And So We Conclude

A few weeks ago in the unexpected context of a meeting at Southwark Cathedral I met an archdeacon who told me that the Brixton Academy is ‘a lovely venue’. The architectural framing of the auditorium certainly makes it unusual, and we wondered why the management saw fit to keep it all in darkness an hour or more before the concert was due to start so people had to pick their way gingerly around or dazzle one another with flashlights. But it was OK, I suppose. Not as plush as the Albert Hall, admittedly. I also fell to wondering, as we constantly had to avert our knees from the traffic of passing concert-goers in front of us, even during the concert itself, how it was that so many people found it impossible to go for an hour and a bit, an hour and a bit that they have had months to prepare for, without a drink or a wee or, given the close relationship between those activities, both. You’ve paid quite a lot for this, why aren’t you watching it?

‘8.30 sharp’ was given as the start time, which I put down as a bit of Harveyism, being the kind of thing no musician would ever say. In fact we kicked off about ten minutes later. Gosh, it was loud. It was pummellingly loud, at least for an irregular concertgoer like me. The subtleties of the recorded music weren’t lost, but turned up so there was no chance whatever of missing them: you couldn’t call the result beautiful, but the power and emotion were undeniable, a complete contrast to the reticence of the Let England Shake concert five years ago. That time, PJ was virtually static: she didn’t exactly chuck herself around the stage last night, but instead, when not blaring on the saxophone, wove to and fro between the nine band members, gesturing in a sort of shamanic dance. It was a big, big production: after the opener ‘Chain of Keys’ the great grey metallic backdrop whose symbolic meaning nobody is quite certain of rose up from behind the stage to dominate the proceedings visually. Whatever it means, it has a certain threatening presence and, more practically, allows a variety of lighting effects to play across it enhancing the ambience of different songs.

Songs? Well, most of Hope Six, four from Let England Shake, two from White Chalk – including the haunting, disjointed ‘To Talk to You’ which offered a quieter if not at all comfortable interlude in the high-volume proceedings – and a couple of old favourites. If PJH has a signature song, ‘Down by the Water’ is it (Alain Johannes did stick duty on that this time), and was achieved in good dark hallucinatory style; ‘To Bring You My Love’ was positively demonic. From way back in 1992, ’50-Foot Queenie’ should have been the most air-pounding track of all but for some reason that was when Polly’s mike let her down, it seemed to me, and quite a bit of it was indistinguishable – not a problem any other time in the set, despite the volume.

We didn’t stay for the encore, so our evening finished with the slow, majestic ‘River Anacostia’, with its imagery of Jesus walking on the poisoned waters by the Washington naval yards. ‘Wade in the water, God’s gonna trouble the water’ intone the band, intercut with Polly’s plaintive query ‘What will become of us?’ and finally silence and darkness fall: enough, at least, to make a soppy Christian tearful. I wonder what she’ll do next? This tour runs until Reykjavik in early November, starts again with a leg in Australia and Japan next year, and might go to South America though no dates are set yet. That will probably be it, as she doesn’t enjoy touring, doesn’t need the money, and presumably only does it so people can hear the music. Of course I am much more relaxed when she’s at home in Dorset and going no further than the corner shop for a pint of milk. But what then?

I will take away from last night how wonderful it was to see these magnificent works – these liturgies of passion and compassion – performed in front of us. God save the Queen. And I will be quiet now, I promise. 

A Journey with a Singer, part 11: 'The Hope Six Demolition Project' (2016)

In the long gap between albums, PJ began pursuing different paths. You remember the time she took over the Today programme on Radio 4: how it was denounced by the Telegraph as ‘incomprehensible liberal drivel’, and how she very clearly took delight in tweaking the nose of Tory England. I was off work that day, and when I first turned on the radio I thought there’d been a strike or something so the normal programme wasn’t being broadcast; when I realised what was happening, I almost ran round the house waving my hands about. It was delicious. More than that, I maintain it’s a work as significant and revealing as any of her music. It not only made her politics pretty clear (‘People complain that the BBC is run by lefties’, one commentator said, ‘this is what the BBC would sound like if it was really run by lefties’), but it also showed her using her celebrity to shelter others so they could share their non-mainstream views, not just the Assanges and Pilgers who didn’t really need it, but people nobody had much heard of. There was poetry, too, and a range of other projects, to occupy her time.

I was increasingly warm towards this new PJH. Rock-chick Polly I’d never felt much in common with, greatly though I might have admired what she did; arty, leftie, literary Polly was more sympatico. What I wasn’t aware of was the work she was doing in preparation for the next recording: travelling with Seamus Murphy to Afghanistan, Kosovo and Washington, staying in somewhat rougher hotels than she’d have been used to, talking to people who would tell them disagreeable things, and writing them down in poems and prose. ‘She’s a musician, not a journalist’, commented Murphy later, ‘she’s not used to people crying when she asks them questions’. She saw human bones in a ruined building, confronted sorrow and need, faced her own inability to help. She didn’t have to do this: she could have stayed safely at home writing about the dire consequences of political decision-making, and done it all from books, newspapers and the TV. If nothing else, Hope Six is an unparalleled act of engagement. No mere singer has ever done anything like it.

The resulting album was (as I’ve said elsewhere) almost inevitably uneven as she tried to reformulate those observations and conversations into music, tried to express anger, sorrow and compassion without being patronising, and not always managing it completely comfortably. But it had the power to move perhaps unlike anything she’d done before, because of the reality that underlay it. My first encounter was watching the video accompanying ‘The Community of Hope’, and what I saw – bearing in mind that not everyone did – was a profoundly humanistic, compassionate vision of people creating hope and love in a society that militated against both. Yes, it made me cry, and much of the rest of the album did too: out of it, PJ Harvey emerged as not so much a musical force as a moral one. Some of my feelings have certainly become more definite, more emboldened, as a result.

Strange things were going on at the same time. This most private of artists, who once upon a time refused to use email, now had an Instagram account of all things (possibly due to the influence of her new management), and seemed happy to begin posting monthly playlists on Spotify (‘Brexit Blues’, the second one was entitled). Of course we now live in a world in which everything goes online, and Polly was apparently relaxed about the fact that her friends were going to snap her and upload the results for the globe to see. There she was picnicking with the band in Switzerland, on a beach near Los Angeles in a big hat, or on the hillside next to St Catherine’s Chapel on a beautiful, hot Dorset day. There were nice moments of self-mockery. Interesting for fans in their own right, all these images revealed something else: how her friends love her. The greatest testament to a person’s character is their ability to keep their friends, and Polly has had many of hers for decades, holding their affection, their allegiance.

As I worked to get my head round Hope Six I decided to re-listen to the whole of PJ’s output, the sum of the last quarter-century of This Woman’s Work. I heard subtleties that I’d missed, things I’d overlooked, and now listening to any part of it I couldn’t quite forget the rest. How far she has come. The angry young woman taking blues as far as blues could go and beyond has become something else; and as I watched her sing a Christian folk song at a support event for Julian Assange in June this year –

I wonder as I wander out under the sky

How Jesus our Saviour was born for to die

For poor ord’n’ry people like you and like I

and gesture towards the audience and then to herself, the ‘something else’ settled into the word transfigured. The past is not abandoned, it becomes the raw material for something grander, and greater. There are fans who desperately want her to give up the politics, but there's a sense in which everything up to this point has been a preparation for what she's doing now. I can’t really say more than that – because there is more I could say, but they aren’t things you can say out loud, not while someone is alive.

My great fear – other than that of some dreadful event, a downed plane, a crashed tour coach, or a lunatic taking a pot-shot at a concert – is that she’ll give up. Her own great idol was Captain Beefheart, Don van Vliet, another challenging musician who eventually abandoned music in favour of art. But she did speak, back in 2007, about being ‘on a lifelong journey to explore what it means to be human through music’, and from that I take comfort. It’s not over just yet, please God.

And that's it, for now. All being well, we'll be at the Brixton Academy tomorrow evening for the real thing. Although I've now so thoroughly built it up I am half-convinced something will go horribly wrong ...

Withdrawal of Favour

'I haven't seen Edna for a while,' commented Lillian, our lay Reader, 'I've tried to contact her, but she hasn't replied'. I said I would have a go, and left a message. The last time I spoke to Edna she was a bit concerned about her health so I was slightly worried that something negative had happened to her. A couple of days later she sent me an email, saying that she thought a couple of recent sermons had taken a political slant, 'and that certainly isn't what I come to church to hear', so she was taking some time away from church but would probably be back before Christmas.

At least Edna isn't ill, I thought. I don't mind this too much, as it's perfectly fair: the God I see in the Scriptures and the life of Jesus Christ is as interested in how we organise our common life as he is in the ordering of our lives as individuals, and sometimes contemplating the Sunday readings does take me in a direction that includes reflecting on the political life of the human community, especially at the moment when we seem to be caught up in so many damaging delusions and fantasies (though perhaps we always are). 'The Lord lays low the lofty city,' says Isaiah, 'Feet trample it down - the feet of the poor, the footsteps of the oppressed'. Ultimately (though I would not say this except under extreme provocation) if you don't like this being talked about, you need to pick another religion. A member of our congregation who not so long ago read one Sunday from the prophet Amos with great relish - 'We will make the ephah small and the shekel great' - was the same gentleman who told me emphatically 'You can't be a Christian and a Conservative'. I wouldn't be so bold (I think cognitive dissonance in this area is possible) and it isn't my place to bully or to present my own views as though they were God's: it definitely is my place to provoke thought and point out that there are such things as falsehood, injustice and mechanisms that have a great influence on the way we live. I'm surprised that it's taken anyone seven years to notice what I'm doing.

Other people who have left the congregation since I've been here as a result of things I have said or done have described me as too theologically conservative, not conservative enough, or took the view that because I'd been associated with the Goth world I was tainted with Satanism. As I say, I don't mind this as it isn't due to anything I would change. In contrast I cast my mind back to the new incumbents' course I went on not long after starting here, and hearing some of the horror stories my colleagues told about relationships in their own parishes broken by a moment of ill-temper or a foolish word. It's those things I think about, and shudder.

A Journey with a Singer, part 10: 'Let England Shake' (2011)

(These last two albums I’ve commented on here before, but this account is more about personal response than a dispassionate review, so is a bit different.)

Reticent though Ms H was now committed to being, in Let England Shake she knew she’d done something that was in an entirely different league from her work thereto. You can see the pleasure, the perfectly reasonable pleasure an artist takes in having achieved something close to what they were aiming for, in the interviews she did around the time (she actually winked at Miranda Sawyer). Over St Peter’s Church, Eype, on the windswept downs of southwest Dorset no more than a mile from her home, the planets locked fortuitously into alignment, and what emerged from those few weeks PJ and her musicians spent there was a text of such subtlety, of such beauty, such compassion and such eternal resonance that it defies analysis. The album wasn’t really ‘about’ World War One, notwithstanding the references scattered through its tracks: it distilled the whole history of human conflict into a series of emotional statements given substance by a bewildering range of source material. It was truly magnificent, as simultaneously grandiose and as detailed as a medieval cathedral. The awards and accolades showered down. Two years later she would receive the MBE.

It took some mental recalibration to get used to, as her work always does. Fans of the old rock-style Polly Harvey who’d hung on hoping White Chalk was just an aberration now gave up: an autoharp? seriously? As usual, I was slow on the uptake. There were several tracks that immediately grabbed me, most especially ‘Last Living Rose’ (I’ve mentioned it here before), that aching exploration of what it’s like to love a country, with all its flaws and shortcomings. I watched Seamus Murphy’s video for the song, recognised the cliffs of West Bay and the church of St Cuthbert, Wells, and found myself getting a bit weepy at its humanism – the bookending image of the skeleton in the museum. Other pieces took longer to bed in, but weeping would become something of a habit. The more I listened, the more the complexity and composition of the music was apparent, the more moving it seemed to become. When Polly accepted the Mercury Award, the only artist ever to win it twice, she welcomed most of all the fact that ‘an album like this’ could be recognised: it was good to exult along with her, and take pleasure in the fact that the queen of the alternative was finally being feted in the way we felt she deserved.

Once I’d worked out that Eype was where the album was recorded, I realised that, despite having been to almost every church in Dorset, it was one I’d never visited. On holiday in July that year I went for a lovely long walk around Bridport, taking in St Peter’s (where I just managed not to be hideously overemotional), and had an ice cream at West Bay. This was where it happened, I reflected: and all around, that beautiful landscape, the land Polly reminds us is ‘weighted down with silent dead’. O England my lionheart, you leave a taste, a bitter one. Just by the footpath out of Eype there is a radio mast whose incongruity in those green hills struck me, and I photographed it, later discovering that it had struck the singer too – she included it in a series of drawings. If you look carefully at the portrait photo accompanying the interview she did for GQ in 2011, it’s right in the corner.

She was now disappearing further into her work. One reviewer described Let England Shake as ‘a curiously humble masterpiece’, pointing out that many of the words were not the singer’s own, that she was becoming a medium, vocalising for the dead – a step beyond the multifoiled identities she’d adopted in the past. For live performances, she became a creature of straps and raven feathers, a seeress or a Sibyl, the priestess of an unfamiliar faith. And yet, aspects of who she was becoming were going to move into the light for the first time, despite herself. 

A Journey with a Singer, Part 9: 'A Woman a Man Walked By' (2009)

Now, this was a bit tougher going. In contrast to PJ-and-Parish’s previous collaboration, Dance Hall at Louse Point, A Woman … was recorded in bits over a much longer period and doesn’t hang together anything like so cohesively. If it has any unity, it’s that of two virtuoso performers enjoying what they can do. And ‘enjoying’ is the keyword: this is a recording that mangles styles, moods and expectations with anarchic glee. There’s a lot on it which is comic, though it’s serious more often than the presentation might lead you to think at first glance.

My memory is that I whipped through the album and then let it rest for a long while before returning to it again, which was unfair. I can now appreciate its cleverness and experimentation much more than I did. If nothing else it acts as a tonic against any impression of the maestra as a pitilessly demanding and downbeat artiste who can’t do anything but misery – as if we thought that anyway.

Choose Your Battles

We've talked about the Swanvale Halt Branch Mothers' Union before. Things have not been easy for the Branch, with several longstanding members dying or moving away, and a hard time had finding anyone to do the work the Branch needs doing. A couple of weeks ago the Chair, who had decided to retire, asked me 'what I was going to do about the MU'. 'We could close the branch, or amalgamate it with another', she went on. After a bit of thought I wrote to her setting out all the options, and my impression that, while the purpose of the MU was as a campaigning organisation, locally there was a tendency to become a fellowship group for its members, and Swanvale Halt Branch had to decide what it wanted to be. 

This was intended as part of a conversation with the branch chair, but she promptly read it to the Committee. I wouldn't have expressed myself quite so unguardedly had it been going more widely. While I was on leave I had no fewer than three outraged communications as a result ('There was no bedside manner!' commented one, and there shouldn't have been a need for one), so when I got back suggested gingerly that we call a meeting of the Committee to talk about it. 

It was all rather good-natured in the event. One typically very mild lady smiled that she'd wanted to 'come round and give you a slap', but as I was determined not to be self-justificatory or defensive and they wanted to get some things actually sorted out about the future, the hour went very positively. Some administrative and promotional changes will take place, I'll help with the latter, and we'll see what happens. 

Now, this should not have happened and is a cautionary tale about what amounts to a private conversation being opened more widely. I could have made a fuss about that, but didn't as there was no point, and the MU committee could have been far more stubbornly upset, but didn't see any point in doing that either. In a great number of parishes this could have been something that would poison relationships for years to come but, as I've had cause to be grateful for in the past, Swanvale Halt is a parish composed of strikingly sensible people. 

A Journey with a Singer, Part 8: 'White Chalk' (2007)

‘Not having an immediate impact’ wasn’t an accusation that could ever be levelled against White Chalk. It was as though the musical world was minding its own business, felt a tap on the shoulder, and turned round to be faced with a ghost. Harvey abandoned her guitar for a piano and her vocal gymnastics for a high-pitched wail, part child, part wraith, vocalising a set of unsettling, inconclusive glimpses into realms of the uncanny that seemed to be unanchored from time or place. It was utterly different from anything she, or anyone, had done before. It was sui generis, somewhere between chamber music and folk, but neither. PJH had triumphantly reasserted her claim as a musical innovator, who never rested and who never let her audience relax completely either.

Longstanding fans who’d been following the lady with the guitar for years gulped and decided not to listen any more: not my reaction. Chilly and unwelcoming as this aural landscape was, it was one I felt quite at home in. I was exhilarated at her willingness to strike out into the unknown. Although only the title track explicitly refers to the Dorset landscape, it was the sense that that was where this music came from that hooked me. ‘White chalk south against time/White chalk cutting down the sea at Lyme/I walk the valley by the Cerne/On a path cut fifteen hundred years ago/And I know these chalk hills will rot my bones’. If I’d wanted the tender, tough ‘The Desperate Kingdom of Love’ from Uh Huh Her at my funeral, here was a song to join it.

But what I missed was the deeper shift in our heroine which White Chalk signalled. For publicity and performances Polly had herself sewn and buttoned into black or white pseudo-Victorian gowns: the white ones were scrawled with song lyrics, as though she herself was erased, submerged within the dire world she had created. For some time in interviews she’d been talking about ‘getting out of the way of the songs’, and this was the symbolic expression of that sentiment. Ceasing to talk about anything but the work, she began to disappear into it. It’s a strange paradox in the spiritual life that just as you are settled and mature as an individual you discover your next task is to relinquish that bounded sense of selfhood within other commitments, and that this is what love really means. White Chalk was the starting-point of Polly’s self-disassembly, giving herself over consciously to something greater than she was, although it took a while for me to realise it. Whether, in such terms, she realised it herself, who can tell.