The stage for PJ Harvey’s first tour since 2017 is set like a domestic interior. The exact decade may be hazy, but this is a musical home, with analogue electronics scattered around the distressed wooden furniture, a fiddle offsetting the guitars. On a wooden table sit a jug of water and glasses.
An earthenware vase holds a single thin branch, echoing the cover image of PJ Harvey’s latest album, I Inside The Old Year Dying, where a gnarled twig – and especially its shadow – foretell of uncanny goings-on in the woods. Her four-strong band wear faded tones; Harvey is all in oat, her Shaker-evening-chic dress fitted with a discreet pocket for a mic pack. Throughout the nearly two-hour set, she and her multi-instrumentalists use every bit of the stage like dramatis personae, with halogen-dominant lighting, warped birdsong and found sounds adding to the feel of witnessing a stage play out of time – how I Inside The Old Year Dying was once envisaged, before the songs took on a life of their own.
If the “when” of Harvey’s densely allusive album is subject to intentional slippage, the “where” is very exact. We may be in Glasgow, but all the action is in Dorset, where the singer-songwriter grew up on a farm – in tune with the seasons, castrating lambs. Her family were fans of Bob Dylan, the blues and Captain Beefheart, all of which have left their imprint on Harvey’s rich and deep discography. One of the highlights of tonight’s gig is a surprise Dylan cover – Dark Eyes – with the band gathered in a tight circle, Harvey doing harmonica parts and James Johnston (formerly of Gallon Drunk and the Bad Seeds) on violin.
The homecoming is significant. Harvey’s last album, The Hope Six Demolition Project (2016) took the artist on an international tour of zones of conflict and deprivation; I Inside… returns her to a more personal place where folklore, the natural world and liminal states come to the fore.
It can still feel like a tough work to crack. These 12 songs (one for every month of the year) grew out of Harvey’s last major outing, Orlam (2022), an epic poem in the Dorset dialect about a young girl on the brink of maturity, and the uncanny characters that people her world. It’s a thin place where ghosts walk and the eye of a dead lamb – the titular Orlam – sees all. These are songs rich in expressive unfamiliarity, littered with gleefully anachronistic Elvis references. Back in July it made for a brow-furrowing listen; a record to admire, perhaps, rather than feel intimately. Tonight’s set is divided in two: the new album end to end, then a set drawn from the far corners of Harvey’s backstory.
If I Inside… often reflected the hard yards she put in – honing her poetic craft, mastering a thorny dialect and then building an entire world – these gigs make for effective outreach work. Live, the newest songs are less mannered, more fleshed-out and persuasive; more like songs than poems set to atmospheres. The distance between July and late September means the singsong incantations of local species names – on tracks like the affecting Lwonesome Tonight – now ring out with warm familiarity. The Elvis references are little Easter eggs nestled in the misty undergrowth. “Love me, tender, tender love,” sings Harvey on A Child’s Question, August, an electrifying moment when her voice descends from the otherworldly soprano of much of I Inside to somewhere altogether earthier. Seem an I is particularly beautiful, rhythmically skewwhiff yet slinky.
The rest of the night finds Harvey working her way backwards in her own timeline. A trio of songs from Let England Shake, her 2011 anti-war album, funnels us towards material that is more overtly carnal. There is lust and longing, sex and death in I Inside The Old Year Dying, it’s just more wrapped up in detailed writerly filigree.
After 9pm, she is ready to take route one again. Send His Love to Me and the title track of her 1995 album To Bring You My Love are hypnotic portraits of love as epic derangement. Harvey’s voice is racked, lustful; itself untouched by time. There’s a particularly wicked relish to her delivery of Down By the Water, a shimmy in which infanticide looms large.
Songs such as Dress and Man-Size, meanwhile, take us back to long-ago 1992 and 1993. But they have echoes in Underwhelem, the fictional Dorset village where I Inside… is set: we see a young woman stepping out; we ponder gender fluidity. Everywhere, there are eyes – blue in Down By the Water, green in Angelene, disembodied in the case of Orlam – and dark in the Dylan cover. No fan of Harvey’s red-in-tooth-and-claw period goes home disappointed. In the process, I Inside The Old Year Dying gains a pulse.
