PJ Harvey is wearing a black armband. Nothing odd there, you might think, in light of recent events. But only Harvey would sport one that looks as if it's been ripped from a blood-pressure testing kit, and team it with a shimmering silver lamé dress and black choker. The effect, much like the set - largely made up of tracks from her latest, Mercury prize-winning album - is quite unlike anything else.
On several numbers, whether thrashed-out songs of lust and rage or tender moments of longing, Harvey is in unbeatably fine form, and the transfixed venue in awe of her. Some in the audience love the way she reinforces stereotypes (men in the crowd seem most attentive when she plays the guitar, looking almost ludicrously sexy), while others lap up the way she shatters them. You want to show highlights of this gig to young women, maybe early teens, and say, look, this is what you can do, this is one of the things women can be.
During Kamikaze and This Is Love, her voice carpets the venue, the declarations of feeling seethed like a threat. On other tracks, freed from the guitar, she slinks a dance, pounds a tambourine, sings Horses in My Dreams beautifully, like an arc of fragile light. Lest we get sentimental - a bouquet of flowers is handed to her at one point - she follows this with Big Exit, sounding steely, fierce, defiant. "I walk on concrete, I walk on sand," she snarls. The gig, with its different textures and moods, is the aural equivalent of this.
There isn't much in the way of small talk, just a few, soft mentions of thanks and then a quiet note that she wishes us well. The feeling is mutual. When she screeches, "Lick my legs, I'm on fire", you feel the whole room is ready to volunteer. Moments later, in the fourth encore, she stuns the room with an acoustic version of Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep, slowed down to a haunting, terrible pace. "Where's your mamma gone?" she cries in a heartbreaking drawl, almost drowned out by the crunch of plastic beer glasses underfoot as people move forward, drawn to this tiny, tremendous woman and that suddenly distressing armband.
At Manchester Apollo (0161-242 2560) tonight, and Brixton Academy, London SW9 (020-7771 2000), on Sunday and Monday.
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