Polly Jean Harvey (Bridport, United Kingdom, 54 years old) is clear. If her career had not started in 1991, she would have had nothing to do in the music world. “In the nineties there was an opening for the type of music I made. Especially for women. The support I received was immediate,” she said on Saturday in a hotel in Barcelona, a few hours before her concert at Primavera Sound, which she will repeat this Friday in Madrid as part of the Botanical Nights. “If I debuted today, it would be much more difficult. I think she wouldn’t get anywhere, because there is no more space,” says the singer, sitting with the demeanor of a classical dancer in front of a cup of coffee. “Everything is going too fast. Before, a disk had a life of one year. Now it’s not even a week. I’m as guilty as anyone. Before I would buy a vinyl, sit down and listen to it in its entirety. Now I give a song a minute and, if I don’t like it, I skip it. I have become a consumer, and it is a word I hate.”
Before the interview, she has set two conditions in the form of kind suggestions: not to talk too much about the past or the place of women in the industry. Except that she didn’t take long to skip them herself, a sign that the singer has a transgressive mind. Especially when it comes to going against herself and what was expected of her. She has made it clear since she debuted, allergic to labels at a time when she gave every unsubmissive woman the seal of riot grrrl, what the feminists of the alternative scene of the nineties were called. While some did grunge On the radio, Harvey sang songs about bleeding clitorises, inspired by Ingmar Bergman films. His albums, raw and bellicose, were tinged with violence and desire, danger and ecstasy, while others limited themselves to making love with their clothes on.
“Since I was little I have heard voices and had visions, perhaps of ghosts. When I grew up, I realized that they were presences and ideas that passed through my body and I turned them into songs.”
The cliché goes that she has done nothing but reinvent herself. She has signed 10 albums with a single rule: not to repeat herself, to keep looking for ways to transfigure her sound, to avoid the easy resort of autobiographical explanation, to which she has an aversion. Her most recent album, I Inside the Old Year Dying, which she will present in Madrid alternating her new songs with a handful of old hits, is an introspective and timeless work that is loosely inspired by her childhood and adolescence in Dorset, through a nine-year-old girl who acts as narrator (but , she insists, nothing to do with her life). “When you’ve been making music for 30 years, it’s hard for you to remember who you were at the beginning, what you wrote when you were 17 or 18. What I remember is the feeling I had when I finished my first song: the absolute happiness of finding a way of expression that is would entirely fit my soul. That has never left me, it has been my common thread in all my albums.” At night in Barcelona, under a magical rain, she played two of her first songs, dress and 50ft Queenie, with the composure that the passage of time has given him.
PJ Harvey’s entire career has been an attempt to avoid becoming a product. It almost happened twice. The first, after his first album, Dry. “My record company, which was going to be absorbed by Universal, suggested names of musicians and producers to me. They wanted it to adopt more commercial features. I had to fight to work with Steve Albini on Rid of Me“, he says about the legendary producer, who died in May, who gave a decisive turn to his sound, and his life. “With that album I realized that as an artist I was going to continue changing and that I was not going to let anything or anyone show me the way, except my instinct.” Did they also mess with his way of presenting himself to the world? “Yes, they gave me names of photographers and designers. I was very polite, I didn’t get angry, but I said no. Maybe it wasn’t what they expected, but they realized that they could also make a profit out of it. Even if he didn’t sell many records, he had respect and loyalty, and those are things that are also worth a lot.”
The second time was after Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea, the greatest of his hits, which he released in 2000. It would be his brightest album. “My challenge was to write a nice pop album where all the songs were singles. I was in a very happy time, I spent part of my time in New York and I had a great time. Those songs reflect that joy and encouragement well. But when I finished it, I moved on to something else. “I am proud of that album, but there are phases that better reflect my desires as a person and artist than others.” In 2004 she edited Uh Huh Herone of her most misunderstood albums, which definitively distanced her from the flat path of commercialism.
Folklore has always interested Harvey, but it takes on an unprecedented role in Orlam, the novel in verse that he published in 2022, and on this new album. The two, who share the same narrative, are partly written in the dialect of Dorset, her region on the south coast of England, with echoes of medieval English, which she learned for months to compose his verses. “I will never be able to leave that place, its miles of forest and its Jurassic coast. We are close to Stonehenge and the Cerne Abbas Giant. “I see the magic that ancient landscape contains, centuries of history that I can feel under my feet and floating in the air.”
“After my last album, I felt lost. “I felt like I wasn’t at my best, that I wasn’t giving my best, and I asked myself if I should take another path.”
It seems that Harvey feels a supernatural connection with that landscape. He even sees some ghost walking through his songs. “I may sound like a crazy person, but since I was little I have heard voices and had visions, maybe of ghosts. When I grew up, I realized that they were presences and ideas that passed through my body and that I converted into music and words.” That is, in songs. The other side of the coin is biblical images, leitmotiv from her first songs, in which she embodied contemporary disciples of Delilah or Mary Magdalene. “For many of us, religion has been a veil that covered us growing up. “I always wanted to know what was under that mantle,” she says.
During the pandemic he considered leaving music. He returned to her after a long period of reflection. “After my last album and tour, I felt lost. I felt like I wasn’t at my best, that I wasn’t giving my best, and I asked myself if I should take another path,” Harvey explains. “When you enter your 50s, you reflect on the past and on the years ahead of you, which are getting fewer and fewer. “I asked myself if I wanted to continue doing this with the three decades I had left.” She promised herself that, if she returned to music, it would not be through inertia. “I had to do it out of passion. I had to wait two years, but she came back. “I realized this is what I love.” Her plan B was to dedicate herself to visual art, which is what she studied for. But my strength is as a singer and songwriter. Now I know that it is my strong point.” Until now she hadn’t realized? “Yes, it’s recent,” she admits without false modesty. “It was never a certainty. I used to wonder if she was doing as well as she could, if she could be doing something better with my life. Since this new album, I feel more confident. That’s why I have decided to continue.”
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