1 Sheela-Na-Gig
My world spun on a different axis after finding Polly Harvey. I can still remember first hearing her voice – half menacing leer, half sugared trick – and knowing I was slipping down a wormhole, taken by the hand and led somewhere dark by some terrible siren. Beware, surly teenager, skulking away in your bedroom and jamming Dry into the CD player for the first time: danger beckons.
I discovered Harvey’s 1992 debut a near-decade after its release, but it’s not an album that can be dimmed by time; it’s still fearless, forever timeless. It’s both vicious blues-punk – a noise that’s bruised and battered, murky and muscular – and a fuck-you manifesto: a subversion of stereotypes, a takedown of male hypocrisy and twisted expectations of femininity. Sheela-Na-Gig (a title inspired by old carvings, often found on Romanesque churches in Britain, of naked women with exaggerated vulvas) is powered by a fierce, ferocious riff that helter-skelters this way and that so giddily you almost miss the sneer in Harvey’s voice, or the wicked taunt in her words. Here, she’s trouncing some prudish man who deems her appetite for sex to be sordid. “Look at these, my child-bearing hips / Look at these my ruby-red lips,” she breathes, poking fun at a million man-made fantasies of female submissiveness, as he runs for the hills lest he be corrupted by sins of the flesh: “He said, ‘Wash your breasts, I don’t want to be unclean / He said, ‘Please take those dirty pillows away from me.’” What a snivelling coward.
2 Rid of Me
Nobody listens to Rid of Me and escapes unscarred. After Dry had made her a cult hero, beloved of everyone from John Peel and Kurt Cobain to NME and Rolling Stone, Harvey felt smothered and fled her pokey home in north London for a seaside retreat in Dorset. There, she poured everything into Rid of Me: a raw album of frazzled nerves and frayed neuroses that’s harsher, uglier and more extreme than Dry; a record that seethes and bites and claws and scratches anyone who comes too close. And producer Steve Albini certainly wasn’t going to pretty it up; he’d been chosen by Harvey to work on the record because of his fondness for harsh, abrasive sound.
Harvey told Spin in 2013 that Rid of Me had come to life in her recluse’s room in Dorset, where she buried herself in the Pixies, Salinger and Nietzsche. Listen to the title track now and you can still feel it. It is essentially a breakup song – but one that’s warped into something sinister. The intro creeps along quietly, all dangerous and evil, rumbling from scary hum into some dread explosion that’s cloudy with loss and lust. Harvey’s words and voice get ever more dark and desperate: it starts with a whispered plea (“Tie yourself to me / I’m hurting”), skids into emotional blackmail (“I beg you, my darling / Don’t leave me”) and then turns psychotically wicked as Harvey shrieks: “I’ll make you lick you my injuries / I’m gonna twist your head off, see.” Once heard, never shaken off.
3 50ft Queenie
Rid of Me is brutal, but it can be darkly, shockingly funny too. And no track has such outrageous black humour as the absolute gift that is 50ft Queenie. Here, Harvey taunts all the dick-waggling braggarts, the ones so oafishly proud about the size of their swinging manhood, and reduces them to whimpering, emasculated dust. “I’m No 1, second to no one,” she crows, commanding all cock-rockers to bow to her superior size and strength, before landing the killer blow: “Fifty foot queenie / Fifty and rising / You can bend over, Casanova.” There’s a serious edge – the deconstruction of man’s obsession with confusing power and the size of their appendages, the subversion of sexist crowing – but it’s the withering humour that really makes it sting. And Harvey knows how to sugar her medicine sonically, too, because it’s not just one of the funniest tracks on Rid of Me; it’s also one of the funnest, a scuzzy, sleazy romp that scurries along with rolling, messy guitars and Harvey’s tough, barking rant. “Nothing can stop me,” she spits. Nobody would be dim enough to try.
4 Easy
By 1993, Harvey had parted company with the band – drummer Rob Ellis and bassist Steve Vaughan – who played on her first two two albums. The tension of making the abrasive, close-to-the-bone Rid of Me and the tiresome slog of touring led to their relationship disintegrating. In search of a stopgap before plotting her next step, Harvey decided to release a batch of original demo recordings and unreleased material from the Rid of Me sessions.
There’s a theory, among some Harvey diehards, that 4-Track Demos is superior to Rid of Me; that there’s a rawness that’s missing from Albini’s gnarled, snarling mixes for the album. Whether they’re right or not, what’s undeniable about 4-Track Demos is its purity – the way that these songs sound so skeletal, brittle and yet still so tough and sinewy. Take Easy, for example: a dirty chug with rough, broken riffs that intermittently explode into fuggy mushroom-cloud choruses while Harvey barks at a slut-shamer: “You’re giving me no leeway / I open once and you call me devil’s gateway.” You can’t just hear her getting progressively more angry – you can feel it, too, rising hotter and harsher as she bitterly chokes “and I deserve it” over and over again, until you feel just as queasy as her.
5 Down by the Water
It’d be wonderfully contrarian to skip Down by the Water, wouldn’t it? It is, after all, the PJ Harvey track that people who know sod-all about PJ Harvey have still heard of: the standout song from her mainstream breakthrough, 1995’s To Bring You My Love; the one about that mad mother who drowns her daughter in a river. But omitting Down by the Water from a list of Harvey’s best songs would be like writing a Leonardo da Vinci biography without mentioning the Mona Lisa. Quite simply, it cannot be done. It would be heresy.
So, let’s start at the beginning: that dank, dirty and ungodly organ riff that heralds the descent into murky waters, slithering and snaking this way and that and just oozing pure dread; Harvey’s innocent and wide-eyed come-on, tricking you into sympathy because she sounds so lost when she moans, “I lost my heart, under the bridge … And now I’m old, now I holler” like a bereft parent; that masterful moment of unease when, with an eerie stab and swell of viola and cello, the penny drops and you understand she’s not spinning you a sob story but confessing to murder most horrid as she leers: “Oh help me Jesus / Come through this storm / I had to lose her / To do her harm.” And then the creepiest of codas: Harvey’s perverted nursery-rhyme whisper as everything fades to fuzz and she repeats “Little fish, big fish, swimming in the water / Come back here, man, give me my daughter.” A bona fide, black-hearted masterpiece.
6 A Perfect Day Elise
“Some critics have taken my writing so literally to the point that they’ll listen to Down by the Water and believe I have actually given birth to a child and drowned her,” scoffed Harvey to Spin in 2005. It’s a curious trend: unlike her old pal Nick Cave, a man always left free to slip into the skins of murderers, sleazebags or demonic preachers because he’s playing characters, Harvey has often been shackled by folk desperate to bolt autobiographical meaning to her every song. “It can be very frustrating, particularly when it seems almost preposterous that it could be autobiographical,” she told me in an interview for the Quietus in 2011, just before the release of Let England Shake. “People don’t allow the metaphor, the imagery, all the things that you work with as a writer … standing completely outside, as the narrator of a story.”
It’s little wonder that 1998’s Is This Desire? changed tack, with its a greater emphasis on narratives that couldn’t possibly be born from her own life to avoid any confusion from thick-skulled critics. Take the dangerously sly A Perfect Day Elise, its jagged electronics and keyboards boiling and bubbling menacingly, as Harvey recounts a tale of twisted love gone wrong. After a lucky one-night stand, a stalker grows so obsessed with Elise that he can’t let her go. “He could think of nothing but her name, Elise,” sings Harvey. Scariest of all are the little hints that he believes he’s on some divine mission, a crime of passion sanctioned by the almighty, convinced that “God is the sweat running down his back” and summoning religious courage before acting: “Said a prayer, pulled the trigger and cried / Tell me why.” And that title? A cruel hoodwink; it’s a perfect day for a murder, and nothing more.
7 Big Exit
Harvey has always had the devilish skill for evolution and reinvention. She’s been blessed with the trickster’s gift for transformation, able to shed old skins and turn herself into something strange and new. Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea (2000) might just be her most startling mutation, though: here’s slick-and-stylish Polly, sophisticated-and-subtle Polly. But, crucially, there’s nothing tame about Stories. Heaven forbid: as Harvey said herself, it’s only “pop according to PJ Harvey, which is probably as un-pop as you can get to most people’s standards”. Pop according to PJ Harvey, then, is the sleaze-soaked romp of This Is Love. Pop according to PJ Harvey is the dank breakup waltz of This Mess We’re In, in which Thom Yorke warbles “Night and day / I dream of making love to you now baby”, like the world’s oddest lothario. Pop according to PJ Harvey is the snarl and swagger of Good Fortune. And pop according to PJ Harvey is also Big Exit: the biggest of big openers, the brashest of brash introductions, with its giant, crunching chords that sound like they’re going to split and splinter the earth. “I wanna pistol! I wanna gun!” bellows Harvey, like she’s scared for her life, before that gorgeous chorus arrives, soaring and sweet and invincible: “Baby baby, ain’t it true / I’m immortal, when I’m with you.”
8 When Under Ether
For the gothic folk of 2007’s White Chalk, Harvey transformed into a pallid spectre who whispered and wailed of supernatural evil like a ghostly child; the kind of unearthly spirit you’d expect to confront at the end of The Turn of the Screw, or lurking in Mr Rochester’s attic in Jane Eyre. On When Under Ether, her gauzy, higher-pitched voice sounds more unsettling than any 50ft queenie or baby-drowning parent. From the off, something beautifully wicked is brewing. “The ceiling is moving / Moving in time / Like a conveyor belt / Above my eyes,” she sings softly, while the piano tinkles and chases itself in dizzy, seasick circles. She’s bed-stricken and under anaesthetic, but conscious of something – or someone – wriggling inside her belly. “Something’s inside me / Unborn and unblessed / Disappears into the ether / This world to the next.” Most likely, it’s an abortion, but everything from the queasiness in her voice to the murky, sing-song chords make you feel as if you’re woozy from anaesthesia too, your own mind playing tricks on you and turning that foetus into some monstrous alien intruder. “Human kindness,” sighs Harvey at the end, her ether-induced bliss cocooning her from trauma. The rest of us? We’re not quite so lucky.
9 Black Hearted Love
There’s a reason Harvey has hailed songwriter John Parish as her musical soulmate: their careers have been intertwined ever since Harvey joined his outfit Automatic Dlamini, and he’s returned the favour by working with her on Let England Shake, White Chalk, Is This Desire? and To Bring You My Love. It’s something special, then, to see them work on a project as equals, as they did on both 1996’s Dance Hall at Louse Point and 2009’s A Woman a Man Walked By. The latter can be elegant and pretty, with shades of romance coloured by something more menacing. Black Hearted Love, in particular, is a big showstopper; a disfigured cabaret tune with scraping, glistening guitars that’s as pillowy-soft and inviting as Harvey has sounded in yonks. And Harvey, for her part, riffs on the idea of her as devil-woman as she plunges into a life-and-death romance. “I think I saw in your shadows / I move in closer beneath your windows,” she sings, like a besotted teenager scrawling confessions in her diary. “When you call out my name in rapture / I volunteer my soul for murder.”
10 On Battleship Hill
“My subject is war, and the pity of war,” Wilfred Owen said. And if you’re one of those dull snobs who thinks a mere pop musician could never be the equal of a poet or painter, then gird your loins: on 2011’s Let England Shake, Harvey got amid the guts, gristle and grim horror of war’s pity just as eloquently as Owen, Hemingway or Goya. It goes beyond simplistic anti-war rhetoric, flits between perspectives and conflicts and time, and wrestles with the fact that being aware of one’s Englishness is to know its blood-soaked history. “What is the glorious fruit of our land?” she asks on the urgent This Glorious Land. “The fruit is orphaned children.” After all, your country needs you – it just doesn’t necessarily need you in one piece.
Let England Shake is so deep, and so rich, that it turns up new ideas and new favourites with each listen. For me – right now, right here – it’s the sad, spooky whistle of On Battleship Hill that really sticks in the brain. Inspired by a real scene of conflict in the bloody Battle of Chunuk Bair between the British Empire and Ottoman troops, it sounds like some long-lost memory that’s been buried deep with the corpses under the clod. Partly, that’s down to Harvey’s use of a zither and its misty, stinging chimes which roll and tumble and fall so gorgeously, but it’s her delivery too. “On Battleship Hill’s caved-in trenches, a hateful feeling still lingers,” she mourns, her voice high and haunted, surveying a landscape that’s been so scarred by monstrous inhumanity that even the mountains resemble “teeth in a rotten mouth”. “Cruel nature has won again,” she concludes, but she knows the real dirty secret of war: there are no victors, just victims.
