http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-12274594

10 February 2011 Last updated at 01:27
PJ Harvey puts war hell on record

By Ian Youngs Entertainment reporter, BBC News

On her latest album, singer PJ Harvey has depicted the horrors of war in brutal detail, motivated by the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. There are arms and legs in the trees. There is flesh quivering in the heat. There are deformed and orphaned children. Heavy stones are falling. Death is everywhere. Welcome to the world created by PJ Harvey on her new album Let England Shake, from which these lines come. Enter at your peril. Over 20 years as one of Britain's most single-minded and artistically driven music-makers, Harvey has always ventured where other musicians fear to tread. But whereas inner anguish has previously fuelled her personal, visceral songs, for this record she has decided to tell harrowing stories from the front lines.

Oppressed civilians

The songs on Let England Shake create vivid snapshots of conflicts from Gallipoli to Helmand and convey her pretty damning view of the societies that allowed them to happen. Determined to reflect the human toll of modern combat, Harvey spent two-and-a-half years researching the subject and interviewing survivors, just as a novelist or scriptwriter might. She imagined herself as a wartime "song correspondent" and her dispatches tell of service personnel who witness terrible things and oppressed civilians who see their countries torn apart. Asked which conflicts provoked her to write the album, Harvey replies: "All current conflicts I would say. "But of course the most recent conflicts, particularly the ones we are involved in - Iraq and Afghanistan - but all conflicts really."It's the result of just living in the world that we're all living in today. That's what's brought about the need for me to try and write an album like this."

Mercury Prize

Harvey has always been "very politically engaged" but was previously afraid of sounding self-righteous or preachy when tackling global issues, she says. "Very gradually over the last four or five years I began to feel that my writing had got to the stage where I might be able to try and address such things now within song. "So that was coupled with a greater sense of urgency and need to want to try to wrap words round our contemporary situations." The urgency, she says, comes from "the world that we're living in", adding: "I think a lot of people are feeling that at the moment." The songs are rarely overtly political but are set against a backdrop of Western societies whose faraway failures have had catastrophic consequences. Harvey, who won the Mercury Prize in 2001, is vague about her own political views, making deliberately diplomatic statements when asked for her thoughts about global affairs. "I'm not wanting to talk about my personal opinions because I want the work to stand up for itself and be taken in any way that the listener hears it," she says. She will say it is a writer's job to "absorb the world around you" and "absorb what's in the air". "I've always felt very interested in what's going on in the world and our country and everywhere. It did feel timely. It felt timely now to write this piece." The first single, The Words That Maketh Murder, is a serviceman's tale of seeing how "soldiers fell like lumps of meat, blown and shot out beyond belief, arms and legs were in the trees".

First-hand accounts

This Glorious Land depicts a country that is ploughed not by iron ploughs but "by tanks and feet marching", with the "glorious fruit of our land" being deformed and orphaned children. The song is punctuated by a hunting bugle and a haunting refrain of "Oh America, oh England". Harvey, who recorded the album in a church in her home town of Bridport, Dorset, chose to tell her stories through the eyes of ordinary soldiers and civilians because she could only speak as "a human being who feels emotions and to empathise", she says. During her research, she spoke to people who had various different roles in Iraq and Afghanistan, she says, as well as learning about other historical conflicts. "I did a lot of research in many, many different areas," she explains. "A lot of reading, a lot of watching documentaries, and as much as I could, reading first hand accounts, whether that was in the form of blogs or books or interviews. "At any opportunity I could I would try and speak to people who had first-hand accounts too. "And then other types of research - I watched films by great film-makers. Stanley Kubrick, Ken Loach. I read a lot of poetry both contemporary and also from history. But this is just the tip of the iceberg." After immersing herself in war stories, she set about writing the lyrics. "Instinct would take over and at some level then the song begins to write itself," she says. "But first of all I just had to feed myself as much information as possible." The songs were written as poems first and the music was added only after the words was were finished. As a result, with its graphic realism and personal approach, the album has more affinity with other battle-weary cultural works - from Apocalypse Now to Picasso's Guernica - than the pop albums with which it will share a shelf.

Let England Shake, the brand new album from British rocker Polly Jean "PJ" Harvey, is an ethereal eulogy to her homeland: a dozen songs of militarism, death, and ambivalent patriotism delivered with uncharacteristic lightness. Harvey, of course, first rose to fame in the early 1990s on the raw power of her delivery. Performing with her PJ Harvey Trio, she released Dry, a highly acclaimed indie debut that led Rolling Stone to dub her 1992's best songwriter and best new female singer. Her follow-up recordings Rid of Me and To Bring You My Love, both on Island Records, brought forth a flurry of Grammy and Mercury Prize nominations, and yet more critical raves—both for Harvey's songwriting and her theatrical stage presence.

In contrast with her music, Harvey is guarded in conversation. Her publicist asked for my assurance that I would avoid "celebrity-type" questions, and I figure she's earned that right. After 20 years of performing, her musical accomplishments and collaborations with rock-and-roll luminaries (Thom Yorke, Josh Homme, Nick Cave) are too numerous to list. But suffice it to say that Let England Shake is pretty different from what her fans are used to.
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Tackling such grim topics was a bold and risky move—as was performing the title track on BBC television in the presence of outgoing prime minister Gordon Brown. New Yorker pop-music critic Sasha Frere-Jones gave the album a tepid review, contrasting her relatively twee delivery with the grit of earlier Harvey incarnations, but Harvey told me she deliberately crafted her vocal style as a counterpoint to the very heavy stuff she's singing about. We also spoke about her rural upbringing, her disastrous first gig, and her dicey relationship with the media.

Mother Jones: I've been listening to your new album a lot. It's quite beautiful.

PJ Harvey: Thank you. I'm glad you like it.

MJ: There's this sense of deeply aggrieved patriotism, this mourning for England in its entirety—yet you don't consider it a protest album?

PJH: It's hard to say what that means, exactly. I knew that I wanted to address these matters, this very weighty subject matter, but I didn't want to do it in a way that felt too heavy-handed, and by that I mean I didn't want to come across as if I was preaching or becoming too self-important. That was very much in the forefront of my mind as I was writing these words, wanting to get the balance right between delivering words that were meaningful, but situated in a way that was also palatable enough for people to receive them.

MJ: There does seem to be more directness in this than in some of your past stuff.

PJH: I wanted to present ideas, but I also wanted to leave it open enough for people to bring in their own feelings to the songs, to the ideas being presented. I wanted a certain ambiguity.

MJ: Compared to your past albums, this one seems more reflective of the world and its woes. What inspired these images of war and death?

PJH: I've always felt that I'm affected by the world, by the way we treat each other, by the way different countries treat each other. I've always been very affected by politics, society, but I never got to a place as a writer where I felt like I could begin to deal with such things and do it well. I think I finally have the confidence to begin to approach such things. I'm not an autobiographical writer, but I am a writer who deals with human emotion on all levels. And at this particular point in time, it's human emotion in relation to the world and specific events.

MJ: I understand you're collaborating with war photographer Seamus Murphy, whose work is amazing. What's that project about?

PJH: When I was writing this record, in 2008, I was in London for an exhibition of Seamus' work, entitled Darkness Visible. That was work from the last 10 years in Afghanistan, and I was very affected by it. So I got in touch afterwards to see if he was interested in doing portrait work with me, or whether he'd ever done such a thing. And he hadn't particularly. He's mostly a photojournalist in conflict areas, but he was willing to have a go. I sent him the demos and the lyrics, and he was interested in working with me. He's made some films for the songs: "The Last Living Rose" is up on my website. The next film is for "The Words That Maketh Murder." We'll be putting them out regularly. Then he's going to edit a short documentary film of his own response to the music. He chose to make a road trip around England and make a photo montage of what he sees.

MJ: You said your work isn't autobiographical, but has your family been affected directly by war?

PJH: Yes, my family in past generations certainly has, on both sides.

MJ: Tell me more about your family. You were raised on a sheep farm in Corscombe, a little tiny village in Dorset. Was that idyllic or sort of lonely?

PJH: Well, that's actually got a bit out of proportion. My father is actually a quarry man—he deals in stone. He also at one point had a lot of sheep, he owned a sheep farm, but primarily the family business was in stone.

MJ: So the farm was incidental, not a working farm?

PJH: No, it wasn't a working farm, but I did grow up in the countryside being very aware of nature and the cycle of life, and I feel very grateful for that.

MJ: What was your family life like? Do you have siblings?

PJH: Yes, I have a brother, an older brother.

MJ: What sort of kid were you?

PJH: I'm not somebody that enjoys talking about my personal life, I'd rather you ask me about my current work.

MJ: Yes, your publicist said you have a distaste for what he called "celebrity-type" questions. Do you have kind of an ambivalent relationship with the press?

PJH: I'm a very private person, so obviously I don't enjoy talking about more personal matters. But at the same time I care very much about my work and I would like people to know that it exists. So I appreciate that there's a meeting point, where I would like people to know about the work that I'm doing, and that requires me to talk about it.

MJ: Do you have any pet peeves about the way you've been portrayed?

PJH: I don't hold onto anything, because it's a waste of energy to do so, really. There's nothing that I can do about the way people want to write about me. I just try and concentrate on my work and do that as well as I can.

MJ: I guess I mean, are there any misconceptions you'd like people to know about?

PJH: It seems rather pointless for me to go over everything and try to set the record straight. People will think what they will and that's the way that life is.

MJ: I did notice that people often ask you about feminism. Is that the lot of female performers, to be held up as role models for their sex?

PJH: I've never aligned myself with any particular cause other than trying to do good work and get better at it; it's not something that I think about very much.

MJ: Now, I gather your parents were very into music, especially the blues. Did they play, too?

PJH: They didn't play music; they weren't musicians. But they did have a great love for music and the house was always full of music when we were children—and it still is now.

MJ: Did they get you playing as a kid?

PJH: They were very supportive, so it was very natural for me to want to go into music. But at the same time they were very open to letting me and my brother do whatever we wanted to choose; we weren't made to learn instruments or anything like that. I started playing the saxophone when I was quite young, in school.

MJ: Did you sing in a choir or anything?

PJH: Not really. I started with the saxophone and then later guitar. And I wrote lyrics from a very young age, poems and short prose. It came very naturally then to marry that with the guitar—the guitar was a much easier instrument to marry words with than the saxophone.

MJ: Well, sure, you can't exactly sing and play the saxophone! Did you consider them lyrics at that point, or was it more like poems?

PJH: In the early stages they were just very much song lyrics. It's only in the last three or four years that I feel I've looked at words much more in the way that one would a poem, how they work on the page, to be read out loud separately from music. That's happened quite recently.

ML: Your mother was a sculptor?

PJH: My mother worked in stone, letter-cutting mostly, and carving—cutting letters for house names or gravestones. She did mostly functional, commissioned work. Myself, I've always been active artistically, painting and sculpting and drawing. For me it's purely aesthetical work, and it often goes hand in hand with what I'm writing.

MJ: I've never seen your visual artwork. Would you describe it a bit?

PJH: I designed a magazine the summer of last year for Francis Ford Coppola called Zoetrope: All-Story. If you go to the website, you can find the edition I designed, with a lot of my work in it. I just recently started oil painting, so I'm very interested in that at the moment. I'm hoping at some point in the next couple of years to put out a little book of some of my poems and some of my paintings.

Next Page: It took me a long time to find the right voice: I didn't want too much weight in my voice, because it made the words too self-important.

MJ: Just after high school, you were playing in bands and also studying art and sculpture. Were you hoping one thing or the other might pan out as a profession?

PJH: I was actually thinking that I would become a visual artist. When I was in art school I was playing in bands and putting my own bands together, but it seemed rather preposterous to think of that as a way of having a career. I think I was trying to move into an area where I thought I might be able to teach, or have some kind of career. I didn't know that music was a possibility, although it was a great love. I didn't know where my life would take me, because it's a very difficult avenue to get into, really.

MJ: Early on, you joined John Parish's band, Automatic Dlamini, and have been collaborating with him ever since—including on the new album. How would you describe your relationship?

PJH: It's very valuable as a writer to have somebody who can be honest with you, whom you respect greatly in their own right. I think that's why John and I work together well. We're very honest with each other, and very critical of each other's work in a very productive way.

MJ: Is it hard for you to take criticism?

PJH: I don't find it hard at all. I find I gain a great deal from constructive criticism from people, and I value it enormously.

MJ: Now, you started your own band in 1991. I've read that at your first show somebody actually offered to pay you to stop playing. Is that true?

PJH: [Laughs.] Yes, that is true.

MJ: But you recovered pretty fast. By 1992, Rolling Stone was calling you the year's best songwriter, the critics were raving about Dry, and record labels were knocking down your door. Were you kind of blown away by the pace?

PJH: Yes, it was a surprise, and it happened very quickly. It was a wonderful surprise. I was taken aback by it.

MJ: So this very private person is all of a sudden launched into the spotlight. Did you find that difficult to deal with?

PJH: It was something that I adjusted to. Initially it was very difficult. It took me a while to find my footing with it, to find a way to be with it.

MJ: What sort of problems did it raise for you? Were people approaching you in the street?

PJH: I'm not recognized very often at all—even now, actually. I find interviews very difficult, but again, it's something that you adjust to. Also entering into the world of the music business, where it's not just about playing the music. If you want to put out records there's an enormous amount of administration that goes alongside that, and that was something again that I had to learn about.

MJ: Well, I hope I'm not making the interview process too difficult for you.

PJH: No, I've had some time to acclimatize at this stage in my life. [Laughs.]

MJ: What question would make you want to hang up the phone?

PJH: Well, you can keep trying and you'll find out!

MJ: I hope not. To change the subject, your approach to music has been sort of in the David Bowie mold, where each record is a new incarnation. What motivates that?

PJH: I have a great desire to learn, and that's always been with me. I want to explore and keep trying to find new ways of saying things. Because in that way you can almost hear something for the first time, or see something for the first time, and then it can have a great deal more meaning.

MJ: What are some of your muses—people, places, artists, that inspire your writing?

PJH: I've been reading a lot of Harold Pinter, particularly his poetry and his political essays. Musically, I tend to listen to the older artists like Nina Simone or Neil Young, Bob Dylan, the Doors. In terms of contemporary artists, I really like The Fall. And Jerry Dammers; I was really struck by a recent performance by his Spatial AKA Orchestra. It left me speechless. It was absolutely incredible. Visual artists: Again and again I get drawn into Francisco Goya, Velázquez, Salvador Dali—I come to these people again and again. And the films of Stanley Kubrick, I've watched those many, many times.

MJ: Your new record feels very different, vocally. It feels like you're experimenting. At times it's almost Kate Bush-like.

PJH: With this particular album, with these words, it took me a long time to find the right voice: I didn't want too much weight in my voice, because it made the words too self-important. I finally found the right way in which to sing them, and often that voice is quite small and quite volatile, and can move all over the place.

MJ: Yes, there's an ambiguous lightness to it.

PJH: That was very intentional. It needed to be. What I said earlier about needing to leave the songs open for people to come in with their own ideas.

MJ: Do you ever listen to your old stuff?

PJH: Very occasionally, not very often.

MJ: Is it hard for you to hear your past incarnations?

PJH: Not at all, because I feel quite separate from them and I can view them quite objectively. So it's pleasant. But it's not something I naturally do, because I'm too interested in making new things.

MJ: When you do look back, what are you most proud of?

PJH: One of the highlights for me was actually playing "Let England Shake" on the Andrew Marr Show in front of Gordon Brown, who was then our prime minister. That was something I'll remember for a long time. If I look at bodies of work, I still feel very proud of Is This Desire? and To Bring You My Love. I think they were strong pieces of work for me, and they stayed with me over the years. I felt I was working very well and very strongly, and that's something that one always aims for but you don't always get. It requires a lot of different parts coming together at the right moment in time, and both records were blessed with that. And I'm proud of White Chalk because I feel like that was a very unusual record, and I don't tire of that one either.

MJ: For the record, my wife says you were her idol. But she's exactly your age. Do you feel like you're still reaching new audiences, especially younger ones?

PJH: I'd like to think that that's the case, I don't know for a fact. But I would love for people to hear my music, for new people to come across it. I'd like people to enjoy it of all ages, and I'd be thrilled if that was the case.

http://motherjones.com/media/2011/02/pj ... ake?page=2

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Thanks, Polly_Jean_Cave. Mother Jones? I haven't looked at their site in years. Not the sort of publication Polly would have been interviewed by before, I imagine. I wonder if Seamus Murphy set this one up.

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Wiggins is so superbly unassuming, he looks like he's about to say 'Pop the gold medal in the post, I'm nipping out for some biscuits'

Mark Steel

MJ: What sort of kid were you?

PJH: I'm not somebody that enjoys talking about my personal life, I'd rather you ask me about my current work.




Love this! Good for her.

MJ: What question would make you want to hang up the phone?

PJH: Well, you can keep trying and you'll find out!

WOW! She never fails at being hermetic. Go, Polly!
I'd rather shoot myself in the head than asking such personal questions. Maybe I am too scared by Polly

The only difference should be the packaging cat. Regular is a standard jewel case and the digi is cardboard "enviro friendly" like a mini album cover.

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how will you ever walk again...

I actually got a bit nervous for him when he started asking the personal questions. She's a 50FT queenie for God's sake.

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I'll rub it, until it...

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with a palmful of stars I throw them like dice repeatedly until the desired constellation appears ♪♬

Mother Jones? Huffington Post? What next, Democracy Now with Amy Goodman? :-)

A few mistakes here: It's Andrew Marr not Morton, obviously. The comments about Morrissey and Johnny Marr banning Gordon Brown from being a Smiths fan are wrong; they banned the current Prime Minister, David Cameron!

I like this quote from Polly. I'm sure it is the sort of thing I've said to people, then they get that glazed look in their eyes, probably thinking, "Here we go, he's off again!" I have an image of Polly with her head in Chomsky/Herman's 'Manufacturing Consent'!:

"Newspapers, the internet, first hand accounts, and television but I'm sure as you know its very difficult to get the full picture with all the censorship in the media more and more so, frighteningly so. You have to do a lot of ground work to really find out whats happening."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/greg-garr ... 21492.html

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Wiggins is so superbly unassuming, he looks like he's about to say 'Pop the gold medal in the post, I'm nipping out for some biscuits'

Mark Steel

Can't wait to have the actual digipak album. I clicked on the spoiler but then quickly scrolled through so I didn't actually see all the artwork.

Absolutely love the album, it's such a strange, but mesmerizing, piece of work. I think England is absolutely stunning. Now I can't wait to hear The Nightingale!

The avant-garde rock star PJ Harvey is being given the chance to travel to conflict zones where the British army is fighting by the Imperial War Museum.

The songs on Harvey's new album, Let England Shake, reflect her strong emotional response to living through a period of war in the Middle East and to other people's memories of previous campaigns. The 41-year-old singer from Dorset composed her album by imagining she had already been given the job of "official war song correspondent".

Already tipped to win the Mercury prize, Let England Shake, which is released tomorrow, includes the track The Words That Maketh Murder. The album's first single, its lyrics include a serviceman's recollection: "Soldiers fell like lumps of meat, blown and shot out beyond belief, arms and legs were in the trees". Another track, This Glorious Land, depicts a countryside ploughed up "by tanks and feet marching".

"We are certainly interested in working with PJ Harvey," said Roger Tolson, the museum's head of collections. "It is something we can take forward as we have never commissioned anybody in that capacity. We have other kinds of works of art using sound, like the art of Susan Philipsz, who won the last Turner prize, but we have never sent a musician out to a conflict zone."

Tolson said the museum wanted "a different perspective". "We want to find fresh pairs of eyes, although in this case it would be a fresh voice," he said.

The initiative was prompted by an interview Harvey gave last week to Radio 4's Front Row. She told presenter John Wilson she would have gone out to write songs in the field of battle had she had been asked. "I would have relished that," she said. "I find myself more and more yearning to do work like that, even if there is no such official appointment, to just go out there anyway."

The suggestion was applauded by Jeremy Deller, who won the Turner prize in 2004 and whose sculpture 5 March 2007, made from the bombed wreck of a Baghdad car, provoked strong reactions at the war museum in London last September.

"Why not have a response in music?" asked Deller. "It would be brilliant. It would be unexpected as well because it is usually men going out there. It would be a breath of fresh air."

Harvey researched a range of conflicts for two and a half years before writing the lyrics of her songs as poems and then setting them to music. She read firsthand accounts of war, watched documentaries and spoke to survivors.

One track, Written On The Forehead, is about modern Iraq, while Bitter Branches reflects warfare waged in a Russian landscape. "I was wanting to show the way that history repeats itself, and so in some ways it doesn't matter what time it was, because the endless cycle goes on and on and on," she said.

The album, recorded in a church in her home town of Bridport, was inspired by Harvey's interest in current affairs and the nature of journalism.

"I started wondering where the officially appointed war songwriter was," she told Wilson. "You have got your war artists, like Steve McQueen, and your war photographers. I fantasised that I had been appointed this official songwriter and so I almost took on that challenge for myself."

Tolson said he would now put forward Harvey's name to the museum's committee for discussion. "I know this makes it sound very bureaucratic, but there are other ways too. Some of our most interesting work is not committee-led – for example, our work with Jeremy Deller."

The museum's collection celebrates the work of war artists down the ages, but its aesthetic has broadened. It no longer simply records the achievements of man as a fighting machine; it also gives space to alternative visions of the devastating effects of war.

Tolson added: "The first thing will be to see if PJ is interested in visiting this area after making her album. I am clear she would have welcomed the chance to go out there, but my sense is that she considers her projects very carefully."

He also acknowledged that the aims of the artist might not fit with the support his museum could offer.

"We could certainly offer to facilitate it. But sometimes we are not able to help and sometimes we might actually hinder," said Tolson. "We realise that making any sense of it all is very, very difficult while a conflict is still ongoing."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/fe ... war-museum

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I didn't take the man from the - oh my the title - Imperial War Museum seriously when he was asked about this on the radio. It sounds like an incredible idea but, Polly is all about not repeating herself, then what good would it do to her to go out there now? It's a bit too late, isn't it?

MJ: What sort of kid were you?

PJH: I'm not somebody that enjoys talking about my personal life, I'd rather you ask me about my current work.

BURN!
Silly, does't he know that Polly doesn't talk about that stuff!

Speaking of her releasing a book of her poems and art; I once had a dream where she made a really cool picture book for children. I'm so excited to put this on my ipod as soon as I get the album. I'm thinking of getting a record player and collecting vinyl albums. I was browsing through my dad's from back in the 70's and 80's; he had Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap and Led Zeppelin VI! I was also in best buy the other day and found the first Black Sabbath album reissued along with Queen's A Night at the Opera! Me and my sister were like giddy schoolgirls!

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Can you use a hyper-dermic needle?

Oh Damn! I just posted two reviews in this thread instead of the review thread. Oh well!

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It's difficult to get the real story as an 'official' or embedded correspondent. The US military did this post-Vietnam to dupe thirsty journalists into thinking they were getting the "real story." In reality, it allowed those who construct war policy to choose when and where journalists ended up going and made destructive tactics look palatable to the American public. So in effect, you have a (mostly) uncritical media satisfied with the exclusive scoop in the heat of battle. I wouldn't have a problem with this if there were alternative reports from outside the official sphere, among the civilian populations that are ravaged by ongoing conflicts. But rarely do you get that kind of thing in the mainstream. If you do, it takes a very, very long time to come out. Look no further than Iraq: plenty of "official" reports from Fallujah, but the civilian carnage that took place thanks in part to the US military was barely touched on till well after the battle. Polly seems like a smart woman, I hope she'd understand this.

Frankly, if you're going to call this a political album, Polly, spell out your politics in plain terms for all to see and condemn the wars that are ongoing in the press. Otherwise all the lyrical content you worked so hard to craft in order to avoid being preachy seems more like a vague, depoliticized marketing tool. I would make sure that I had total access to whatever theatre I was entering, in official and unofficial areas. I could never be in the sole employ of an official body if it meant limiting, censoring or depoliticizing my work.