Opening her late-summer set in Gunnersbury Park, west London, PJ Harvey sang: “Wyman, am I worthy?/Speak your wordle to me.” A pink haze had settled across the sky just before she appeared onstage to the sound of birdsong, church bells, and electronic fuzz. In the lyric – which comes from “Prayer at the Gate”, the opening track of her most recent record I Inside the Old Year Dying – Harvey sings in the dialect of her native Dorset. Wyman-Elvis is a Christ-like figure, literally an all-wise warrior, who appears throughout the album, and “wordle” is the world. For the next hour and a half, as the sky darkens and Harvey and her four-piece band perform underneath a low, red-tinged moon, they conjure their own wordle, one of riddles and disquieting enchantment.
Harvey is singing from the perspective of nine-year-old Ira-Abel Rawles, the fictional character whose story she tells in Orlam, her second collection of poetry, which was published in 2022. She developed the book under the mentorship of the Scottish poet and two-time TS Eliot Prize winner Don Paterson, and learned the dialect (which she remembers hearing as a child from the older people in her Dorset village) by studying William Barnes’s 1886 A Glossary of the Dorset Dialect.
The world she then built through verse – of Ira’s coming of age in the superstitious rural community of Underwhelem, overlooked by “bedraggled angels” (sheep) and Orlam, a lamb’s eyeball that acts as her protector – forms the basis of the songs on I Inside, which was released in July last year. The collection’s incantatory rhyming poems have an innate song-like quality. Take “A Badder Charm”, the final stanza of which reads:
Pick at hate as ’twere a scab
Till my usurpers ’neath the grab
Wi’ eyes out-pecked an’ gut-strings splayed;
The lamb-christ’s sacrifice repaid
For the album, Harvey worked with theatre sound designers to locate scratchy found recordings, which she fed through analogue equipment, giving them a further layer of hiss. Onstage, samples of children and hedgerow creatures fizz underneath the band’s tight guitars and percussion. In both settings, Harvey’s strange folk lyrics combine with the airy music to conjure a mood that feels supernatural and yet wholly rooted in a rural England of a time gone by.
Harvey is one of our most adventurous living musicians. In interviews she has often underlined her wish never to repeat herself; she refuses to make music that sounds at all similar to what she has made before. “Often we would jettison a sound because it was too familiar to us,” she said on the American radio network NPR about the making of I Inside. “That gets harder the more work that you’ve made, because there’s more to avoid.” And Harvey has made that task particularly difficult by working with the same two co-producers, John Parish (who at Gunnersbury Park adds backing vocals and guitar, which at one point he strums with a paintbrush) and Flood (real name Mark Ellis), for the best part of 30 years.
Yet these sustained collaborations have resulted in remarkably wide-ranging music. Since releasing her debut record, Dry, in 1992, Harvey has continually usurped expectations, moving steadily from goth to trip-hopper, introverted dawdler to spokesperson on international conflict – and now to poet and reviver of a near-extinct dialect. These many guises may suggest an artist spread too thin to build a devout following, but the opposite is true. As the rapt, 20,000-strong crowd gathered at Gunnersbury Park would tell you, it is with – not in spite of – this instinct for reinvention that she has won acclaim.
Polly Jean Harvey, who was born in Bridport, Dorset, in 1969, is the only artist to have been awarded the Mercury Prize twice. She first won for her polished pop-rock album Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea (2000), a love letter to New York that features Thom Yorke of Radiohead and has sold more than a million copies worldwide. She received the award again for the rambunctious rock of Let England Shake (2011), for which she researched the history of conflict to create a treatise on England’s centuries-old role as an overseas aggressor.
It’s full of percussion and bold lyrics, its most poignant a call-and-response line that runs: “What is the glorious fruit of our land?/Its fruit is deformed children.” The desperately bleak image – a reference to the war in Afghanistan – is turned especially eerie by the childish sing-song voice with which Harvey performs it.
In the decade between her Mercury wins, she released Uh Huh Her (2004), a punk-infused record that featured an accordion interlude (played by Harvey, who took on all the album’s instruments, bar a few drum lines) and a minute-long track of seagull calls. Then came White Chalk (2007), for which she turned to the piano, lending the album a balladic, haunting quality.
While each of these records sounds very different to the others, there are occasional whispers of through-lines: “White chalk hills are all I’ve known/White chalk hills will rot my bones,” she sings on the title track of the 2007 album, which – complete with a harmonica solo from Harvey – closes the Gunnersbury Park set. The name of the soft rock of her Dorset childhood reappears on the new record. “I laugh in the leaves and merge to meesh [moss]/Just a charm in the woak [oak] with the chalky children of evermore,” she sings, “chalky” here meaning ghostly, which in turn sheds new light on Harvey’s relationship with those Dorset cliffs.
Given the sonic array of Harvey’s discography – which to date comprises ten studio albums over 31 years, plus numerous soundtracks for film and TV – Harvey’s live show is slick. After a first half dedicated to I Inside, the set becomes a marathon of greatest hits. Harvey – dressed in a streamlined white dress, with white lace-up boots and her dark hair curled – wilfully plays the part of shape-shifter at the microphone.
She dons an autoharp for “The Words That Maketh Murder”, another rousing political number from Let England Shake, before leaping – literally, across the stage – into the thunderous opening bars of her 1993 single “50ft Queenie”, from Rid of Me, which she made with the producer Steve Albini (also known for his work with Nirvana and Pixies), who died aged 61 in May.
While Harvey’s vocal parts have tended to be higher in pitch for her more recent music, in this section of the set she dips down into the lower tones she more often used at the start of her career: theset list provides an impressive display of the elasticity of her voice. On “The Desperate Kingdom of Love” (from Uh Huh Her), which Harvey plays solo on acoustic guitar, her voice is full and rounded. Then, on the riotous “Man-Size” (1993) it drops lower, and her syllables grow more disjointed, as she instructs herself to “Douse hair with gasoline/Set it light and set it free”. She barely stops for applause before dashing into her urgent 1991 debut single “Dress”, now accented with fiddle flourishes. Comparatively, “The Garden”, from Is This Desire? (1998), is so pared-back as to take on a spectral quality, as Harvey lunges across the stage during her breathy vocal performance.
Despite these many different sounds, textures and moods, what is constant in Harvey’s music is a primal energy. Whatever she does, she does with rawness. It’s a feeling that, in its many showings – electric guitar slashes and harp flourishes, spoken-word segments and angelic choruses – somehow holds together a sense of the new and the ancient. The overall effect is one of timelessness, palpable across Harvey’s discography, and never stronger than on I Inside the Old Year Dying. In the NPR interview, Harvey said that when making it, she aimed “to have this non-linear, no-era, every-era world going on”; she wanted to find “a threshold where you’re in a sort of between worlds, a shadowland”.
Harvey’s is a very English shadowland, a place where a young girl wanders through “beech and aller, woak and birch” trees – beech, elder, oak and birch – on Maundy day, where we are instructed to worship nature above all: “Hail the hedge as it grows/Ask the hedge all it knows.” It’s a quieter politicism than on Let England Shake and less a call to attention than her earlier, punkier records. But her focus on the natural world, and her use of hyper-local folk tales now too often forgotten, is powerful. It shows that Harvey knows an artist can look back in time for inspiration and still be forward-facing in intent. And, of course, such primal verve is best live, where we encounter PJ Harvey’s shape-shifting talents up-close and resolute.
PJ Harvey’s “I Inside the Old Year Dying” is out on Partisan Records
[See also: Oasis: tribunes of the people]
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This article appears in the 21 Aug 2024 issue of the New Statesman, The Christian Comeback