An element in my affection for PJ is the sense of having changed along with her over the course of a quarter-century, and in some of the same ways. Part of this is about getting a bit milder as one gets older, and I notice that when I listen to some of the music which meant a lot to me when I was 20 what I experience is not the emotion I felt then, but the memory of that emotion. Not long ago, though, I re-listened to Polly’s earlier albums, wondering how I’d feel about the music – and if anything am more sensitive to the savagery and violence than I was in the past. It seems heightened by the awareness of what she’s done since.
bruise wrote:
... each new sound standing as the objective correlative of the whole body of work ...
That puts it brilliantly: after so long, and so much change, everything Polly does seems to me to be contained in everything else. Part of the reason, for instance, that I find that performance of ‘I Wonder as I Wander’ in Berlin so moving is that its purity and serenity emerge from the same person as all that jaggedness and violence. I like that.
And those earlier recordings are still there, but I imagine that as a performer PJ would find it hard to keep producing new work that made use of the same emotions without burlesquing herself; a performed song is already at several removes from the emotion that inspires it, and the further away you get from the emotional experience the less possible it is to pull the trick off (funnily enough the Thought for the Day Rowan Williams did as part of PJ’s act of assault-and-battery on the
Today programme in 2014 touched on this idea, I wonder how that came about). Even the older pieces she’s performing at the moment aren’t being performed in the same way as they were twenty-odd years ago.
Of course she can only do what she wants to do and not what anyone else would prefer, although the ‘selfishness’ of that is balanced by the clear sense of vocation she has, of serving something whose origins somehow lie beyond her. I think this is what a lot of creative people feel: you seem to ‘discover’ work rather than make it, although actually battering it out in a usable form takes a lot of graft. That applies to individual pieces of work, though Polly has said in the past that she feels that about her trajectory as a whole, too.
As for Instagram: I wonder whether it’s part of the same interrogation of the idea of observing and being observed as the residency at Somerset House, and
Hope VI itself. That showed how banal recording an album really is, and the Instagram account shows how banal touring it is. Both promise a kind of intimacy and in fact don’t reveal very much at all. Apart from the fact that she wears specs to read!