I’m so proud of Polly.
We (Island records) released the album ‘Rid of me’ in 1993, making it 30 years old this month.
It has so many great songs on it, but my favourite has got to be the song ‘Dry’. It has just the most exquisitely painful put down of a man’s prowess ever in the lyrics. “You leave me dry”.
I have so many stories surrounding her, but I thought I’d concentrate on a tiny on one which helps to explain her success. It’s the story of the album sleeve.
There was a point when we were trying to sign Polly that she was resisting physically signing the contract. It was though there was a blockage. I recall that she was with me and my head of talent Nick Angel as we were trying strongarm her into signing the bloody contract, however it was clear that something was really worrying her.
It was the concept of artistic freedom: she had the concern that we would say all the right things, and then once we signed her, take them all away again.
My office was situated high above the Island records war room in St Peters Square, Chiswick. Looking down I could see Julian Cope from The Teardrop Explodes chatting away with somebody in the Press department. He was wearing the bottom half of a costume hire dog suit complete with big furry feet and a long tail. I said to Polly, “why don’t you go and talk to Julian about artistic freedom and see what he has to say? “
She didn’t know him from adam and I didn’t expect her to take me up on it, but she got up and left the room went down the stairs and the two of them went to the Ritz café on the Chiswick high Road and have a cup of builders tea.
She came back and signed the contract within half an hour.
The first test of her worry about artistic freedom came in the choice of Steve Albini as the producer. I thought the songs on the demos were absolutely magnificent, and I really strongly felt that they needed a sort of Brian Eno esque approach…. All big and landscapish. Polly was absolutely adamant about using Steve Albini: a punk producer and a legend for recording albums in less than a week. Steve was by far the cheapest choice, both in terms of recording budget and fees, but I really felt that the songs needed to breathe a bit more.
So what happened???
Steve produced the album, I didn’t get my way, she heard my argument and decided to follow her own instinct. In Creative control football terms : PJ 1 MM 0.
She came to see me sometime after recording for a discussion about art direction: where we look for common ideas about the sleeve, photos and videos etc.
She slapped a Boots the chemist packet of photographs on my desk and said “ I have got the album sleeve”. With a sense of incredulity, I opened the packet of 36 black and white images. The first 20 shots were quite difficult to look at because they were shots of Polly half naked in the bath with her hair flicking back. I instantly knew that out of the 20 shots we would have a great statement sleeve.
That left the following 16 shots in the packet: PJ’s art director and brilliant best pal Maria Mochnacz (the photographer) had put elastic bands around Polly‘s face and left them on for half an hour. When she took them all off, Polly‘s face was covered in scars. That is the back cover of the album.
The photographs also speak of her state of mind. There was no glam squad considerations: no Hair And Makeup, no specialist lighting, it was all raw and pure. Even the physical backdrop tells you something about her life at the time. Woodchip wallpaper and black mould. This was not a woman living in a suite in a fancy hotel. And she had no power: and yet she had all the power.
Polly asked me whether I would reimburse the cost of the photo shoot if I was happy to accept the two images: it did cause me a little bit of consternation as I repaid her the £13.50 processing fee from Boots the chemist.
This really is a story of unparalleled creativity. Polly Harvey remains one of the most creative and brilliant human beings that I’ve ever met.
She was a youngster, inexperienced, and naive to the ways of the industry however she had such a massively innate sense of her own creative direction that it was simply impossible to ignore her views.
In every respect the choices that she made on rid of me were hers and not ours, and they were completely correct in every respect. 
PJ 10 MM 0

It's a trend I've seen many major artists and songwriters have been going through over the past years. It is possible their contracts have expired and there's this collective tendency to leave major labels, which seem in fact more keen on promoting pop acts and less alternative artists/bands. Look who are the new artists pushed nowadays by historical major labels to get an idea, and the list of grammy or other awards dedicated to rock and alternative names. The musical landscape is definitely pushing artists like PJ to the fringes, in commercial terms.