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that while the woman herself was a mighty creative power, the other members of the band, as it was then, could have been replaced by ‘any competent session musicians’ and it would have made no difference.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.