Here’s a thing – the live album as DVD extra. 2004 was a very good year to catch PJ Harvey on tour. She’d done extroverted before of course, on the 1995 Barbarella burlesque extravaganza, but then she was brittle rather than visceral, the exagerrated lipstick and eye shadow application functioning as Brechtian mask, the pink catsuit a corset to hold her guts in. On that tour, one imagines she’d have chewed nails rather than collapse into a fit of giggles during ‘Down By The Water’, as happens here.
The Uh Huh Her shows might have inspired gallery wags to question Harvey’s karaoke Karen O shapes, paraphrasing Blake’s proverb about the eagle never losing so much time as when she submitted to learn of the crow, except Karen O ain’t no crow, and PJ’s no pale Zelig taking on the personalities of last year’s models.
It helped that the band were a band rather than an assembly. The bass player was a towering specimen of manhood called Dingo, a six-foot scum punk who looked like he’d shambled out of Mad Max – The Road Warrior or Riddley Walker, while Josh Kinghoffer was an itchy and unnerving occlusion of angled elbows and floppy fringe that belied a style which could adapt from No Wave jagged to bluesy fluid. As for Rob Ellis, his abstract-equational approach to the trap kit is all but beyond reproach in my book.
And here you get 18 tunes, two of them previously unreleased, ‘Uh Huh Her’ being a filthy distorto blues halfway between John Lee and The Birthday Party with a “Don’t marry her” refrain; ‘EVOL’ a mid-paced wallow in the mires of lust, jealousy and sundry psycho-sexual neuroses.
A lot of the songs – ‘Dress’, ‘The Big Exit’, ‘The Letter’, ‘Leah’ – never had owt wrong with the arrangements and instrumentation in the first place, so they’re trotted out unmolested, if that’s the word, with just an extra glistening of sweat.
The rest do what you’d want them to, capturing Harvey in the full of her blood, backed by players capable of endowing old tunes with new muscle tissue. ‘Meet Ze Monster’ is stripped of studio artifice and wheeled out as scuzz-industrial wang-dang motorik designed to make the snazziest digital hardware sound analogue overdriven, valves so hot you could fry an egg on ’em. If you had an egg. ‘I Think I’m A Mother’ is spare and spooky and slathered with snake oil. ‘Taut’, plucked from Louse Point, is a borderline certifiable spew of straightjacket jerks and ink-blot automatic writing relieved by a “Jesus save me” melody line. And Uh Huh Her tunes like ‘It’s You’ and ‘The Darker Days Of Me And Him’, rendered bare bones style on their parent album, here benefit from extra tonal variation. Mind you, the contrary is true of ‘Good Fortune’ and ‘Perfect Day Elise’, which weigh in a tad more anaemic than their studio counterparts, but these are largely forgivable niggles.
Too many live albums are about the stuff that didn’t actually get captured on tape: the ritual, the lights, the t-shirt, the bog roll, the bar tab. Please Leave Quietly is about music, sufficient unto itself.