homemade, designed to slip beneath the canopies of the arches.

But without someone to assist me and foot the ladder, veiling two large paintings and one wall-mounted mosaic panel presents a disagreeable prospect to someone who gets vertiginous even standing on a chair to change a light bulb. So last Saturday I moved very carefully, shifting the ladder laboriously and sensibly (or what I thought was sensibly) and not overreaching. 

I realised I'd missed a Pollyday and hadn't listened to Let England Shake on its anniversary, February 14th, as I should, so did the veiling to the accompaniment of the maestra on headphones. Shimmering music of war and death, and the terrible destructiveness of human folly, alongside this act of preparation for the symbolic violence of the Passion. Neither alone has ever felt quite the same before. 

Having Said That ...

... I was at the V&A today to see the "Diva" exhibition, mainly tempted by PJ Harvey's Hope Six drum which is on show there, but I also dropped in at the medieval gallery and was astonished that I'd never spotted several representations of my patron saint, not Polly but St Catherine. There's an English alabaster panel showing the Martyrom, a German wooden statue, a golden reliquary, and a tiny plaque no more than an inch across.

PJ Harvey: I Inside the Old Year Dying (2023)

The first reaction to PJ Harvey’s latest studio album, seven years in the waiting for those of us who were (notwithstanding her soundtrack projects for All About Eve, The Virtues or Bad Sisters), must be astonishment that thirty years into their career an artist can still produce something so radically distinct from what’s come before. There are, almost inevitably, hints and echoes of the past, but they are merely that, just as the blushes of other artists – Patti Smith’s ‘Ghost Dance’ on the title track, for instance, rhythms that call to mind Kylie Minogue at her best or vocals mimicking Siouxsie when she still had a voice – amount to nothing more than a drop or two of flavour added to the mix.

It's also necessary to say that this isn’t ‘Orlam put to music’, even though every song derives from a lyric in that book. I’ve said how I found Orlam a baleful and horrible work notwithstanding its brilliance; the album runs with the folklore, flora and fauna, and the personal mythology of the book, but excises the rapes and menace to favour something far less definite and monstrous. It’s weird, but dreamy-weird rather than bloody-weird. Structurally, the poems are bent and reshaped into songs, in the same way Harvey refashioned elements of The Hollow of the Hand into Hope Six. This means that the recording isn’t telling the same story as the book, even when it begins where the book does with ‘Prayer at the Gate’. The twelve tracks don’t follow the year the way Orlam does, but leap around the months, leaving us somewhere toward the end of summer. Mind you, there’s a slight feel of the early 1970s about ‘Autumn Term’ and ‘Seem an I’, or the witchy folk-horror sensibility of ‘A Child’s Question: July’, just the time Harvey was growing up and when Orlam is imagined.

The narrative indeterminacy is intensified by techniques Harvey has never used before, especially sampling found sounds - the children playing on ‘Autumn Term’ or the birds and insects on ‘Noiseless Noise’ - or the rhythmic distortion of her voice (‘The Nether-Edge’). None of it is obvious or clear: the sampled noises are not straightforward scene-setting like the seagulls on Uh Huh Her, but cut into tiny fragments and looped, often placed so low in the mix that you’re not sure what you’re hearing. This means they are not intrusions of the real world into that of the album, but parts of the real world captured and transformed, a bit like a human hair used in a magic spell. Are there church bells close to the end of ‘I Inside the Old I Dying’? And what’s the scraping noise repeated through the first half of ‘August’? Sometimes you fasten onto a sound or aural shape, only to find it disappearing. This is a recording which you absolutely need to listen to on headphones or a high-quality sound system, else most of its subtleties will escape you.

The album in Harvey’s oeuvre closest to the atmosphere of I Inside the Old Year Dying is 1998’s Is This Desire?, a similarly enclosed, dreamy series of soundscapes; but the earlier record’s intense tales were models of clarity and comprensibility compared to this, so internal and hazy. The final track, ‘A Noiseless Noise’, finishes with the plea ‘Come away, love, and leave your wandering’, as though addressing someone emerging from a strange reverie, and perhaps, in the previous forty minutes, that’s just where we’ve been. 

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. 

'Art of Darkness', by John Robb (Louder Than War, 2023)

It is not, I think, an easy matter to write well about popular music. It is often very, very hard to account for the appeal of a particular artist, album or track, even if you feel it yourself. You’re tempted to grandiloquise, or you find yourself falling back on clichés and, if you have even the remotest degree of self-awareness, you then try to avoid those clichés and end up producing text that reads like a thesaurus. What you write stands in constant danger of collapse into meaningless sentences, pretentious metaphors, and, if you don’t check back properly, repetition.

Art of Darkness drops straight into all these traps and rarely clambers out, to the extent that I find a lot of it actually hard to read. The Blogging Goth has already given this long-awaited and much-heralded book a detailed and dreadful review, so I won’t dwell on the typos, maladroit expressions and strange lacunae which scatter almost every page, mainly because a reader can also easily appreciate the colossal work and commitment the author has put into it. Instead, there are deeper problems which relate to Art of Darkness’s aims and methods, and I will talk about them.

The Blogging Goth takes Mr Robb to task for, to all appearances, having no awareness of the extensive academic work on Goth culture and subculture, and he is right: the early chapters of the book unnecessarily rehearse what is now a very familiar story of Gothic art across the centuries. But it is a different book which haunts Art of Darkness, one more directly relevant to the subject: Simon Reynolds’s Rip It Up and Start Again, the 2005 history of post-punk which, for all its controversies, still stands as the baseline for anyone wanting to tackle the topic. Reynolds’s chapter on early Goth in Rip It Up tells the same story in twenty pages that John Robb covers in 530; it’s an account with plenty to contest or at least expand on, so the point must be whether Art of Darkness answers any of the questions Reynolds skates past in his breezy and vigorous prose. I would expect any ‘history of Goth’, especially one claiming to be ‘The history of Goth’, to have a go; but a passing reference in an interview with Andrew Eldritch is the only sign that Rip It Up or the questions it begs features at all in Mr Robb’s mental landscape. The biggest of those questions is how is it that we recognise as ‘Goth’ all these completely disparate forms of music?

Chapters 6 to 12 are intended to highlight the ‘dark’ elements of glam, mainstream rock, and the like which helped to produce what we know think of as ‘Goth’, but only occasionally do we get any insight into how this happened. Interviewees in the book repeatedly state that the importance of David Bowie, for instance, to the post-punks who started bands lay less in anything he wrote as such, but in his presentation of possibility, of non-mainstream models of sexuality, of drama and pretence; and that the role of punk was to open up a space in which young musicians felt they could create with minimal resources. We don’t actually need lots of information about Bowie, glam, or punk, to make any of these points. Once we pass beyond the early Goth bands whose members Mr Robb has interviewed so diligently we are promised an account of ‘How dark energy infected Indie’ (chapter 33), but what we get is a list of Goth-ish artists, not an examination of how this came about. Incidentally, you would expect me to look for a mention of PJ Harvey, and here she is, featured in three paragraphs across which Mr Robb manages to get wrong the year when she got going as an independent artist, mangles the title of her breakthrough album, and adapts his most striking statement, unacknowledged, from Andrew Collins’s famous NME review of Dry in 1992. If that’s the case with an artist I know something about, what reliance can I place on the rest?

The substantial worth of Art of Darkness lies in its interviews with musicians, but even more with the accounts of clubs, retailers and Goth experience beyond the membership of bands. The first chapter begins with a nice re-imagining of a night at an alternative club; there’s a breathless list of regional clubs on p.11, any and each of which could do with a write-up of its own; and the descriptions of venues across the country in chapters 19, 25 and 28, of the way they focused musical life, of what it was like to attend them and the risks you took to do so – club manager Doreen Allen eventually provided a bus so her clientele at Planet X in Liverpool could get home without being beaten up – are easily the most valuable elements of the book. They’re also some of the easier to read: the description of Pete Burns holding court at Probe Records in Liverpool during the late ‘70s is a hoot (p.399).

And it’s in the experience of these early Goth clubbers that we might find the beginnings of an answer to the question of how all this stuff comes to be thought of as Goth at all: that certainly can’t come from the interviewees, who, almost to a soul, scorn the word. There’s a ‘history of Goth’ to be told that wrests itself free from bands and is instead organised around the consumers of Goth culture: it’s their active filtering and processing of the fare offered to them that actually settles what is or is not Goth. John Robb continually approaches this idea and then backs away from it, but his book does provide lots of material for anyone who might want to pursue it in the future.

Art of Darkness’s last few pages enter very interesting territory, though it’s mainly through the words of the Goth academics Mr Robb has asked for help, Claire Nally of Northumbria University and freelancer Kate Cherrell, and the passionate paragraph by Kai Asmaa from Morocco describing being a Gothic person in a conservative Muslim culture. There are books waiting to be written around Nally and Cherrell’s suggestions about the interaction between Goth online and in real life: perhaps they will do so. It’s on the very penultimate page that John Robb suggests he might actually understand more than he seems to, with the statement that ‘Goth itself had no manifesto. It was … a retrospective term for something already happening’. That’s the key to its history which, for the most part, he has left unused.

'To Bring You My Love' at 28

A nicer anniversary falling today (as well as being Lady Arlen and Madame Morbidfrog's birthdays) is that PJ Harvey's To Bring You My Love was released on February 27th in 1995. Many moons ago now I told you about my first encounter with it. For lots of souls it was the moment they first met the Corscombe conjuror-of-storms, wrapped in red silk or her shocking-pink catsuit or whatever costume she might have been wearing at the time, and it has lost none of its haunting power over subsequent years. At the time, reviewers gulped at the inconceivable about-face the album represented, as its author seemed completely to junk everything she'd done up to that point; some hated it, Time awarding it their title of worst recording of the year, a 'hopelessly mannered CD' produced by an 'utterly graceless singer'. Nicholas Barber for The Independent, though, thought he could sum it up in six inspired words: 'imagine "Siouxsie and the Bad Seeds"'. 

In view of subsequent events, TBYML did seem a bit like PJH's audition for the job of Nick Cave's girlfriend, and many commentators were keen to draw the comparison at the time. But though it and the output of the Bad Seeds at the time seem to share an imaginative universe, they aren't very close together in it. If we think of TBYML as pastiche Americana, we are reading into it settings that aren't there, as its lyrics are marked by distinct unspecificity; and, with the possible exception of 'Working For the Man', Harvey sings for women characters, while the women on Cave's records are usually the victims of the characters he voices. And it was a good dozen years after the album was released that the maestra told Gary Crowley on BBC Radio London about a much more important consideration in her mind at the time, the writing of Flannery O'Connor. In 2020 she posted a picture on Instagram showing her with a copy of O'Connor's Wise Blood, taken, she said, around the time TBYML was being composed - though more recently she told Rolling Stone that she was already reading the American's work in her late teens (I'm not sure she isn't misremembering that, she is not always careful about dates).

Flannery O'Connor was an artist thought little of for many years, who seems to have ascended to general acclaim just at the point that aspects of her work - and, even more, her person, if the two can be separated - start to become unacceptable to those who decide what to celebrate and what to denigrate, aspects which shouldn't really be news. O'Connor was only 39 when she died in 1964 of systemic lupus, the same disabling disease that killed her father - a sardonic, thoughtful writer of morality tales with a taste for the violent, her attitudes drawn deep from Catholic Christianity, and yet an author who refused to proselytise, instead depicting her characters engaged almost unawares in the battle for goodness and transcendence the Faith outlined; and one who also resisted any attempt to locate good and evil in simple, obvious places. O'Connor's is a fallen world penetrated with grace. 

Harvey says that O'Connor's work taught her about storytelling: it 'was also shaping the way that my third-person narrative was becoming in the whole record'. Now, the curious thing about this is that, like most of her music, TBYML's songs don't embody stories. It's only really on her subsequent record, 1998's Is This Desire?, that she turns to such structures, and some of the tracks on that record do have specific lift-off points in tales by O'Connor. The protagonists of TBYML give you glimpses into their history - the obsessive of the title track who was born in the desert and has crossed wasted landscapes to meet the listener, the murderous mother of 'Down By the Water', 'The Dancer's' desperate abandoned lover on her deathbed. But each is speaking from a single moment, rather than laying out a narrative as Nick Cave's characters from around the same time do.

If Flannery O'Connor has sketched the landscape TBYML inhabits, what it takes from her writing isn't the third-person device which Harvey doesn't adopt until a few years later; and, while you can see the same interests in both artists, Harvey's music dealt with religion, violence, and extremity right from the start. Instead, what O'Connor seems to have provided her with is the permission to bolt them all together, to imagine characters whose lives move around religion and sometimes lead them in violent directions. And, as always, Harvey's imagination takes her deeper and wilder than virtually anyone else.

Swanvale Halt Book Club: Review, PJ Harvey, 'Orlam' (Picador, 2022)

When Polly Harvey was four, she found a dead lamb in the woods near her house: the crows had pecked its eyes out. At home, her parents had just bought Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon and had it on the turntable endlessly. Thereafter, she said, that record never failed to make her feel physically sick; though it took until the 2010s before she would admit in interviews why it did. Harvey takes this horrible experience and spins out of it her second collection of poetry, Orlam.

Her protagonist Ira-Abel Rawles is nine, and lives in the fictional Dorset village of UNDERWHELEM – in the text, it’s always capitalised, as though in a print transcription of Domesday Book. It’s a place where females and animals are never safe from predation of different kinds. Not that Ira thinks of herself as female, as her double name suggests – she’s a ‘not-gurrel’, she insists, a ‘wether on the nether-edge’ who should have been born a ‘tarble tup’, and who identifies with Joan of Arc as well as the lambs she has a reluctant hand (literally) in castrating. That sexual ambiguity will not protect her. All this also opens out of Harvey’s childhood, though I hope not much of the rest of the story does, or I doubt she’ll ever be able to show her face in her home village of Corscombe again (1).

I say ‘story’, and that is what Orlam is – a verse novel spanning a calendar year and written, as the quotes so far make clear, in old Dorset dialect mainly lifted from William Barnes’s 1886 Dictionary; so the ‘tarble tup’ Ira imagines she might have been is, in what Barnes would have called ‘book-English’, a ‘tolerable ram’. Readers should not imagine that Harvey would actually have heard much of this during her real 1970s Dorset upbringing, beyond perhaps the odd word: instead it’s a very conscious anachronism that allows the author to prise open Ira’s experience, its earthy Anglo-Saxon shapes generating a very particular relationship between that, the landscape, and the people around her. The dialect doesn’t entirely lift us away from West Dorset in the 1970s – the jerrycans and sheep-dip chemicals see to that – but it gives that setting a depth and resonance which makes it seem a landscape of myth.

Ira creates her own myths, to cope with the horrors she encounters. The dead lamb’s eyeball becomes Orlam, her guardian spirit, floating over the fields on its trailing optic nerve; in the only place she finds refuge, Gore Woods, she meets the bleeding Civil War soldier Wyman-Elvis and his entourage of ghosts, and the Ash-Wraiths, the shades of every child who has ever played there. She ‘scratches’ out her myths, her sorrows and enmities, writing to take control of what she undergoes. She needs these spectral allies, because she has few enough among the human residents of Underwhelem. She loves her mother, but her mother is neglectful and absent; she loves her grandmother (called Mary, like Harvey’s own), but Mary is dead, and hovers over the hollow lane; she adores her elder brother Kane-Jude, but he betrays her (predestined by his names, Cain and Judas). The rest, from Ira’s drunken, inadequate father Chalmers-Adam, to Emerson-Dogger Bowditch who rapes her in the Red Shed, are deserving objects of her scorn and hatred. She casts spells against them (apparently successfully in her father’s case), and makes songs to defend herself. It’s a mythology woven from plants and wildlife, the details of sheep-rearing, Shakespeare, pop songs and weather rhymes, Christian imagery, and Dorset folklore (2), and makes a heady enough mix – though the intoxicant isn’t good old Dorset cider, but the cheap whisky and Palmer’s bitter served up in Underwhelem’s grotty pub, the Golden Fleece.

I often find that I have to reorientate myself to get into a new PJ Harvey album, and this book turned out the same: it took me three reads before it really gelled. It isn’t hard to read: you can tackle it quite quickly, and in fact I think it helps to read it quickly, once you’re familiar with the rich but restricted vocabulary of the dialect. Polly’s mentor Don Paterson’s simultaneous ‘English’ translations of her words are best ignored as they will mislead you into one particular reading of a multivocal text. I found at first that the poem’s conventions, such as the capitalisation of placenames and the fabricated names of the characters, separated me from the emotion it should have contained, but after repeated readings those distractions faded. And they may only be Ira’s imaginings anyway, though Harvey has been rightly non-committal about that. So I got there, in the end.

But it is brutal. ‘Sex and death all roundabout/Sonny with ‘es eyes pecked out/Scoff the vlesh vlee and the yis/This is how the wordle is’. Ira excepted, all the living characters are grotesques, who seem to exist only to cause others pain, notably her. The miasma of horror barely lifts, whether it’s the dramatic hideousness of the pervert forester John Forsey dressing as the Dorset Ooser, or the more prosaic terrors of the new school term, which Ira dreads so much she throws up on her teacher’s shoes. The Christ-figure (that’s how Harvey describes him, not me) Wyman-Elvis hands The Word to Ira – in Presley’s phrase, love me tender, a marker of hope amid the evil, but she finds it hard to hold onto it. For all Orlam’s skill, its near-relentless morbidity is wearing, as though Harvey is working through something. Mind you, if this still doesn’t represent the mature outworking of her poetic voice, what might be to come?

The book ends with a recapitulation of its first lyric, ‘Prayer at the Gate’, in almost Christian terms:

So look before and look behind

At life and death all innertwined

And teake towards your dark-haired Lord

Forever bleeding with The Word.

By now, the end of the year and the beginning of a new one, Ira’s mother seems to have resurfaced, her father appears to have succumbed to the curse Ira laid on him, and the ghost of her childhood has joined the Ash-Wraiths while she carries on into a more knowing near-adolescence. And that’s as optimistic as Orlam gets. It is, I think, a brilliant achievement, but hard to take, and even harder – for me, yet – to love.

(There haven't been that many reviews of Orlam yet, either because people don't know what to make of it, or hate it but are too polite to say so. You can have a look at this one, or this, or this.)

1.Earnest Pollywatchers heard drafts of these poems as far back as 2017 when she read them at King’s Place in London. They've hardly altered, but where they have it's weakened the specific local references. So the early version of ‘Black Saturday’ described Ira and her brother playing war in ‘Luther’s Coppice’, a real location in Corscombe; in the book, this has become ‘Blaggot’s Copse’.

2.I especially like the references to the Red Post which in the book is ‘UNDERWHELEM’s hanging post’ (p.75). There are four real Red Posts in Dorset, roadside waymarkers, and because nobody really knows why they are coloured red, you can make up what you like. I think of them as the mystic axial points around which the county revolves, which rivet it into its past. The nearest to Corscombe is at Benville Bridge. 

Echoes of a Past Present

To most people, February 14th was Valentine's Day, or St Valentine's if you are more religiously aware. For Fr Thesis and other good Anglo-Catholics it was the Feast of SS Cyril & Methodius, while to Professor Purplepen it was the Eve of Lupercalia. My chief observance of the day, however, was the anniversary of the release of Let England Shake. As dedicated Pollywatchers await the publication in April of her collection of poetry, Orlam, telling the story of a young girl growing up in the Dorset countryside - which the publishers Picador rather ambitiously claim will 'renew English poetry' - we are sure the maestra is preparing new music, as she has had herself photographed for Instagram with a guitar and a variety of what knowledgable souls say are very weird pedals. Perhaps it even relates to the poetry. But for now we must content ourselves with the old stuff.

War, the bloody meat of Let England Shake, never goes out of fashion, and the album's dense lyrical tapestry of references from Flanders Fields and Gallipoli, Jamaica and Kurdistan, Ireland and the Peninsular War, that both locate and dislocate the history of human conflict, are as relevant now as ever. The past flows through us all, and on into the future. The last song is 'The Colour of the Earth', taken from the words of an Antipodean soldier remembering a fallen comrade. PJH wanted Mick Harvey to sing it - she joins in later - and only after the recording did he tell her that his own grandfather had been at Gallipoli:

Louis was my dearest friend

fighting in the ANZAC trench

Louis ran forward from the line

I never saw him again

Yesterday, after listening to the album again, I found myself looking up the video on Youtube, one of the ones shot by Seamus Murphy. At first PJH, Mick Harvey, John Parish and Jean-Marc Butty sing the song a capella in the lane near Eype Church where the recording was done, followed by the album version accompanied by Murphy's images. 

In the comments I found this:

PJH's music continues to have - sadly - a terrifying contemporary resonance. We can only hope that Mr Putin is a rational kind of crook and that his administration is not secretly as chaotic and makeshift as the Johnson one seems to be, because powers with the capacity to destroy civilisation shouldn't mess about with one another. Slips and miscalculations just might lead to more human damage than just that of a small and nasty war.

Individual Contributions

Commenters on the video were discussing the merits of PJ Harvey’s first album, Dry. Someone had stated that while the woman herself was a mighty creative power, the other members of the band, as it was then, could have been replaced by ‘any competent session musicians’ and it would have made no difference. As is the way of these things a ridiculous polarisation developed in which any defence of the other musicians involved was read by some as a denigration of Harvey’s own genius. I was pleased with myself for not chipping in.

Ian Olliver, Harvey’s original bassist, was a quarryman who worked for her dad, and when his wife insisted he couldn’t carry on a 7am-5pm working day and play in a band on top of it, he was replaced by Steve Vaughan, an engineer by trade. Bassists are mostly there to add sonic ballast, so perhaps their contribution wasn’t all that individual, but it would be certainly unfair to say the same about the drummer, Rob Ellis. Ellis was interested in 20^th-century classical music and irregular, unexpected rhythms; so was Harvey, she just didn’t know it at that stage. When Ellis mentioned Bartok and Stravinsky to her she looked at him blankly, but both Dry and Rid of Me are marked by the irregularity, dissonance, and extreme contrasts between quiet and loud passages which appealed to both of them. Ellis was modest enough to claim that Harvey had made use of him because he was the only available drummer around Yeovil at the time, but it counts as one of the great good fortunes of her life that he was perhaps the only one who stood a chance of understanding what she wanted to do. By her own admission Harvey finds it almost agonisingly difficult to express what she has in mind, and has always needed collaborators who get it without much prompting.

We’ve now heard the demos for Harvey’s early work, of course, and while they clarify the power and energy of her imagination, without the other musicians the end product would have been different. No creative artist is entirely alone; and, quite apart from the practicalities of art-making, each stands in a cloud of endeavour extending before they were born and beyond their individual lives. Ideally, to tell the story of an artist you would begin with their entire society.

But we still want the individual. After a mention on Radio 4 I recently read Jenny Uglow’s acclaimed 2012 ‘anti-biography’ of Sarah Losh, The Pinecone. Losh is a fascinating character, a landowner and amateur architect in mid-19^th century Cumbria whose politics had a radical tinge; the problem is that apart from one tiny essay about her building of the compelling and frankly Deist church at Wreay, and a I think a letter about travelling in Italy, she wrote nothing, nor did others say very much about her, either. Ms Uglow tries to get around this void at the heart of her enterprise by writing about everything else – Sarah Losh’s antecedents, the social and political life of Carlisle, the industrial and agricultural interests of the Loshes and the families linked with them, science, religion, and economics. But that void won’t go away. Time and again the writer guesses at Sarah Losh’s thoughts, opinions, reactions, and beliefs, but they remain guesses, and by the end I, certainly, felt I’d been wandering through mental mist. Even I, it seems, anti-individualist thought I may be, hunger to know a person, to touch a personality.

Owlen (= 'roaming about at night')

A woman wanders through a wood, or a setting with the appearance of a wood, making odd gestures and talking about dead sheep and thrushes, and wearing a dress with an eyeball scrawled on it. Were we not aware that she is PJ Harvey and therefore an emissary of the powers beyond, we might simply assume that she was nuts. Our heroine was performing at the (slightly abortive) livestreamed Glastonbury Festival: not singing, but reading poetry, another couple of offerings from what we all still hope is the forthcoming collection ‘about a haunted sheep farm in Dorset’. But then it’s been forthcoming for four years now …

The poems were trailed as being ‘in Dorset dialect’. This is interesting, because Dorset dialect is not something anyone now uses, nor has used for a very long time. Remember I am a mere six weeks younger than Ms H, and, though I grew up in suburban Bournemouth rather than a village just northeast of Beaminster, my mother’s family in particular come from pretty close by there, in south Somerset, and they were all farm workers and the like: one of my mum’s cousins lives just round the corner from the Harvey quarrying business on Ham Hill. PJ’s accent, too, always strikes me as quite gentle (though she stresses it a bit in the Glastonbury performance), much more so than some of my relatives’. Nor is there even just one uniform Dorset accent: Polly clearly has the West Country rhotic ‘r’ in her speech – at least she often does – while I grew up without it, and it’s not that prevalent on the east side of the county anyway. In his 19^th-century Dorset dialect poetry, which she surely has in mind, William Barnes spells the name of the county Dosset, as though it has no ‘r’ sound at all; certainly not the ‘Darzet’ of general non-West Country imagination. You don’t hear that until you get to Cornwall.

I can’t remember anyone from my childhood using dialect words, either: rather, the older generations spoke what Barnes would have called ‘book-English’, just with an accent. The closest they came to it was my grandad’s insistence on referring to rats as ‘longtails’; but that smacks more of superstition than general usage, a bit like the reluctance of Portlanders to name the rabbits that undermine the quarries, instead describing them with any number of circumlocutory epithets. In early 1970s Corscombe, I suppose, some of the old farm workers may have used the dialect words they picked up from their grandparents, calling ewe-lambs chilvern or the meal in the middle of the day your nammet – ‘noon meat’; but by coincidence I’ve just read Thomas Hardy’s introduction to his Selected Poems of William Barnes, published in 1908, and even then he laments the demise of the old Dorset speech thanks to mobility and education, and the condescension of the well-to-do. I can’t imagine ‘Dorset Dialect’ was very prevalent even in the Blackmore Vale nearly fifty years ago.

William Barnes used dialect to emphasise the dignity of the Dorset people he worked with as schoolmaster and priest, the relevance of their outlook and experiences. Harvey isn’t doing that; nor does she seem to be using it to recall a culture the tail-end of which she may have brushed against in her childhood. Instead, the Anglo-Saxon straightforwardness of the old Dorset speech becomes an incantation, a means of piercing through normality into a heightened awareness of nature and a soul’s place in it: a way of meditating on identity and feeling, the opposite but equal of what Elisabeth Bletsoe does with her poetry of complexity and technical naming.

Goo on an' publish, Polly!

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. 

'Timeless'

It's not St Catherine's Day yet - St Clement is the saint culted on November 23rd, in fact - but this post has something of a St Catherine connection. Continuing my interest in the work of Dorset musician Sammy Hurden, some while ago I managed to chase down a secondhand copy of her short album Jurassic Journey; it seems to be the only example of her music in any recorded form, apart from snippets on Youtube. One of the tracks, 'Timeless', was recorded in where else but St Catherine's Chapel at Abbotsbury. One day early in 2011 Ms Hurden took singer Abbie Lathe (one of the participants in the early-1990s women's choir Brilliant Birthdays along with PJ Harvey and the late Kate Garrett) and West Country folk performer Jess Upton (whose school band, some accounts say, Polly had also played with in her teens) up to the chapel along with Lucy Roberts who played the five-string fiddle, and together they recorded this haunting, wordless evocation of place, memory and time. 

As nothing of this music exists anywhere except on a handful of CDs, I thought I would put together a little video to go with 'Timeless'. I assembled my photos of the chapel going back over many years to form a journey there and back. Have a look if you have a moment. Sammy Hurden's website seems to have disappeared sometime over the last year, so I am glad to publicise her work (which I trust she would not mind - it's impossible to ask her). 

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.

'Rid of Me' by Kate Schatz (2007)

Kate Schatz’s short 2007 novel based on PJ Harvey’s second album is a seductive oddity. It’s part of Continuum’s '33 1/3' series of monographs in which an author focuses intensely on one musical album at a time, but it’s the only one, I think, which chooses to do that in the form of fiction. ‘This is not about Rid of Me - it’s because of it’, says Ms Schatz in her Prologue, describing how the experience of listening over and over to Harvey’s music on that vicious 1993 compilation developed into a series of:

Characters, lyrics, and landscapes. Moods, and tones, and those feelings. You begin writing. With each song, to each song, from each song. Around and near and under and then, at some point, it takes a shape. … Chapters like songs, book like an album. It becomes a new story, years of listening spiralled out into new words and meanings.

Each chapter is named from one of Rid of Me’s 14 songs, and begins and ends with the first and last words from its eponymous lyric. Cumulatively they tell the story of Mary and Kathleen (names taken, of course, from the album as well), two young women who flee terrible circumstances and, encountering each other in a roadside bar, set up house in a shack in the darkling woods that both have long regarded from afar – a mythical place of danger and threat becoming a refuge for a pair of marooned souls. Their experience is hallucinatory, violent, and finally redemptive.

Continuum (in Britain the publisher is Bloomsbury) are proud of the design of the 33 1/3 series: the books are slightly larger than A6 size and varied within a uniform style, and Rid of Me is cool black, off-white, and silver-grey. The small size makes reading the book an intimate experience of entering into a tiny imaginative world, appropriate to the story. It is also, naturally, great fun for PJH fans. There is an introductory quote from the maestra herself (not provided specially, don’t be silly) and as well as the quotes from Rid of Me, there are echoes of other songs, especially in the last couple of chapters. The apple tree Mary and Kathleen find on p.102, ‘dripping with fruit, bruised and rotting’ where Mary glimpses in Kathleen an image of ‘the first woman on earth’ harks back to the Biblical allusions of Harvey’s first album, Dry, and especially the imagery of ‘Happy and Bleeding’; on the very last page we get a kind of joint voice declaring ‘this is love, this is love’ as the women reach an ecstatic apotheosis, ‘alone … flying, about to rush down into a pure new space’, and that comes from 2000’s Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea. You could play Polly Bingo with the somewhat phantasmagoric and highly-wrought text, if you felt inclined.

The novel is a work of love, obviously, but just as clearly, it’s an exercise, and an effort. Ms Schatz’s scheme forces her into some odd narrative contortions, perhaps most obviously in the chapter ‘Luna’, where, with no warning, Kathleen, like Harvey’s celestially-obsessed narrator in the original song, addresses the Moon at some length. It’s a bit like twelve-tone music, constrained by rules which don’t always gel into anything naturalistic. Engaging and sometimes moving though it might be, nobody could say the story is remotely convincing; not much of it, in fact, ‘makes sense’ at all.

Thanks to all its virtues, though, Rid of Me is very far from being a waste of money, and another testament to the generative power of Harvey’s work for that of other artists. So I also bought the 33 1/3 volume about the Banshees' Peepshow and will report on that at some point!

'I Was a Teenage Banshee' (Sue Webster, 2019)

Very very vaguely, I think I’d been aware of artists Sue Webster and Tim Noble,  but really only began to pay attention when they’d separated and it became clear that Ms Webster was one of PJ Harvey’s chums. Polly wrote a poem as an introduction to Webster’s The Folly Acres Cookbook in 2015, and, for a fan, Webster’s Instagram feed is worth keeping an eye on as occasionally they do stuff together and PJH even consents to be photographed. But Webster also has other enthusiasms, and I couldn’t help noticing that Siouxsie Sioux pops up on that Instagram feed rather often.

Sue Webster’s current book, I Was a Teenage Banshee, delineates her own relationship with the Queen of Gothdom and how it wove in and out of her bumpy adolescence and partnership with Tim Noble (PJH appears very fleetingly). One Wednesday morning in 1978 the eleven-year-old Sue Webster sat beside the letterbox of her family home in Leicester, waiting for the highlight of her week – the arrival of music magazine NME - and its plop to the floor on this particular morning was to bend the trajectory of her life, like a prism twisting the light. ‘I found myself catapulted across the room by a pair of killer-heeled, thigh-length patent leather boots … The figure I saw rising above me, wearing Cleopatra-style make-up and sporting a Nazi swastika armband, belonged to the surrogate mother I’d long been searching for’. Bowie, Kate Bush, the Slits, the Sisters, and a Leicester band or two, are all present in the book too, but they are barely even support acts; years later, Webster reflects that ‘everything I ever learned in life was from listening to the first four albums of Siouxsie and the Banshees’.

But the narrative doesn’t start there. It starts in the middle, with Webster leaving for university and her father packing three cardboard boxes full of tat which she then carts around with her for the intervening years, never examining them until the day in 2014 when she and Tim Noble part. That’s when she chooses to open them. Box one contained school work and juvenile art work. Box two sheltered diaries, personalia, and ‘letters written to me by friends I had forgotten and who had once cared for me’. Box three was the Banshees box.

It was, Webster says, ‘the obsession that dragged me kicking and screaming throughout my adolescence’: LPs and singles, concert tickets and coach passes, ‘crumpled posters with economical squares of Blu Tack still attached’, her fan club membership card, bootleg tapes and ‘much sought-after concert T-shirts held together for dear life by safety pins, not for the punk aesthetic but in order to retain their very existence’. She uses the memorabilia to prise open the story of her life.

I Was a Teenage Banshee is a big, floppy paperback, pricey and quite difficult to handle both physically and conceptually. Ms Webster presents her tale, a narrative of difficult growing up, love, loss and art, as an excavation of artefacts, elaborating on ‘Crime Scene’, the wall-collage she made out of the bits and pieces from the cardboard boxes and the links between them. Some items come from the boxes and some are the artworks she and Tim Noble make, apart and together: especially together, filtering their own enthusiasms and the works of past artists through their own trashy and deeply committed aesthetic. There are two contextualising essays – ‘A Touch of Insanity’, about Webster’s teenage skirmishes with the mental health system; and the concluding ‘I Was a Teenage Banshee’, laying out how she met and fell for Siouxsie Sioux – and, straying and rambling through memory and rant, they are moving and illuminating, but for the most part we have to draw our own conclusions from those juxtapositions of paper scraps, photos and artwork.

Doing it isn’t that easy, and clearer statements about Webster’s actual interactions with Siouxsie and her music come from other sources than the book, for example a recent account in US magazine Interview. Here, she describes how she listened to The Scream and heard not raucous punk but ‘almost like a soundtrack to a film … it left a lot more to the imagination’. Goth hadn’t really been synthesised at this stage but that’s as good an account of the difference between the two as you might ask for. Her leather jacket with studs and painted Banshee images she made herself: ‘it was my pride and joy, my armour that I put on when I went to the gigs … It’s the thing that defines you, because you aren’t afraid to step out of your front door wearing something that you’ve made’. By the time she went to Trent Polytechnic in Nottingham in 1988, there to meet her future lover and collaborator, Webster had dyed her hair blonde, acquired a baseball cap, and, whether her earlier phase was best described as Goth or Punk, she’d left it behind. No Banshees music later than 1984’s baleful album Juju gets a mention, but Webster doesn’t forget completely: she sees Siouxsie perform again several times in the 2000s, adding to that pile of fading concert tickets. She doesn’t tell us what she thinks about those later encounters with her idol, coming to her again after so many years have passed, more experienced, more secure, much better-off, and with her hair black again albeit not as spiky as in 1984. There’s a lot she doesn’t tell us, in fact.

But really all you need to unlock the mystery is that statement that Siouxsie became Webster’s ‘surrogate mother’. If her natural birth into a working-class Leicester family promised nothing very exciting, her second parturition from that dark musical and sartorial womb created a new potential life, one of exploration and provocation, one of different responsibilities. ‘I came home from school and hacked off my beautiful long shiny black hair with a razor blade. That’s when everything changed and my life became a serious matter.’

Swanvale Halt Film Club: A Dog Called Money (2019)

It’s taken a long time for the third and final stage of PJ Harvey and Seamus Murphy’s project to reach the public. The Hollow of the Hand, the book of photographs and poetry, came out in 2015; the album, The Hope Six Demolition Project, in 2016; and only at the very end of last year were most of us able to view the film, A Dog Called Money. I’ve finally watched it!

Over ninety minutes, the documentary follows the composition of Hope Six, picking out the experiences which influenced the way the songs developed – though not all of them, and not exhaustively, and not all the songs featured actually ended up on the album (we get versions of the junked ‘Homo Sappy Blues’ and ‘Age of the Dollar’, the latter jettisoned due to John Parish’s disapproval even though everyone else liked it (‘I wish just for once she wouldn’t listen to what he says’, commented one fan on thegardenforum.org). Episodes from Murphy and Harvey’s travels are interspersed with scenes from the studio at Somerset House, and visitors watching the musicians through the one-way glass. Harvey reads excerpts from her notebooks and just occasionally someone else says something – an Artangel employee taking visitors through the passageways of Somerset House, or Paunie, the lesbian gang leader Harvey and Murphy met in Anacostia. A few elements aren’t from their joint travels, but from trips Murphy made separately: an anti-Assad demonstration in Syria, a Trump campaign rally in the US, refugees on the Greek border with Macedonia.

There are lots of fantastic vignettes. Harvey meets an instrument-maker in an upstairs shop in a Kabul backstreet and gives up trying to explain to him where Dorset is. She goes to a museum of mines, also in Afghanistan, and reels off some of the terrible exhibits. She sits attentive at a raucous church service in Anacostia and looks a bit fazed at a very different one in Kosovo, though listening enough to quote the words of Fr Sava Janjic: ‘If you don’t have to break the branch, don’t do it. If you don’t have to kill the animal, don’t do it.’ A young woman is baptised at Union Temple Baptist Church; little girls learn Arabic at an Afghan maktab (at least, that’s my interpretation of what’s happening); tourists mill around the Washington Monument while a chap wees behind a tree to right of shot. Everywhere are mountains, traffic jams, birds in and out of cages, rivers, ruins, children, dust.

The trouble is, it’s all vignettes. Determined, like the book and the album, that observation, witnessing, should be the keynote of the project, the film presents images without context or comment. That this is the point is stressed by the very first shot, a little Afghan boy with his nose pressed against glass, and it’s echoed by Harvey’s wanderings, Murphy’s camera lens, and the faces of the visitors to the recording sessions. Having taken that decision, the film has no choice but to leave us in the same position, without helping us make the connections that would turn the succession of moments into a story. The US observation blimps hover with intent in the Afghan sky, but even the anger and sense of conflict which is shot through the album is absent here, any very political feeling dispersed by the amiable banter of the musicians back in London. It’s like much of Harvey’s poetry, so quiet and spare it’s easy to miss the significance of what she describes.

The reticence means there’s a lot that doesn’t get mentioned. ‘I’m the only woman here,’ Harvey points out at an Albanian village ceremony in Kosovo, leaving us wondering how it was arranged. That’s surprising enough, but surprise is hardly an adequate response to seeing her watching an ecstatic Sufi prayer-session at an Afghan mosque – how did she get to be the only woman there, a place where no woman would ever normally be? What did they say to make that happen? We have the familiar footage of the Union Temple Baptist choir singing lines from ‘The Community of Hope’, but not a word about the church’s own unhappiness at the political firestorm the song raised when it was released early in 2016. This isn’t really ‘the story of the album’ except in a very minimal way.

Of course it’s all delightful for Pollywatchers, but what about anyone else? It seems to me that you have to be signed up for the project: without reading the book and listening to the finished songs, it’s hard to fathom the film, and (notwithstanding a single introductory caption) if you don’t know who PJ Harvey is and who the old codgers playing instruments in the studio are, you may well be left adrift. One viewer on the MUBI website, where you can see the movie, commented concisely and brutally (as others have for twenty years or more), ‘get your head out of your ass’. That’s a nasty dismissal of one of the least self-regarding artists in the world, and Harvey does explicitly acknowledge the ambiguities of her position as observer: crunching through the debris of an abandoned house in Kosovo, she notes ‘a handmade rotting wooden ladder, a corn store. These were country people. And I’m stepping on their things in my expensive leather sandals’. Yet you can still wonder whether the project’s achievements have matched its ambitions. There is only one abiding message: the unity-in-variety of human experience, and human dignity against the emptiness of ideological (especially national) rhetoric. In the silence is the point. And you either take that, or leave it.

Dorset Music

Something, hopefully, uplifting for the end of the year! It came to the attention of folk on the PJ Harvey fan boards that back in the early 1990s she'd taken uncharacteristic part in an overtly feminist music project, the Brilliant Birthdays choir, based in Salisbury. The organiser was Sammy Hurden, who you can see in the only photograph of the choir publicly available, holding the guitar, with the young Polly to the right of the girl in the stripy top. Ms Hurden and PJH obviously kept in touch with one another, because she appears among the voices on 'The Colour of the Earth', the last track from the mighty Let England Shake, and, so the sleeve notes imply, organised the other voices. 

Perhaps this isn't a surprise, as Ms Hurden hasn't moved very far from West Dorset, so she would have been around for that very Dorset-based recording. Her website relates her ongoing work with community choirs, gathering and coaching people to sing pieces that evoke the landscape around them. 'The Chalk Legends', part of the cultural side of the 2012 Olympics for which Weymouth was one of the locations, took singers and musicians to St Catherine's Chapel at Abbotsbury and the church of St George Reforne on Portland. 

You can't get more Dorset than The Hare and the Harp, though. It was inspired by a medieval carving in the County Museum in Dorchester, and was performed in Powerstock church - the piece is in the key of the bells which are rung in the background throughout the songs. It's not just the beauty of the landscape and the woven depth of history which makes this piece so moving, though, but (despite the bolstering presence of a few professional musicians) the commitment you see here to getting ordinary people to make music. A very happy new year to you all.

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.

Final Acts

Bill is dying at the moment. Two years ago he watched Reg breathing his last in the traumatic funeral service that was supposed to be for someone else entirely, as the paramedics battled around him, and muttered, 'Let him go, let him go.' Now it's Bill's own turn. The last time I saw him in hospital, he could just about say my name and the phrase 'I go in and out', which cost him a lot of effort. A week later, lying in bed instead of sitting beside it, he couldn't say anything no matter how hard he tried. He looked dehydrated to me, his lips dry and flaky, but wouldn't or couldn't take any water from a straw, and happily a doctor came by so I was able to tell her: she would put him on some fluids, she said. The doctor gone, Bill's eyes mainly looked forward rather than at me. I assured him of the love of the parish and of God for him. And he started to cry out. I couldn't tell whether it meant laughter or distress. I have known the most faithful people, and Bill is nothing if not that, collapse into numbness or rage at the end, as though they never really believed it was going to happen to them. But whatever he felt, he couldn't communicate to me in any way I could understand. It was under the chain of inarticulacy.

There is nothing peaceful about this slow death. It's a battle, a concluding struggle to the end of a long life, as the body closes down. I suppose it's unreasonable to expect anything else, and we should brace ourselves for it: anything else is a bonus. But what a damnable business it is. In humanist terms, are there any earthly pleasures that can balance the terrible process of leaving them?

March 30th is also the 27th anniversary of the release of Dry and so I have listened to it again in line with my devotional programme. The unfocused rage behind it was helpful. 'Happy and Bleeding' is about a specifically female experience, but there was something applicable about some of the lyrics:

This fruit was bruised
dropped off and blue 
out of season ...
Long overdue
too early and it's late, too

If it were not for the Cross, for the divine sharing in the human sorrow, I would not be here doing this, I can tell you. Even with it, holding on to faith is a near thing.