Words of Wisdom: PJ Harvey

By Nick Duerden

On this chilly February morning, Polly Jean Harvey walks into a fairly clinical West London hotel conference room with a steady and all too palpable reluctance. Tiny and birdlike, and dressed entirely in black, she conjures up a smile that lasts less than a second, then folds herself neatly into her chair, chin tucked into her chest, eyes downcast.

Unlike so many other modern artists, PJ Harvey is a throwback to another time, someone who would rather leave most things unsaid. So, no, she doesn't tweet. The very fact that she must occasionally break her silence -- invariably on the occasion of a new album -- disconcerts her greatly.

"I do find it difficult talking about my music," she admits, carefully pouring herself a glass of water from the bottle in front of her but neglecting to drink from it. "Many artists do. The work, you see, is already done. There it is. What else is there to say?"

But it's worth attempting to break down these defenses, because there are few songwriters at work today quite as arresting as Harvey. Her recently released eighth album, Let England Shake (Vagrant), is remarkable stuff, an angry, agitated state-of-the-nation polemic that raises questions of identity.

"I've always been interested in politics, actually," she says, "but for the first time I felt a real urgency to write about it. I can't tell you why, exactly, except that the older I get, the more frustrated I become in seeing what is happening all around me."

The album's overriding theme is war, the abhorrence and futility of it. "Soldiers fell like lumps of meat / Blown and shot out beyond belief," she sings in "The Words That Maketh Murder," which draws vivid parallels between World War I's 1915 battle at Gallipoli and current-day Iraq and Afghanistan.

"The way we treat one another as individuals and nations is incredibly distressing," she says. "It prompts anger and despair in me, of course, but I'm still hopeful for the capacity to change. We have to be, don't we?"

Following her maiden Coachella appearance this year, Harvey is sticking around for some shows in the U.S., but even in this she likes to keep things idiosyncratic. "I have done back-to-back nights across the whole country, but I don't want to do that this time," she says. "I like the idea of residencies, a few nights in a row in the same venue. It makes it all a little bit different, perhaps even special."

Let England Shake is itself another curveball in a 20-year career full of them, Harvey consistently dismantling the style, sound, and image of each album after its conclusion in pursuit, next time around, of sometimes total reinvention.

"I've never had any interest in making something I've already made before only slightly differently," she says. "But I do have a huge interest in gaining knowledge and experimenting, and then moving into new areas."

It is this chameleonlike approach that has allowed her to switch from pagan folk to accessible rock so seamlessly, from 1992's abrasive Dry to 1998's ethereal Is This Desire? to 2000's streamlined Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea, and now to the haunting but at times oddly jaunty Let England Shake.

And she has achieved all this with rare success too, winning awards and plaudits and longevity, as well as the respect of her idol, the late Captain Beefheart, who once called her to praise her work (something Beefheart almost never did to anyone). So impressed is London's Imperial War Museum with her new album that it has invited her to become its first "War Artist."

Her constant state of flux is mirrored in her private life as well. Born and once again living in the town of Dorset in southwest England, Harvey previously spent years roaming the planet in search of writerly inspiration: London, New York, and even Los Angeles for a while a few years back. (The latter move raised eyebrows at the time, as if this was somehow out of character.) And now, at 41, she seems to have found a kind of quiet contentment that might just endure. Though she won't, of course, tolerate questions about her relationship status, she will say that she has an active social life in Dorset but also remains ultimately devoted to her work, "which I must carry out alone." She writes every day and also paints.

"I get a lot of satisfaction out of painting," she says. "But I don't think I'm a great artist, so I wouldn't want to do an exhibition just yet, with all guns blazing, saying, 'Here is my wonderful artwork!' " She laughs. "It's funny. I wanted to become a painter originally. When I released Dry, I thought it would sell at best a few hundred copies, and then I'd return to my art, but I got lucky. Right now, it's merely an extension of my writing. Perhaps one day I will show it, but I'll wait until the time feels right."

The fact that she is happy to remain, for the foreseeable future, a songwriter at all is progress of sorts, because once she wasn't so sure.

"I did toy with the idea of becoming a vet instead, it's true," she says. "And a nurse. I've always been drawn to the idea of care, of helping people. But I realize now what a luxury it is to be doing what I do. I'm a creative individual and have always tried to make my work as well as I can, and make it meaningful and worthwhile. Ever since I first started doing this, all I have ever tried to do is follow my gut. I hope I always will."

http://www.spin.com/articles/words-wisdom-pj-harvey

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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

http://www.fasterlouder.com.au/features ... vey?page=4

Feature by sarahanne 21st Apr, 2011

Almost twelve months ago Polly Jean Harvey stood on a BBC soundstage swathed in black feathers, autoharp in hand, performing the title song from her new album, Let England Shake.

This haunting appearance on UK current affairs program The Andrew Marr Show was significant not only because it was the first glimpse fans had been given of Harvey’s latest musical transformation, but, in a moment that seems eerily serendipitous in retrospect, she was watched by Marr and his special guest Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Three weeks later Brown would be kicked out of office, no doubt with Harvey’s lyrics “The West’s asleep. Let England shake. Weighted down with silent dead” ringing in his ears.

There couldn’t have been a greater introduction to Harvey’s latest record, which at its very core is an effecting observation of her homeland, humanity and war. It is an album on which Harvey has reinvented herself once again, showing off a new voice, dark extrospective prose tangled with lush melodies and a new found love for the autoharp.

When I reach Polly in her hometown of Dorsett she sounds content and, in her unnervingly polite West Country accent, talks with much passion about her latest album. A record, which may well be her most defining piece of work yet.

Congratulations on finally having the album out – how does it feel to be handing it over to the world after such a long gestation period?
Oh it it’s a wonderful feeling actually, it’s almost a feeling of relief that I can finally let it go. Also because it took such a lot of preparation not only in terms of writing and creating it in the first place, but in terms of the way it was presented, all the artwork, and then setting up the dates we were going to play live, it was an enormous amount of work. So when it has actually gone out to the world then it just starts its own life really, its journey, its out of your hands and it’s a good feeling really

It must be, as I understand you were working on the lyrics for this album for two years before you even begun writing the music?
I write every day anyway and I have done for years, so that’s not abnormal as every day I spend time working on certain pieces and working on trying to improve my use of language. And so it was very natural for me to approach this album in that same way. And yes, I spent a long time gathering words and working and re-working them so I felt they had a clarity and a simplicity I was looking for. And once I felt that I had enough strong bodies of work, in terms of words, it was only then that I went about making a bed of music for them to lie on.

The themes you have chosen to write about on this album, are very big “human themes” – war, homeland, patriotism – have you always wanted to write an album that encompassed such grand ideas?
I think, and many writers as well, are very instinctive. You follow what you feel is gathering your greatest interest at that time and that changes every day. It was just very natural that my instincts lead me into the thing I was most interested in, which was what is going on today in the world that we live in, in all aspects. And it was a time also that I felt that I has more experience as a writer and more experience with language in what I could express through song – actually more coherent and more lucid ideas. And I needed to have that quality if I was going to begin to speak about such huge subject matter.

In an interview you gave last year, you mentioned there was a time when you felt like you didn’t have those words at your fingertips – what changed?
They are just words; you just have to work hard. I certainly do, writing doesn’t come easy to me I have to study and I have to re-work things. Take them apart put them back together, get outside opinion which is invaluable when you are writing and just keep on not giving up and make something as strong as it could be, and that just requires hours of work basically.

Three of the songs on the album address specifically the battle of Galipolli, which is very much a part of Australia’s history. What drew you as an contemporary English woman to this particular battle?
The sheer scale of the disaster and the dreadful mismanagement and the huge waste just moved me so much that I found I really wanted to try and talk about it. And I got to that point because I started looking at our contemporary wars, Afghanistan and Iraq for example, and as I began to research more into the background of these countries I got lead, as I said earlier you get lead by your instincts, and I knew that in order to understand our contemporary wars I’d have to go back in history to what had gone wrong before. And of course Gallipoli was a part of the First World War and I just got lead back in time and then I came to the Gallipoli campaign and I was just stopped in my tracks. I was quite overwhelmed by this story. I read a lot of first hand accounts and I was so moved that I felt a great need to try and put across some of those emotions.

Beyond non-fiction accounts, did you delve into art that has been inspired by this battle over the last century?
Yes I looked at many different angles around the Gallipoli campaign. I looked at accounts from both sides. I also looked at how other artists had dealt with it through film or poetry and indeed in the way other artists had dealt with such subject matter – how they’d dealt with war. I dealt with songs that had done that, poems that had done that, writers, painters, and film makers. Just to get an overall view of how one can deal with these things.

That is an extremely dark headspace to spend a lot of time inside of I’d imagine, yet while the subject matter on the album is at times very dark the melodies and the instrumentation on Let England Shake are very light making for an interesting juxtaposition. Was this intentional?
Yes it was completely intentional. I knew that I didn’t want to weight the words down anymore; they had enough weight as it was and I wanted the music to be something that was very communal, very uplifting, very energising and that also had elements of beauty and hope with in it to offset the darkness of the words. It was very important to me.

You have included a number of samples on the album, one in particular Istanbul Not Constantinople which was used when you performed the track Let England Shake on the Andrew Marr show didn’t make the cut – why did you leave it off the album?
Well songs tell you what they need and what they don’t need, particularly when you move towards the final representation and I found that the sample actually hampered the song, it was actually draining it in and not letting it slide of its own accord so it had to go. But I’m really happy that I had that record of it on the Andrew Marr show.

That was such an interesting appearance in itself with the former Prime Minister Gordon Brown watching on – were you aware he was going to be there, especially given that you were performing Let England Shake?
I was only aware that he’d be there just beforehand, Id already chosen to play that song before I even knew Gordon Brown would be there because it felt so current and it felt very relevant to what was happening here in England at the time with the election. And I had already chosen to perform that song, and obviously when I knew that Gordon Brown was going to be there that was such a wonderful opportunity, it’s one of the highlights of my career so far to be able to be on that show at the same time as our current Prime Minister, it meant a great deal to me.

You’ve chosen a very considered style of singing on the album – did you put a great deal of time into how you wanted your vocals to sound on the album?
Yes I had to and I do so with every album; I have to find the right voice for each song and sometimes it takes a long time and it is a process of trial and error trying different things that aren’t working, to eventually find a thing that does work, and that was the case for this record too. Going back to what we were saying about the music, it is similar in that I had to find a voice that didn’t weigh the words down or make them tedious, dogmatic or self-important. So I had to find a voice that was actually quite light in the way that it delivered the words.

Is that why you chose to work with the instruments you have on this album as well? You have picked up the autoharp for most of the songs – what drew you to using this?
Well I began playing it when I was doing solo shows around the time of White Chalk and I loved playing songs on the autoharp and at that stage I was playing Down By The Water and Grow Grow Grow and it worked very well. And it is such a beautiful, melodic, harmonious instrument; it’s like having a miniature orchestra at my fingertips. It’s so delicate and so beautiful it felt absolutely right for adding a certain beauty and lightness that I really wanted to mellow these difficult words.

You also picked up the saxophone for this album, much like you wrote White Chalk on an instrument you hadn’t played before – is this habit of picking up unfamiliar instruments the way you are finding inspiration to create records these days?
Funnily enough, I was very adept on the saxophone and I use to play it from the age of nine until I was seventeen and it would be the one instrument I would play, but I packed it away and didn’t play it for twenty years which is why it sounds badly played – because it is. But going back to what you were saying, I actually quite enjoy a certain naivety in ones relationship with an instrument, that’s how I feel. I like to pick up an instrument and respond purely by instinct not by intellect and I feel I get more in touch with the song, in terms of the emotion and the quality that I’m trying to convey so I never really practice. And I quite like it that.

With that in mind, could you ever see a PJ Harvey record where you just picked up the guitar and went back to that being your foremost songwriting tool?
Well, if you’re asking if I would just pick up a guitar and write an album like the first few again of course no; I can’t do that because I’ve moved on as a person. And every single day you move forward and to just repeat something you’ve done before just doesn’t interest me at all, it’s not what life is about. Life is about learning and moving forward and challenging yourself and seeing what you are capable of and that is always going to take me into new areas.

With White Chalk you performed shows in a solo capacity for the first time which I imagine would have been quite daunting – are you looking forward to going back to a full band to perform this album?
Yes it has been very enjoyable, I’ve already played some shows with this band that are on the record which is just four piece band – myself, Mick Harvey, John Parish and John Watson. And they are just a delight onstage and it is wonderfully enjoyable to be playing with them again.

You recorded with those men in an amazing space, in a church overlooking a sea which seems a perfect setting for this album – how did that come about?
Purely by coincidence that came about, I’d been looking at studios in Berlin and I couldn’t find one that felt right because I was originally wanted to make this record in the city, in a city that I was unfamiliar with but interested in. And because I’d come back home and hadn’t found anything, purely coincidentally a man that runs the local church as an arts centre these days said that if I ever wanted to rehearse there I was welcome, and that’s the way this came about. It planted the seed that maybe I should record in there and that’s how it happened.

Are we going to see you in Australia any time in the next year do you think?
Yes most definitely, I very much plan to come and play in Australia its always a place I really want to come to and I love playing to people their. So that will happen, I’m not sure exactly when but it will happen sometime in the next year or year and a half.

John Watson! Town of Dorsett! Journalism really is rubbish these days.

I read an interview in a greek magazine. The journalist asked her in the end what are her future plans and she said that she plans on releasing a book with her drawings and after that a book with poems..

*cries*

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I'll rub it, until it...

PJ Harvey: 'I feel things deeply. I get angry, I shout at the TV, I feel sick'
Polly Harvey opens up to Dorian Lynskey about 20 years in music and the emotions behind her latest dark masterpiece

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/ap ... -interview

Polly Jean Harvey chooses her words carefully. Her lyrical perfectionism is the chief reason why her new album, Let England Shake, has been widely hailed as her masterpiece – quite an achievement for someone 20 years and eight albums into her career, at a stage when most songwriters are leaning on their back catalogue. But she is almost as exacting when it comes to interviews. She talks in eloquent, formal sentences, with nary an um or er, as if even one careless utterance might betray her.

At 41, Harvey is revered for what she does not give away. We don't tend to draw distinctions between artist and celebrity. Usually the life promotes the work, and interviewers comb the lyrics for gateways into autobiography, but Harvey likes to keep certain doors closed. Apart from her short, inevitably public relationship with Nick Cave (they fell in love while filming the video to their 1996 duet "Henry Lee"), her private life is terra incognita. Last time I met her, in a pub in Abbotsbury, Dorset for 2007's White Chalk, it struck me that she answered questions the same way she poured our tea: elegantly, precisely, without spilling a drop. The only personal detail I can remember extracting is her unexpected love of Wife Swap.

This time she is warmer – literally so, because the fire in Kensington's Gore hotel is on full-blast despite the sunshine outside. "I can't work out how to turn it off," she says apologetically. She is dressed so chicly, all in black, nothing out of place, that I assume she's doing a photo shoot later, but no, it is just how she likes to present herself. Even the room feels carefully chosen. Wood-panelled, lined with stern oil paintings and ranks of unread books, it's so remote from the 21st century that even the mineral water bottles on the table between us seem anachronistic, and my Dictaphone looks like something that fell off a spaceship. It speaks to Harvey's fondness for old things. When I mention that I often go on holiday in Dorset, where she was born and still lives, she excitedly rattles off some Harveyesque sightseeing recommendations: graveyards and ruins.

Like White Chalk, Let England Shake has an ancient quality – in the words of one song, "the grey, damp filthiness of ages and battered books/ Fog rolling down behind the mountains/ And on the graveyards and dead sea captains." It's about national identity and conflict, initially inspired by Iraq and Afghanistan but roaming across centuries and continents, following the ribbons of blood that tie all wars together. She thought it a strange, dark record when she finished it, and the intensely positive reception has surprised her. "It's been overwhelming," she says. "People from all walks of life tell me how much it's touched them. It's a wonderful feeling, and not one I'm used to – the feeling that people were hungry for this kind of work."

A few weeks ago she played the Troxy in east London. Even as she paraphrased Eddie Cochran on "The Words That Maketh Murder" and sang "What if I take my problem to the United Nations?" – a goofy joke in Cochran's Summertime Blues half a century ago and a bitter one now — an ocean away in New York the UN Security Council was debating what to do about the rebellion in Libya.

"It strikes me every time we play that song," she says. "Or indeed any of the songs on the record – how you can apply them to different situations. Certainly that night at the Troxy it had a different meaning because of what was happening at the time, and I'm sure it did for many people in the room as well."

Whatever Harvey thinks about the Libyan intervention, or about any specific political controversy, she keeps to herself but the richness and ambiguity of Let England Shake allows listeners to make their own connections. It's about war, and the damage it does to countries and to human bodies, but it doesn't yield anything as simplistic as a message. The album is a collage of so many different voices – sampled, quoted or alluded to – that Harvey's own point of view is lost in the fog, and deliberately so.

"I didn't want to tell people what to think or feel," she says. "I wanted to remain a narrator." In October 2008, around the time she was starting the album, she heard Stephen Wyatt's Memorials to the Missing, a Radio 4 afternoon play about Fabian Ware, founder of the Imperial War Graves Commission. "What touched me the most is that [Ware] heard the voices of the dead talking to him and he couldn't rest. I'd always be following the news and there'd be so many firsthand accounts from soldiers and civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq. That's what I wanted to be heard – people who had been eyewitnesses through all different periods in history."

Even though Harvey has never written about such issues before, she says she has always been politically engaged, and music was crucial to her education. Her parents, a quarryman and a stonemason, were friends with Rolling Stone Ian Stewart and their remote Dorset farmhouse (she has said that even a day trip into town would make her dizzy) was often home to visiting musicians. The songs they played were windows on the world beyond. "Certain Neil Young songs like 'Southern Man' or 'Ohio', I'd go looking for the meaning behind them. A lot of Dylan's work, especially the early 60s. Beefheart's 'Dachau Blues'. I remember hearing that when I was very young and wondering, what's he singing about? 'Burning in the ovens in world war two.' Pink Floyd, 'Money'. I remember thinking about money a lot, and how this thing that meant so much was just a piece of paper." She laughs, and her laugh is wonderfully giddy and uncontrolled – it leaps out of her. "There was so much going on."

In sixth form she had an activist phase. "I think I went on a few different marches. I was involved in different action groups at the school."

What were the causes? "I can't recall," she says, unconvincingly. I suspect she just doesn't want to give away any information that might enable people to slap a label on her. Still, it's a surprising image: Polly Harvey on a demo, holding a placard. "I literally left school and went straight into music via art college for a year, and I've been so involved in my job of writing songs that the more actively involved part became channelled into standing on the stage and saying things that way. It's only now that it's come full circle and I'm using my voice again in a way that's tying everything together."

Like a more elegant Forrest Gump, she has a habit of wandering into pivotal moments in history. She flew in to visit some friends in Berlin the day the wall came down in 1989. On 9/11 (or "September 11, 2001" as she puts it with typical formality) she was on tour in Washington DC. This also happened to be the day that she won the Mercury prize, for Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea, and had to phone in her acceptance speech. "I can remember looking out of the hotel window and seeing armoured vehicles driving up the street and the Pentagon on fire, so of course everything took on an entirely different perspective. It felt very strange to not even be in the place where the prize was being given and then to be on the telephone and to look out of my window and see that scene."

The Mercury-winning Stories is her most commercially successful album to date and also her least favourite: an exercise in pop songcraft that left her unmoved. At that point, she could have gone either way. Her first two albums (Dry, Rid of Me) were raw and visceral. Her next two (To Bring You My Love, Is This Desire?) were spooky and sensual. Stories was predominately about New York (where she lived for a while) and being in love. On the cover, she stood looking chic and purposeful amid the bright lights of a Manhattan street. Entering her 30s, she seemed to have sanded down her edges and become comfortable, which, for all the album's charms, was a disappointment.

But no. Her next album, 2004's Uh Huh Her was a raggedy scrapbook of disparate ideas, less a coherent statement than an exercise in creative house-clearing, and with White Chalk she opened a whole new chapter. Perennially disgruntled by critics who took her songs for glorified diary entries, she embraced a more obviously literary approach, setting aside her guitar to pick out sparse, beautiful melodies on unfamiliar instruments such as the piano and autoharp. She sits down to write every single day instead of waiting for the muse to strike. Lyrics tend to start out as poetry, and some then evolve into songs. "You have to be more disciplined, and you ultimately end up with a much stronger piece of work."

Listening to her talk about Let England Shake, it sounds less like a record than a novel or an art exhibition. "She comes from an art school ethos," says Paul McGuinness, who has been managing Harvey since she supported his other clients, U2, in 1993. "Had she not got a record deal she would have gone on to do fine art at St Martins. She did get a record deal, but in a way she's been at art school ever since. She's extremely independent. She makes a plan and then very methodically carries it out."

Harvey still likes to draw and paint, recently contributing illustrations to Francis Ford Coppola's Zoetrope: All-Story magazine, and owns paintings by Christopher T Wood and Alasdair Wallace. All the photographs and videos accompanying the new album are the work of the war photographer Seamus Murphy.

"I'm probably much more influenced by film-makers and painters than I am by other songwriters or poets," she says. "With songs I almost see the images, see the action, and then all I have to do is describe it. It's almost like watching a scene from a film, and that's what I go about trying to catch in a song."

Songwriters tend to be notoriously bad at describing the creative process, and loth to mention the perspiration behind the inspiration, but Harvey is visibly energised by talking about it. "I certainly feel like I'm getting somewhere that I wanted to get to as a writer of words. I wanted to get better, I wanted to be more coherent, I wanted there to be a greater strength and depth emotionally, and all these things require work – to hone something, to get rid of any superfluous language. I'm inspired by the other great writers I go back to and read again and again, and think how did they do that?"

Such as? She indicates a volume of Harold Pinter's poetry that she has brought with her. "Pinter leaves me speechless. Just unbelievable. A poem like 'American Football' or 'The Disappeared'. TS Eliot of course. Ted Hughes. WB Yeats. James Joyce." She leans forward, freshly excited. "Just that feeling of reading something profound and having your breath quite literally taken away by the end of a piece. I'm reading John Burnside's poems at the moment. Do you know his work? I'm getting that feeling – just reaching the end of every poem, going 'Oh my God!'" She clutches her chest and laughs. "And all of these writers offer me a greater understanding of what it is to be alive, and that is such an incredible thing art can do for other people. It made me want to try and get close to this strange, mysterious thing that people can do with words."

Even so, I wonder if she ever misses the jolting release of strapping on an electric guitar, turning it up loud, and bashing out a song in a couple of hours. "I think probably that desire is met in other areas – that immediate buzz you get from something taking off. It might be driving really fast somewhere. It might be screaming like a lunatic, running fast down a hill. Or playing music extremely loud and shouting."

This is the thing about Harvey. She has done such a good job recently of presenting herself as a patient craftswoman, chipping away at words the way her mother chips away at stone, that you could be mistaken for thinking she had become emotionally cool, but it's just that she doesn't advertise that side of her personality anymore, and for good reason. When, in 1992, she was promoting Dry, whose torrid, abstract expressions of female sexuality were new to indie-rock, she found herself fielding questions about when she lost her virginity. Along with the other sudden pressures of entering the music business, it precipitated a nervous breakdown. Circa To Bring You My Love three years later, when she adopted a lurid, glam-grotesque look she described as "Joan Crawford on acid," she was asked about eating disorders. Who could blame her for pulling up the drawbridge in later years? She is not cool so much as contained, with a hint of underground streams foaming away beneath the surface.

"I'm not a removed person, no matter what I'm doing," she says. "I've always been very visceral in that I feel things very deeply. I certainly can get very angry about things I hear day to day, and shout at the radio, shout at the television, or actually feel sick or feel like weeping. Equally I laugh out loud quite a lot and I love comedy. I like to roll around laughing with tears streaming down my face. I do react to things."

I wonder how she was affected by researching Let England Shake. She hoovered up information about myriad conflicts from books and museums. When I last met her, she didn't even own a computer but she has relented for research purposes. Unsurprisingly, she has not been seduced by such fripperies as Twitter. "I'm the type of person that if there's something I have access to I want to know everything it has to offer. I can't not finish a book. So if there's an open book like the internet, there's a temptation to sit there and learn everything. So I'm very disciplined. I just use it for very specific purposes when I know exactly what I'm looking for."

She knows so much about Gallipoli, the subject of at least three songs, that she could probably write a doctoral dissertation on the fiasco. She planned to go there, and to other first world war battlefields, but never got around to it. "I went within my mind but I'd still like to go there and see if the place I went in my mind is how it is."

Sometimes, she admits, it was overwhelming, all that death. "I think as a creative artist it's crucial to be open – to feel. You can't do it with a closed heart. You almost have to hand over your soul to that action. And so there can be times when you can feel too full of the piece that you're making. It's almost like being a sponge and you just have to absorb everything in order to have all of the goods to make something out of that.

"I've been writing songs for many years, and you become more accustomed to taking care of that – knowing how much to expose yourself, knowing how to pace yourself. Just simple things like learning that when I come to approach my work every day there's a certain opening that has to take place, and then when I finish my work for the day I give myself time to close that down again. You just close up all your edges and carry on about your day."

Having lived in New York or Los Angeles, she's thinking of leaving Dorset again for a while. "It would be a good time for me to remove myself from familiar surroundings. It really opens my eyes and forces me to think in an entirely different way."

She already has several competing ideas for her next album, but you probably shouldn't hold your breath waiting for it. Let England Shake was the product of "hundreds of pieces of writing: entirely finished poems and songs, entirely recorded songs". Getting a record right has become more important to her than being prolific. "If it takes 10 years then I would rather wait and know that I felt each piece was strong than feel that it was time to put something out but five pieces are a bit weak."

The industry standard cycle of album-tour-album-tour doesn't apply. "There wouldn't be any point in me trying to persuade her to take the steps that I thought were necessary to get her into football stadiums," says Paul McGuinness. "She's not, quite honestly, that interested in success. She's not driven in any way by commercial imperatives. Really she's working to satisfy herself."

However charming and polite Harvey is, you can still come away from talking to her feeling that so much goes unsaid. She maintains her sense of mystery, which serves her art but leaves anyone who loves that art wanting to know more about the person who creates it. While writing Let England Shake, she dug out the war memorabilia of her own family: her great grandad's naval hatband, her grandfather's drum from the Home Guard, dozens of old photographs. "I did find myself looking at them and wishing I'd asked a lot more of my grandparents when they were still alive," she says wistfully. "There's so much you want to know once they're gone."

I know the feeling.

PJ confidential: Polly Harvey's career in brief

1969 Born in Dorset to stonemason father and sculptor mother. She is raised on a sheep farm to an eclectic soundtrack of blues, new romantics, indie rock and classical.

1987 Leaves school and, after contributing to a range of West Country bands, joins forces with John Parish in Automatic Dlamini as backing vocalist and guitarist.

1991 After touring with the band for four years, Harvey leaves and starts the PJ Harvey Trio. They relocate to London and release debut single, "Dress".

1992 Famously poses topless on the front of NME.

1993 Harvey goes solo, releasing critically acclaimed albums such as To Bring You My Love, produced by John Parish. Her recurring collaborations with Parish include Dance Hall at Louse Point in 1996 and 2009's A Woman a Man Walked By.

1996 Sings on two tracks from Nick Cave's Murder Ballads, a collaboration that leads to romance between Harvey and Cave.

1998 Appears as Magdalena in movie The Book of Life by Hal Hartley.

2001 Wins the Mercury prize for Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea, featuring three tracks with Radiohead's Thom Yorke. Other collaborations include work with Marianne Faithfull and Tricky.

2003 Her albums Rid of Me and To Bring You My Love are put on Rolling Stone's Greatest 500 Albums of All Time list.

2010 Invited to be a guest designer for Francis Ford Coppola's Zoetrope: All-Story, a literary magazine where her artworks will sit alongside short stories.

2011 Awarded an outstanding contribution to music gong at the NME awards and releases Let England Shake.

Mina Holland

^ That was a really enjoyable interview, love the picture too.

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Has anybody scanned and posted the PJ two-page spread appraisal from last months Uncut magazine?

Just wondering, like... cus it was £5 to buy and so didnt.

I don't know why her using the internet made me so giddy. I wonder if she googled herself.

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I'll rub it, until it...

Thanks for that, revenire.

I'm seeing the interviewer, Dorian Lynskey, give a 'talk' about his book next month (Billy Bragg - who is now living not far from Polly - will be there too).

http://33revolutionsperminute.wordpress.com/

Love the image of Polly shouting at the tv. I do that far too often!

And this is exactly why Polly is 'tops' for me:

"There wouldn't be any point in me trying to persuade her to take the steps that I thought were necessary to get her into football stadiums," says Paul McGuinness. "She's not, quite honestly, that interested in success. She's not driven in any way by commercial imperatives. Really she's working to satisfy herself."

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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

This really impressed me too. Refreshing isn't it?

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Click to see the PJ Harvey Gigography

That is definitely one of the better interviews of this era.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JelqPcoaAB8"