I Inside The Old Year Dying is the acclaimed new album by PJ Harvey (England, 54 years old), which anticipates a tour that will take her to Spain next year: on June 1st she will be in Barcelona (Primavera Sound) and on the 7th in Madrid (Botanical Nights). This will be his first concert in the capital in 17 years (his last step was at Summercase in 2007) and his first outside the framework of a major festival since his performance at Sala Pachá in 1995. This could be one of the keys to that – by no means cheap – Botánico tickets were already sold out on the day they went on sale.
What may sound like routine news (PJ Harvey's new album and tour) is not at all. Firstly, because each new work by the British artist plays with the unpredictable, defies expectations and you never know where it will lead. And secondly, because it has now become known that the artist was on the verge of leaving music, at least in such formats.
PJ Harvey at the Kosmopolis Festival in Barcelona 2017. Félix Corchado
Basically, there were no red flags as it had been seven years since the last publication (The Hope Six Demolition Project, 2016). We've already gotten used to the fact that these cycles of silence are natural in the recording lives of artists with long careers. And there wasn't complete silence either: during this time, the artist re-released her entire catalog with additional albums containing her demos, released the box set B-Sides, Demos & Rarities, and composed music for the play All About Eve and for the series The Virtues and Evil Sisters. In addition, his songs were frequently played on the renowned Peaky Blinders.
PJ Harvey on the “Let England Shake” tour.JORDI VIDAL (REDFERNS)
But in a recent interview he gave to journalist Ann Powers on NPR, the United States' National Public Radio, he admitted that he had lost touch with music. “I felt like a kind of separation, like the fun I felt when I started making songs at 17 was gone, that kind of absolute joy.” He admits that he was impressed by a few words from the filmmaker and educator Artist Steve McQueen helped explore it creatively: “What do you love?” You love words, images and music. Imagine what you can do with these three things without thinking that it has to be something specific, not a painting, not a record…” In the end it was a book with a long narrative poem, Orlam – published in April 2022 – which reconnected her with the world and prompted her to return to composing.
Something more than a poetic pause
In recent years, Polly Jean Harvey has undertaken serious training as a poet. In 2013 he gave his first concert at the British Library (the British National Library in London) and in 2015 he published his first book of poetry, The Hollow Of The Hand. He later decided to improve his technique by taking lessons from Scottish author Don Paterson for three years. From there emerged Orlam, which seduced much of British literary criticism for its use of the local dialect of Dorset (in southwest England) and the way in which it incorporated traditional rituals and superstitions from that area. She was so pleased that she even gave several interviews to promote what she had avoided for more than a decade, which was said to be due to her extreme shyness and reluctance to reveal too much information about herself. In fact, the almost complete lack of autobiographical material in her works has always been notable, and she was quite annoyed when people tried to draw conclusions about herself from the lyrics of her songs, especially early in her career.
He even thought about adapting Orlam for the theater. In fact, he tried with director Ian Rickson and actors Ben Whishaw and Colin Morgan, but it didn't quite work out. Songs emerged, so that the new album can be seen as an extension of his latest poetic work, from which he takes up landscapes, themes and spirit. He retained some of the roles performed by the two actors from the theater rehearsals and also experimented with field recordings in unorthodox ways. Proof of his strong belief in this album is the fact that in the first part of his tour he performs it in its entirety and in order, then gives way to another set of songs selected from his entire repertoire. She says it renewed her confidence and gave her new strength.
Three decades of experience in continuous transformation
In reality, none of this will come as a surprise to anyone who has followed Polly Jean Harvey's career more or less closely since she burst onto the scene in 1991 with the single “Dress.” Music wasn't a priority for him back then either. The daughter of hippie-bohemian parents with particular cultural preferences (as a child she rocked out to Captain Beefheart records as well as blues and dark folk), she had a multidisciplinary artistic education. He was studying sculpture at the prestigious Central Saint Martins University of the Arts in London when the Too Pure label offered him a record deal to release his first album, Dry, which led him to focus his career on sound. But this art student ethic has extended to many of her subsequent projects. His collaborations with the photographer and filmmaker Seamus Murphy are well known and he even took his first steps into acting with filmmakers such as Hal Hartley, in addition to exhibiting sculptural and visual works that were already less well known. Particularly groundbreaking was his idea to turn the recording of The Hope Six Demolition Project into an art installation. He set up a temporary studio in The Somerset House gallery in London where the band began their work while the audience could watch the process in real time through a glass pane.
PJ Harvey in another photo promoting his new album.Steve Gullick
When PJ Harvey was still understood as a rock trio (complemented by Rob Ellis on drums and Ian Oliver on bass), it emerged as part of the alternative explosion of the early 90s. Their second album, Rid Of Me, was produced by guru Steve Albini the same year as Nirvana's In Utero (1993), coinciding with the rise of groups like Hole and Breeders and with the feminist punk movement of Riot Grrrl. But she immediately distanced herself from it. The trio disbanded after supporting U2 on the Zooropa tour, but their time in the big stadiums was not so unsuccessful for them as the Irish band's manager, Paul McGuinness, offered her his services.
When she released her third album “To Bring You My Love” in 1995, she was already living in her own world and surprised with the extremely theatrical image of a femme fatale, which updated the sound of the blues and took it into new territories. Comparisons with Patti Smith or with the grunge stars of the moment no longer appeared as often as with the transformations of David Bowie or with contemporaries such as Radiohead, Björk (with whom he recorded a suggestive and historical version of Satisfaction at a the Rolling Stones shared). Brit Awards) or Nick Cave (with whom she had a turbulent relationship at the time). These were more accurate associations, but still inadequate and unfair to describe an artist on the level of Is This Desire? (1998) was already immersed in another universe, a timeless folk with Pre-Raphaelite aesthetics and sound design, where electric ripping came together with organic preciousness and electronic influences. Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea (2000) made them famous thanks to catchy, riotous rock songs wrapped in neon lights, black leather and dominatrix heels. Those of us who saw it live at the 2001 Benicássim Festival will never forget it. Later, the lukewarm Uh Huh Her (2004) could be described as a self-boycott if he hadn't continued to be infallible on stage. White Chalk (2007) was another completely unexpected change of direction, an underrated album in which he visited for the first time a mythological, romantic and dark Dorset with a Victorian aura and piano and autoharp as central instruments, and with which he accompanied a tour in which she acted completely alone.
A new protest song
Her career had already been fully paid off with seven albums that had made her one of the most important musical artists not only of her time, but of all time. But no one expected that this would mess things up even more. In 2011, he delivered what many consider to be his masterpiece: “Let England Shake.” A complete reinvention of their sound, the introduction of a new folk and a new protest song. The album offers a disillusioned vision of his country and its imperialist and warmongering history against the backdrop of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was also his first collaboration with Seamus Murphy, who created disarming clips for each of his songs. PJ Harvey's work has never been so explicitly political, but this is where a growing trend began. The following year he recorded “Shaker Aamer,” a song about a Guantanamo prisoner who went on hunger strike, and in 2015 he traveled with Murphy to Kosovo, Afghanistan and Washington, where he had a humanistic and geopolitical observation experience who created the book. Poems and photographs The Hollow Of The Hand, the album The Hope Six Demolition Project and the documentary A Dog Called Money directed by Murphy, which took part in the Berlin Film Festival. The album essentially saw PJ playing the saxophone – the instrument he started playing in the group Automatic Dlamini in the late '80s – and accompanying it on a dazzling tour with a nine-piece band.
PJ Harvey, during his concert at Primavera Sound.XT (WireImage)
“Before Let England Shake, I was immersed in reading poets who wrote about the war. Then I felt the need to convey terrible things in beautiful language. Very often poems of great beauty are about something very violent or ugly. That attracted me, so I tried to do the same thing that so many poets have done for centuries,” he told Rolling Stone last year while promoting Orlam. “With this album and with Hope Six… I was looking outward, at the political landscape, at what was happening in the world. I think I've always followed my instincts as a writer, and my instincts told me that I had to change the scale and go back to a smaller scale. “A person, a city, a forest was practically all I needed as a place of rest or, if you prefer, a place to regain my strength.” Indeed, in PJ Harvey's unpredictable creative universe, everything is interconnected and full of meaning.
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