Dogs of war let slip a career high
WHEN an artist wins the Mercury Prize for the best album of the year, you would expect them to be somewhat frazzled when you turn up to interview them the following day. When an artist makes history by winning the prize a second time, the champagne corks should still be popping. To expect PJ Harvey to indulge in such behaviour, however, is to misunderstand a woman who has done it her way.
We're in the hotel in West London in which Harvey always stays when she comes up from her home in Dorset, southwest England - a quiet place with a discreet facade. She is sipping herbal tea, poised and serene, with no visible trace of a hangover. How did she react to her history-making achievement? By getting an early night and putting in a few hours of writing the following morning.
"I write every day," she explains, looking pretty in a sophisticated way, a simple outfit of black jeans and a black top covering a slight frame. "It's like any muscle that you have to keep fit and well: you need to use the part of the brain that writes and creates. It's like breathing for me."
She didn't feel like going on a four-day bender? She laughs at the idea. To anyone who has followed Harvey's career, her discipline should come as no surprise. She approaches life by distilling it, by cutting out the unnecessary. Her acceptance speech at last Tuesday's Mercury Prize ceremony was classic.
"Thank you for the recognition of my work on this album," she said. "When I last won, on September 11, 2001, I was in Washington DC, watching the Pentagon burning from the window."
That has an expediency a presidential speechwriter would get a medal for. It is pertinent to the war-themed album, Let England Shake, for which she won the award; it reminds us that she won a decade ago for Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea; and
it highlights the 10th anniversary of September 11 in one fell swoop.
But even the famously meticulous Harvey could not have planned the cosmic symmetry of Let England Shake winning the Mercury a decade after September 11. "It's so strange, isn't it?" she says quietly. "It couldn't have been a better master plan, were it one."
She can, however, take credit for the perfectly realised and thought-out vision that is Let England Shake, more a conceptual art piece than rock album. It isn't protest music, but a humane response to events beyond Harvey's realm of experience, couched in sparse musical arrangements that are based for the most part around Harvey's autoharp. The music is unpredictable: one song, Written on the Forehead, features a sample of a jaunty reggae tune called Blood and Fire by Niney the Observer, even though it is about a destroyed Middle Eastern city.
The track Harvey performed at the Mercurys, The Words that Maketh Murder, borrows a line and a melody from Eddie Cochran's rock 'n' roll classic Summertime Blues, and combines it with the visceral imagery embedded in the line "I have seen and done things I want to forget; soldiers fell like lumps of meat".
"After finishing the last album, I knew that I wanted to explore a different way of lyric-writing; to not deal with interior monologues," says Harvey.
"For years I had wanted to write about the things I felt affected by in the world but I didn't feel I had the skills, and I didn't want to slip into writing weak protest songs.
"Then one night I was watching the news about what was happening in Afghanistan, and felt so sick, so impotent, that I knew I had to try to respond to it. I didn't know if I would succeed, but at least I would try."
For much of 2007 and 2008, Harvey studied painters, poets, novelists and filmmakers who had dealt with the subject of war.
"I was by myself for the most part, at my home in Dorset. Only when I started thinking about how it might sound did I pick up instruments and talk about it with other people," she says.
On Battleship Hill imagines the lingering impact of life in the trenches, The Glorious Land reflects how England was built on the back of countless foreign wars. The lyricism is minimal: every word is considered. "That's my writing process in general," she says. "I freeform around an idea and then strip everything back to the bare ingredients; to see how
little you can use."
Nothing is casual with Harvey. Each new album has come with a complementary personal style: a chic, urban look for the New York-inspired Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea, a cross between a warrior queen and a disembodied spirit for Let England Shake, right down to the white gown and feather headdress she wore to the Mercurys.
Harvey is unusual for a pop star in that she gets better as she gets older. At 41, she has made the best album of her career, and one that sounds nothing like anything she has done before. How does she forget what has gone before? "It's not so much forgetting what I've done as not repeating myself," she says.
If you look at Polly Harvey's history, there is evidence of an unusual type of pop star. Brought up on a sheep farm in Dorset by music-loving artist parents who introduced her to Bob Dylan and Captain Beefheart, she made a huge impact with her first single, Dress, in 1991. John Peel called her early material "admirable, if not always enjoyable".
Today Harvey aims for an artistic focus and discipline that's unusual in our information-overloaded age. She remains in Dorset, living close to her parents, and doesn't own a mobile phone. "I use the internet very, very rarely, and then only for some specific piece of research," she says. "It's too much information for me."
Harvey is already working towards her next project, although she has no idea what shape or form it will take. She displays none of the messiness and self-doubt that makes life so eternally complicated. She comes across as calm, considered, polite, and possessed of a quiet confidence. It turns out that I'm totally wrong on this last observation, however. "Absolutely the opposite," she says. "I'm always questioning what I'm doing. I'm always questioning if it's any good. I live in fear that I'll never be able to write again. I always feel it could have been better. I question if I'm doing the right thing with my life and wonder if I should be in any other different job."
Harvey will at least concede that she couldn't have made Let England Shake any better. The only other album she is satisfied with is 1995's To Bring You My Love.
"I had to go through all that ebb and flow, that long period of not quite getting there, to get to a point when I feel I couldn't have done anything more to make it a more complete album. Maybe I'll have to wait another 10 years before I get it right again."
You get the impression that making history with a second Mercury win is extremely unlikely to derail PJ Harvey.
"I'm pleased about what happened because, with this album, I was confident. It achieved what I wanted to do, which was to put words around the concept of war in a subtle and ambiguous way. And for me, that is unusual."
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/ar ... 6134249527
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