PJ Harvey is back with her most dizzyingly and radical work since the raw pulse and grind of her 1993 debut. Here she tells Fused about being an art student, blistering fingers and that ‘Riot Grrrl’ era.
The great thing about learning a new instrument from scratch is that it enables you to be more childlike, more unaffected by adulthood. When that intellectual knowledge is stripped away from you, it liberates your imagination. I don’t know how to play the piano, I’m very hamfisted at it, and I love that. In the future, I’d quite like to keep grabbing at instruments I’ve never played before. It forces me into the position of listening for the first time and I find that very freeing.
I don’t feel that I’m ‘not myself’, that I’m not Polly at any time when I’m on stage. I really enjoy singing and playing songs. I’d be doing so whether people were watching or not. It’s something that I want, need and have to do. So I feel very myself singing and playing. When I’m singing any given song I’m absolutely inside it. But then, when I stop singing and step out of it, it’s like, OK, I’m here with these nice people and I’m going to talk to them. I read this lovely quote by Dylan the other day. He said that all you have to do with songs is just to let them be there, in the room. And I love that, because it’s exactly how I feel. In some ways, the songs are nothing to do with me and yet they come through me. I’m the conduit for them.
My parents used to play music every night and still do. My Mum’s putting on a band this weekend, she still does it. So I was very lucky. Such a fantastic record collection they had – and all old vinyl. They started buying when they were 20. I was listening to Howlin’ Wolf’s version of ‘Back Door Man’ yesterday. It’s shocking me still – how could he get away with that? But the rise of his voice, it’s like nails going down your back, or something.
My experiences as an art student feed though enormously into my songwriting. It all comes from the same place. I work on both in the same way. I used lots of found objects but also real materials – it was always black and white, very little colour, very minimal. And, as with a song, I start off with lots and lots of information and just strip it away, see how little you actually need, see how ‘bare’ you can get something, where it’s at its barest but can still deliver some sort of emotion, some sort of comment.
It’s very convenient for people to pigeonhole people and doesn’t do much of a service for the diversity of people who were coming through then. I never felt part of Riot Grrrl, even though I was included in it. I think what I always hated was that ‘Grrr!’ spelling. I thought it was appalling! ‘Grrr’ is a little bit pathetic. Like cavewomen in loincloths. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who felt like that.
It occurred to me the other day, I am a songwriter. I’m not a musician in that I won’t touch an instrument from one year to the next unless I’m performing or recording. It all goes on in here, in my brain. I write the songs in my brain and then come to the instruments at the last minute. This goes for the guitar as well. I had to practice hard for a month just to learn to play guitar again. My fingers were blistered. I feel much more like an explorer. I’m much more excited about laying my hands on anything that’s new and that I don’t understand. That’s what’s most interesting to me at the moment. It’s a life’s work, exploring. I sometimes wake up in a panic, thinking I’ll never get to explore all these ideas I want to try before I die. It’s a lovely but scary feeling.
I think with each album my mind and imagination goes into one particular area, I fall in love with an idea and go in that route. And this time it was about ‘country’, although not necessarily a particular place. With all of the songs I create this little film in my head, mostly in woodland, or on hills, or mountains.
I say I don’t want to retread old ground and sometimes I achieve that and other times I don’t, but it’s always what I strive for. And I was particularly vigilant with this record. I think I did a better job than I have done for quite a few years – it did see through my initial idea. It’s too easy to get distracted, or fall in love with a song, even if it’s very much like what you’ve done before. This time around, it was to do with the plethora of music around us now and I don’t want to add anything that’s not new, there seems so little point because there is so much of everything. That’s what made me pursue the piano route.