Star power is a rare thing in music today, stripped away by social media overexposure and a heritage industry that trades on former glories. But PJ Harvey has an otherworldly air as she walks into a restaurant at the Barbican in London for one of her first interviews about her music in more than a decade. A thunderstorm has broken the June heatwave, and Harvey, 53, had to shelter under a ledge to keep dry on her way here. Still, Harvey looks pristine in a black vest and tiny black leather shorts, her famous dark hair in soft, shoulder-length curls, a fine gold chain bearing two rings around her neck.
This is Polly Jean Harvey off-duty. As a musician and performer, PJ Harvey rivals David Bowie for reinvention. Her fans can plot the moment they fell for her by era-specific archetypes and sounds: was it the austere bun of her debut, 1992’s Dry? Or perhaps the lurid leopard print of 1993’s Rid of Me? For me, it was the white suit, red lipstick and gleeful strut of This Is Love from 2000’s Mercury prize-winning Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea, leering out of MTV2 and suddenly making pop music look wan.
For 30 years, Harvey’s only constant has been her dogged refusal to repeat herself. She set the bar high from day one: she was a budding art student from a farm in rural Dorset, but with her ribald, violent songs about sex and subjugation, the issue of where she had come from felt like another matter entirely. Harvey’s brawny early 90s albums satirised femininity as a burdensome form of drag (though she refused associations with the burgeoning feminist punk scene) and were intended, she said then, “to humiliate myself and make the listener feel uncomfortable”. Annie Clark, AKA St Vincent, tells me she found salvation in Harvey’s refusal of dogma. “She said: I am an artist, not a mouthpiece for whatever mercurial musings, sympathy Olympics, cause du jour. She rejected your moral purity for her own ritual obliteration.”
Nor could anyone have guessed then where she was going – Harvey’s 2011 album Let England Shake saw her acclaimed as a stately war laureate, making nerve-jangling rock from first world war history. It made Harvey the only double Mercury prize winner. In between came haunted trip-hop, petulant punk and spectral balladry. Pinning down Harvey’s own story on those records was a tall order: she’s always defied autobiographical readings, yet none of her music could have been made by anyone else.
She opens the window. When we order tea and the waiter apologises that she only has triple-mint, not bog-standard peppermint, I suggest throwing a strop, and discover that Harvey is quick to laugh. Her posture is immaculate. She never gesticulates: the emotion is all given (and later withheld) in her striking features. “That looks like a nice recorder,” she says of my dictaphone. Harvey used one just like it to capture some of the field recordings on her new, beguilingly strange 10th album, I Inside the Old Year Dying, where sounds like demob-happy kids and fizzing power lines are twisted around her pastoral post-punk and heretical hymns. Others came from sound designers she met while making music for theatre. She asked one “for really specific noises, and he had every single one of them!” she enthuses, her Dorset accent worn and comforting. Like what? “Like: ‘Can I have wind blowing through a barbed wire fence in November?’ And he’d go, ‘Yeah, here you are!’”
You get the impression she would rather talk about things like this all day. She has grown more enigmatic over the past decade, producing more music for theatre and TV than solo albums; her once-ferocious gigs became precisely choreographed. She is so private that the tiniest scrap of information becomes outsized: she tells me that she loved The White Lotus, hasn’t finished Succession yet, adores soundtracks, and, surprisingly, calls Ricky Gervais a favourite comedian (he just makes her laugh).
I Inside … is Harvey’s latest pivot – an intimate musical setting of 12 poems from her acclaimed 2022 collection Orlam. (Poetry Foundation called it “accomplished and allusive”.) Set in the Dorset woods, it chronicles the year in which her heroine, Ira-Abel, loses her innocence as childhood slips away and the pressures and perils of girlhood intensify. Harvey wrote the poems in an old Dorset dialect that she remembered from her youth (“drisk” is mist; “twanketen”, melancholy; “scratching”, writing). On I Inside … she sings in it, too, in startling, uncanny tones: sometimes naive and girlish, other times sharp and bitter.
It might be Harvey’s slipperiest record, one she describes as a “sonic netherworld”. It sounds like a sort of timeless folk music, I suggest. “I definitely hoped that I could sort of be in every era and no era all at the same time,” says Harvey, pleased by the idea. Given her allergy to repetition, it seems surprising that she revisited Orlam in a different medium. As she’s got older, she explains, “I’ve stopped trying to compartmentalise what I do.” Songs, poems, drawings used to be kept separate. “But now I’m quite comfortable letting them all blur into one.”
Harvey didn’t intend to make a new album: it crept up on her during her daily piano and guitar practice. “I don’t feel I’m a natural musician,” she says. “I have to really work at it.” Sometimes she recited other people’s songs – Nina Simone, the Stranglers – but sometimes she just needed words for a new melody. While writing Orlam, “I’d grab at a poem because it was the easiest thing I had to hand.”
During the pandemic, she took the sketches to her oldest collaborators, musician John Parish and producer Flood. Harvey and Parish started collaborating when she joined his band, Automatic Dlamini, aged 18. “She started giving me tapes of really early songs, and I saw straight away she had a brilliant voice,” Parish recalls. “I asked her to join as soon as she left school.” Flood first produced 1995’s lethal To Bring You My Love, blown away by a demo that others had warned him was “a bit out there”, he says.
Harvey wanted a marriage of manmade and natural sounds. “It was always a bit homemade, and I love that,” she says, beaming. “To get some of those sounds, it really was like four hands each doing different things to ancient equipment that might break at any time. It felt very human and very of the moment.” But they were still prepared to junk everything if it didn’t meet their high standards. It was the eternal challenge, says Harvey: avoiding repetition. “None of us are interested in treading over the same ground, and the more you’ve worked together, the harder that is,” she says. “The more songs I’ve written, it’s harder to write songs because I so often start something and think, well, mm, that’s a bit like that song I wrote in 1996.”
Harvey was also determined to avoid what they called her “PJ Harvey voice”. It echoes a scribble in the liner notes to 2004’s barbed, beautiful Uh Huh Her, in which she questioned: “too PJ H?” (As a teenager, I couldn’t imagine how anything could be “too PJ H”.) Harvey describes it as “a particular way of projecting my voice – even down to that. Flood would stop me straight away if he heard me singing in a way I’d sung before, and help me find emotional ways to access a different voice.” (Flood insists he wouldn’t dare: “I might get the withering eyebrow.”)
Doesn’t trying not to sound like PJ Harvey ever lead to an identity crisis? “It does,” she admits. “I definitely go through times where I wonder if I still have the ability to write the songs I dream of writing. Am I still any good? Have I still got it? But I’ll keep having a go. And usually, if I persevere, I can get there.” Sometimes it feels like “climbing uphill through mud”, even in pursuit of songs she knows aren’t good enough. “In some ways, I’d be a bit scared if I lost that doubt because then I would maybe feel a bit too comfortable, and not really be able to see clearly what I’m doing any more.”
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The creation of Harvey’s previous album, The Hope Six Demolition Project, was an uphill slog through mud. Having reflected on historic atrocities with Let England Shake, The Hope Six focused on modern foreign and domestic policy. Harvey’s reportage-style lyrics drew from research trips to Kosovo, Afghanistan and Washington DC. She offered unprecedented access into its creation, setting up a studio in Somerset House in London for the public to watch her record through one-way glass, and also published an accompanying poetry book, The Hollow of the Hand. Yet she never talked about the intentions behind these works. “I wanted to leave everything that I had to say within the lyrics, and not have to put them inside some sort of framework,” she says now.
Harvey was accused of poverty tourism, with DC councillors vociferously criticising one song for portraying a deprived neighbourhood as “drug town, just zombies”. (“PJ Harvey is to music what Piers Morgan is to cable news,” said one.) It’s easily Harvey’s least beloved record but – she says, becoming terse – she “didn’t pay too much attention to the response”. She doesn’t read reviews because she doesn’t find it healthy (she once said reading all her early press contributed to a period of mental ill health). “Bottom line,” she says, “I know how I feel about it.” Did the politicians’ comments make her question her intentions? No. “Everyone’s entitled to a different opinion.”
But on a gruelling year-long tour for the album, Harvey developed a different kind of dissatisfaction. “I was very tired, then remembered how tired I’d been writing,” she says, warming again. She was in her late 40s, “a natural time of questioning: is this still what I want to be doing?” Sometimes, during the shows, “I felt as though I was watching myself from a distance ‘performing’ my work, trying to unravel who and what I was at that moment in my life.” After the tour, she took time off, even stopping her daily practising. Her enthusiasm was revived by being asked to do soundtracks by theatre director Ian Rickson, and TV showrunners Sharon Horgan and Shane Meadows. “That was a way I could really enjoy music without it having to become a Polly Harvey album.”
Poetry was another salvation. Harvey began a formal mentorship with the Scottish poet Don Paterson. Their first lesson was at her house. “I was so excited and nervous, there with my notepad and pen,” she remembers. “And Don said, ‘Right, I thought today we won’t do any theory. We’re just going to talk about why you want to write poetry.’ That was it!” She gulps with trepidation. Three hours of probing later, she had cast back to herself as a tiny child, writing and drawing under a tree in woods near her house, and was in tears. “I seemed to have been completely regressed to a child of five weeping under a fir tree at the bottom of the garden!”
Paterson told her: write about that. Harvey wasn’t sure; The Hollow of the Hand had been a journalistic endeavour. “Don encouraged me to be as bold in my poetry as I am in my songs, which I hadn’t done,” she says. “I’d felt a bit like I was not worthy to write poetry, so I trod very carefully around it.” Poets are her greatest inspiration, she explains later by email. “There seems to be a magic and magnificence in their words that conjure the very meaning of life. To even begin to try and enter that world felt a goal beyond my capability.”
Harvey also took poetry courses in London, and claims no one recognised her. “If you’re going about your life like a normal person, people only see what you’re there to do,” she says. She loved being a student “because I always felt a bit sad that I missed out on going on to further learning”. In the early 90s, Harvey turned down studying sculpture at St Martin’s College to pursue music: “I’d often feel what fun that would have been, to have had those three years with a similar age group, finding out who you are. It was a bit like going back to do that study that I’d never done. You’d often be encouraged to share really new writing, which puts you in a vulnerable position, but it’s the same for everyone. That was a beautiful thing.”
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Harvey’s fans know how fiercely she rejects autobiographical interpretations of her work. Though she also welcomed the misconceptions as they only made her more elusive – if people want to assume from 1995’s Down By the Water that she drowned her daughter, let them. Other records were clearly more personal – she paused the writing of 1998’s Is This Desire? when penning one song made her realise that she was unwell and needed to get help – although given the ghoulish 90s coverage of her few spells of mental ill health, you can understand why she’d rather conceal the links between her life and music.
But there are startling things in common between the protagonist of her new songs and poems and the young Harvey. Both are farm girls who cropped their hair and exclusively befriended boys. Ira-Abel describes herself as a “not-girl, a bogus boy”; as a child, Harvey loathed girlhood, went by the name Paul and peed standing up to fit in. I try to draw what seem like clear lines between them, but Harvey stridently resists. Harvey once said she became shy at 11 – was that a similar loss of innocence? No, she says – besides, she can’t remember saying that and surely everyone goes through it. Did her brother cut her hair, as Ira-Abel’s does? “Like I said, it’s not an autobiographical work,” she says. (Though one associate lets slip that it’s “kind of like an origin story, autobiographical but oblique”, then tells me, “Don’t dob me in!”)
I try to widen the conversation to what seem like timely themes in the work, but it proves just as fruitless. Harvey becomes impassive and I start to sweat in her cool gaze. Ira’s frustrations with gender seem resonant with contemporary conversations about identity. Was that on her mind? “No, no.”
Her last three albums all consider the human capacity for cruelty. What keeps bringing her back to that theme? “I wouldn’t say they’re just that,” she says. “There’s also a lot of looking at positivity and love. You can only look at that with the other side. Then that is really an exploration of how it feels to be alive.”
She’s said that she can become grievously upset by current events: is it a strike against terrible things being normalised, or her innate empathy? “I’m naturally like that,” she says. “I get very affected and upset by things on a daily basis that we hear are happening in the world, then feel the need to write about it.” The government plans to house refugees in a barge off the coast near where Harvey grew up. Are there local movements against it? She thinks so. “I think it’s really difficult for everyone in that area for all sorts of different reasons, isn’t it?” Does she have an opinion? “I do, but I’m not going to talk about that,” she says. Defeated by her stonewalling, I move on.
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I Inside … is the latest iteration of Harvey’s need to remove herself from her work. As a younger woman, she achieved it through self-destruction; this album feels as though she’s trying to attain it through transcendence. She doesn’t often listen back to her albums, she says, but calls this one a comfort. “It always makes me feel better.”
A recent lavish reissue campaign of all her albums traces how Polly Jean Harvey became PJ Harvey, though Harvey says the release was just a practical matter: many of her albums were out of print on vinyl. The idea grew to include old demos and rarities. “It’s been a lovely project for me, and for me to have,” she says. “It’s made it much easier to reference things while I’m looking for something.” (I imagine her putting on 2007’s White Chalk to confirm her suspicions that yes, she’s used that voice before.)
One of the best parts, I thought, was the archival photos: a goth in hot weather reading Flannery O’Connor; looking uncertain at college; the tender Polaroid of her and lover Nick Cave in a collage she made for him in the mid-90s (last year Cave described them as “each too self-absorbed to ever be able to inhabit the same space in any truly meaningful way”). I wondered how she felt looking at them – who she felt close to, distant from? “I didn’t feel any of those things, no,” she says, perplexed.
I ask why she wanted to shock people when she first emerged. She can’t remember, then stops me. “If I was to keep asking you what you meant when you wrote that line, where were you at, wouldn’t you find it a bit odd?” she probes. No, I say – old photos give me enormous nostalgia. I love hearing artists reflect on their career. And I had imagined that doing a retrospective must be poignant. I find myself apologising, flustered. “I’m just curious,” she says gently. “I’m not even critical. It does interest me because a lot of people want to know about those things, but I guess I’m just not that type of person.”
Harvey lives in the moment, she says. “Not even that far in the future – only in terms of creative ideas I’m slowly growing.” Her past selves feel a healthy distance away, though she won’t perform some songs from Dry any more. She was 17 when she wrote it. “I’m too far away from that as a 53-year-old woman.” She’s always written from the perspective of various characters – why is this different? “It’d be like you reading from your diary aged 16 and really having to inhabit that now – like on that funny radio programme [Radio 4’s My Teenage Diary], which I love. It’s hilarious. But hilarity is not what we’re after.” I assume she would never write a memoir. “I wouldn’t, really,” she says. “I’ve seen some beautiful films made as people reach their older years,” she says, mentioning Nina Simone: La Légende from 1992. “Maybe when I can see my end in sight, I maybe, might do a film,” she says.
Perhaps it’s Harvey’s refusal to look back that imbues her work with a potency which means fans can plot their lives by it. Sharon Horgan recently asked Harvey to score her Bafta-winning drama series Bad Sisters. She discovered her when she moved from Ireland to London in the late 90s, initially falling for the “raw, primal” To Bring You My Love. “That might have suited where I was at the time, feeling angry,” says Horgan. Soon the slicker Stories From the City … came to define Horgan’s experience. “It’s how she talks about being in love. It felt like you were able to learn a lot about putting your feelings in order when you listen to that album.”
Harvey is happy to have a foot in the past, in some respects. Music consumption has changed a lot even since her previous album. She worries about how music is valued, even by herself. “If I don’t like it after a minute, I might go to something else, and I keep pulling myself back on that: Polly! Just sit and listen!” she says. As a songwriter who emerged decades before streaming, she was “lucky enough to have had a good grounding when things weren’t like that. I’ve been able to grow confidence in my process. But I wonder how it affects the younger generation that is having to write in this new climate?”
She’s been listening to conversations about AI and creativity. “But,” she says with a rhapsodic sigh, “I can’t imagine that the imperfection of the human touch will be outridden by the perfection of a computer. I think there’s something beautiful about imperfections and failings of us as human beings.” She comes back to the making of I Inside … “I believe that people will still want that homemade-ness of it – going full circle to us holding things together with bits of tape to make a sound.”
For one night only on New Year’s Eve 1991, Harvey, Parish and some others formed an Abba tribute band, Fabba. Has she seen Abba Voyage? “I didn’t, but I would be interested to,” she says. “I’ve heard brilliant reports. I think that’s going to become more and more common though, don’t you?” she says of the reanimating technology. “I mean, oh gosh,” she adds, with a grimace, “the other day I did entertain whether they’re gonna make a PJ Harvey avatar when I’m dead and gone!” She hoots. Maybe they could call it the Pologram, I suggest. Finally, I have found the limit of Harvey’s desire to keep moving forward. “Oh no!” she cries happily, head in hands, “please, no!”
• I Inside the Old Year Dying by PJ Harvey is out on 7 July.
