25 years ago today: PJ Harvey released Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea

Originally published in Hot Press in 2000:

Walk on concrete/
I walk on sand/
But I can' t find/
A safe place to stand/
Baby, baby/
Ain't it true/
I'm immortal/
When I'm with you
('Big Exit', Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea)

The never-ending rumble of crosstown traffic. The pounding ever-present urgency. The cacophony of unending motion and activity, of infinite possible realities jostling against each other as danger lurks and adventure beckons everywhere. Millions of tales, waiting to be spun out, a constant, colourful racket, blaring out from hundreds of massive, crowded streets. Down in the Village, a kaleidoscope of sights and smells and sounds from halfway round the world, fragments of language caught on the air, colours bleeding into each other, hyper-vivid and irrevocably alive. The unmistakeable, monolithic presence of the city of New York, its ongoing clamour, audible through the walls, even as you sleep.

Lord knows PJ Harvey has always been a visceral artist. But on her fifth album, Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea, she has harnessed the energy and the mainlined thrill of the city of cities and reinvented herself or, more precisely, relocated her ability to strip endless layers away and get at the exposed nerves, the base elementals, the very core of sensuality and human emotion.

Harvey is insistent that this is not her New York record. Fair enough, as Manhattan her adopted home for much of last year functions mainly as a backdrop, albeit an incredibly vivid one, for vignettes brimming with full-blooded sexuality, a long-missing, rekindled lust for life, and, surprisingly, something that sounds quite like, well, true love.

Harvey is back on form. With the raw ferocity and full-on ramrod guitars of her Dry and Rid Of Me era, combined with whip-smart, streamlined production and a return to her colossal uber-female vocal presence, she's brought herself back from whatever lonely, distressed hinterland she inhabited during her previous album Is This Desire? This, in absolute contrast, is desire: and a whole lot more besides.

In unbelievable counterpoint to her feral Patti Smith yowl, Polly Jean Harvey's speaking voice is soft, almost like a young girl's, with the cut-glass pronunciation and rounded Devon plumminess of a Lewis Carroll heroine. Occasionally, it takes on a momentary growly quality as the tenor of it drops for a moment and when this happens, it's akin to lifting a stone in the forest and seeing a whole other teeming, complex, mucky universe beneath and you get a brief flash of the earthiness and throaty viscerality of her records. Then she'll carry on, and it disappears again, just as instantly.

Mind what you ask her, Hot Press was warned: she can be difficult, even chilly. Perhaps, but while she certainly doesn't possess the confessional, here's-every-detail-Oprah garrulousness of a Hello!-troubling Spice Girl, she's far from the tight-lipped quasi-opponent I had been prepared to meet.

She's a warm, friendly woman who, when she dodges personal questions (and she does), does so with courtesy and humour, and who is self-possessed, at ease and, very plainly, effusively happy.

In black, with her hair twisted up and wearing raspberry tights the colour of her lipstick, she's as graceful and elegant as an off-duty ballerina; and all those rumours of bad health and time spent in the wilderness may as well have been about another person entirely.

I read something really interesting about the title of the record, I tell Harvey: that it's not so named because it's about the city and the sea, but because of an idea from Jung about the city as the conscious mind and the sea as the subconscious.

"Yeah, that idea is fascinating to me," she explains. "I live by the sea, I have a place there, at the moment. And very often in fact, every day I m home now I walk the beach, I walk the cliffs. I read somewhere that it's the artist's duty to walk the tideline, because the sea is the representation of the subconscious, and the land of consciousness. And so therefore to walk the tideline is the artist or the creative person's duty, in order to somewhere be walking the blurring line between the two. And this just summed up for me, really, an explanation of songwriting, or an explanation of creative writing of any kind.

"Because that is what it is: it s almost like being in a semi-conscious state, or a state of subconsciousness, exploring the kind of territory that one is in when one is dreaming. But that's also tempered with one foot on the land at the same time. And that is what writing is about for me."

I got extreme visual reactions to a lot of these songs, I tell her; they're very vividly drawn, almost cinematic. Is she particularly interested in the visual side of the creative process?

"Mmmm, mmmm, very much so, yeah," she agrees. "Before I went into music, I was probably going to go into visual arts and it still continues to be a very inspiring source for me. You know, film, artwork, painting, sculpture, all of these kinds of things just kind of feed my own writing enormously. So, yeah, songs will come from images, very often, from films, from paintings, they'll just spark a tiny spark and from that will come a song."

New York is arguably one of the better cities one can live in for museums and galleries, and for the visual experience in general. Did you see anything interesting while you were there?

"I did. I saw quite a lot of exhibitions while I was there. I didn't tend to go to many of the major spaces, I think I went to the Modern Art museum, and I went to the Guggenheim. I also enjoyed just wandering around especially in Soho, where there's quite a lot of little galleries and cafes that are exhibiting contemporary artists work, people that aren't particularly famous. That interests me, very much, to see what's going on, more on the outskirts."

How easy was it for you to blend in New York?

"Hmmm..it was pretty easy." Then she considers. "You know, the initial week, when I first got there, I did feel very much like a non-human being, landed from another planet. It was a foreign country to me, and I had to re-learn the customs, if you like; how to conduct myself living there. But after that it didn't take long before I slipped into the way of life, quite quickly."

It's a satisfying image to have in one's mind: of Harvey on the outskirts, infiltrating the coffeehouses, lurking round the galleries, inconspicuously devouring New York s extreme visual impact: the ever-absorptive receptor.

Didn't you live up along that park near Harlem?

"Riverside. Yeah, I was up at the top end of Riverside, which was bordering on Harlem. It was a very interesting kind of divide to be in, cos you know, there's Harlem ten blocks north, and then there were these beautiful West Side apartments ten blocks south, and I was kind of in the middle of those two."

How did you end up living there, specifically?

"It was a cheap apartment probably, cos it didn't have any air-conditioning," she giggles.

So what kind of things did you spend your days doing? I understand you ve been writing poetry?

"Mmmmm, yeah. Especially when I was in New York, actually. That's where I began, really. I'd been writing a bit before, but over the last couple of years, I've been working on quite a lot of poetry and more prose-writing as well. It just interests me, I'm not by any means a good poet. I'm a useless poet. That's why it interests me so much, because it's something I can't do very well, (laughs) At all. And at the same time, it does fuel my songwriting, and has changed my writing, in a very good way I think. It has caused me to write in a much more specific way in songs, which I like."

I assume that when you re writing a song, the fact that you're writing music as well is a help, in terms of how things can be illustrated, whereas you don't have that help in poetry: you're really starting with a blank page.

"Mmmm, exactly. With a song, you have the music to strengthen the words or, to debase the words, if you choose: you know, you can be singing something and the music underneath will turn it on its head, make it not make sense at all. With poetry and writing you don't have that. So it has to be strong enough to hold itself together. So it is actually much much harder, I think."

Are you reading a lot of poetry, then? Who do you like?

"Yeah, I'm reading a lot. At the moment I'm reading a book by Osip Mandelestan, who's a Russian poet from the 1900s, and I was put onto his work by Mark Linkous from Sparklehorse, actually. He said, You've gotta read this! And it's very, very moving.

"I read a lot of Ted Hughes, I read a lot of Wilfred Owen, and a contemporary poet called Billy Childish from England. A lot of Raymond Carver, as well. A lot of prose as well as poetry."

When we walked through/
Little Italy/
I saw my reflection/
Come right off your face
('Good Fortune')

What made PJ Harvey move to New York in the first place?

"I'd spent a month there in '98 making a film with Hal Hartley [The Book Of Life, in which she played Mary Magdalene], and just loved the place, but obviously at that time didn't have time to explore it," she explains. "I was supposed to be working. It just put this spark in me where I thought: I really want to come here when I'm not doing anything else, and when I m not on tour, and when I m not just so I can really absorb this culture, because it was very inspiring to me. Not just in terms of writing, but personally, it was very inspiring. And it did me an awful lot of good, I think, as a person."

How? Harvey considers: it's the first nearly-personal question of the interview.

"Um. Well, you know, Manhattan is just so full, absolutely full of everything, and I did feel that my eyes were opened, in a very new way. I do have a greater sense of perspective, of my own position, amidst all of these millions of people living in very close proximity to each other. And it's toughened me up, in a good way."

New York is a city that really makes one aware of how tiny one life is, I suggest; perhaps this may have led her to give small moments pride of place on this record. When I suggest this, she looks me right in the eye.

"It's very interesting that you picked that up. Most people don't really pick that up. But yeah, I mean, during my time in New York, and probably a little beforehand through reading a lot of poetry and working on poetry, really I just became very interested in bringing in specifics in songwriting. Which I'd started doing in poetry, because you need to, because like we were saying it has to hold itself together, and being very specific is what helps that happen for me. So that did start to happen in the songwriting as well, and I became very interested in capturing tiny, what would be seen as insignificant moments, you know: moments that you know and I know that we can remember.

"Things like smell association: you smell something, and immediately it's an emotional response, an emotional feeling to what might have been the tiniest moment. Oh, I remember sitting next to that person and smelling that smell with them when we were having that drink in that bar. That's the kind of thing that I have become very interested in. Songs like 'This Mess We're In', and 'You Said Something', it's all about capturing those elusive moments.

The overall lightness of Stories, relatively speaking, is going to surprise many listeners who are used to the Biblical enormity and angry fatalism of Harvey's breakthrough album To Bring You My Love.

Most shocking of all is 'We Float' – a song so relaxed and free of tension and inner struggle that it contains the unthinkable, quintessentially un-Harveyish phrase: "We'll float/Take life as it comes." Compared to her past work, where protagonists wrestle with the devil and rail against the sky and beg the Lord for redemption, God only shows up once here on the hidden track 'This Wicked Tongue' and, even then, he's a million miles away. The subtext seems to be: go and live your life. How did this sea-change come about?

"It wasn't a conscious thing. I just naturally was moving into different territories, and I have written a lot about biblical matters in past songs. And I always try and not do what I feel I've exhausted before."

But even leaving aside the almost mythical fatalism of these older records, I suggest, Stories is a lot more human-sized, human-centred, and accepting: more positive, and more essentially free. I re-listened lately to Is This Desire? I tell her, and re-felt its helplessness and claustrophobia, and its intense sadness. I understand that she went through a very dark period at some stage, I say and Harvey visibly stiffens and goes very still, as if physically preparing herself for the question to follow.

How did she get from there to here?

There is a prolonged pause.

"You know," Harvey begins. There s a palpable tension, not between Harvey and her interrogator but between her clear desire to answer the question truthfully and her iron-hard reluctance to reveal herself. And as she answers, you can almost watch her editing the specific into the general in her head.

"It's a gradual process. You know, it's just a gradual process, for everyone, as you get older, really. You develop a better sense of perspective, and of self-acceptance, and I think that's what has happened for me. I mean, certainly over the last two or three years, I've just reached a place where I find greater happiness in accepting myself as how I am.

"It was kind of from around age 29 onwards, for me, when there was just suddenly just an enormous sense of relief, and I thought, well, actually, it's okay. To be me. It's really alright. And I'm not a bad person, it's ok. And with that just the whole world just suddenly opens up to you."

The transformation in her work, from Is This Desire? to Stories, seems a return not only to life, but to a life more vivid, more drunk with vitality, than ever before. It makes me think of a person who has been ill in hospital for some time, I suggest: where, if and when the person pulls through, they're almost 10 times more alive than before.

She nods. "I think you're very right, yeah. In the same way that, you know, if something of enormous circumstance happens in your life, whether a birth or a death, again you're shaken to the very core, and re-evaluate everything, and start again."

I wonder whether it's possible, or easy, to conjure from imagination the kind of exuberant joy that is found on this record, if it's not what you re actually feeling. I imagine it's easier to conjure melancholy, I say and Harvey slightly misreads the question, but raises a significant point all the same.

"Well, I very much dislike the notion that an artist has to be melancholy or fucked-up in some way in order to write. I think it's absolute rubbish. And I hate the fact that people like to buy into that myth, particularly in the media. Because it's very damaging. It's completely not true. I've written my best work, I'd say, when I'm most balanced and happy. Sure, you can write when you're melancholy, and when you re struggling, but I've felt, for me personally, I would write in a very blindfolded, tunnel-visioned way.

"When one is more" – she gives her accent an exaggerated, comical hauteur, for emphasis – "together, and more clear, and unaffected by anything else, you've a bigger palette to work with and there's suddenly an enormous variety of colours, because your whole world's opened up, and you can see things clearly. So I do think that, you know, it's a load of rubbish. People like this myth of artists needing to be disturbed and fucked up in order to write, and so want to continue this. And then, also, the artists themselves buy into that, and they fuel it."

Do you really think artists buy into it as well?

"I'm sure they do, yeah. I think sometimes people genuinely believe they can't write unless they're messed up in some way."

The reviews thus far will tell you that Stories is Harvey's most boldly sexual record: flushed and livid with rampant, fleshy physicality. And in one sense it is: 'This is Love', for example, finds her hollering in raunched-up carnal triumph, "I can't believe life's so complex/When I just wanna sit here and watch you undress..."

But in another, surprising sense, it's about love, and love gone right for a change, at that. The violently happy 'Good Fortune' ("Threw my bad fortune/Off the top of/A tall building/But I'd rather have done it with you") sees Harvey at her most delightedly exuberant in years, if not ever and it s one of the most romantic pieces of music I've heard in ages.

"Ohh! Thank you."

Do you think that most people on this planet get to experience a love like that?

Polly smiles, broadly, and is still for a moment. Then: "Yes. I do, actually." She laughs.

Really? A love that extraordinary, that utterly huge?

"I mean, obviously all I've got to judge by are the friends that I talk to about, you know, their love lives, like everybody does," she says. "I mean, everyone that I know has shared the same experience of feeling as if one's in love, the intense feeling of love. And it's fascinating, obviously, isn't it? You just wonder, well, is that feeling like that feeling that I had? You don't know. And you never will know. And that's why it's so elusive, and so fascinating."

And on the subject of utterly tremendous, shamelessly voluptuous physical love: it's amazing to hear what Harvey has managed to bring out of Thom Yorke, not exactly the indie Tom Jones of overt sexuality, on this album. His muted background keening lends a vast, wide-open quality to 'One Line' and the faraway night-visions of 'Beautiful Feeling', but most striking by far is 'The Mess We're In'.

It's a quasi-duet flooding over with carnality, which Harvey leaves Yorke to largely sing on his own, and where she gives him the opportunity to have a physicality a corporal body, so to speak, that he doesn't typically have. "Night and day", murmurs Yorke with the loveblinded atonality of a lover undone by desire, "I dream of making love to you, baby/Lovemaking on screen/Impossible dream."

"I wanted to hear Thom singing like that," she says bluntly. Then she bursts into gales of laughter. "I really did, you know. Because I love his voice. And I wanted to hear him singing words like that. And luckily for me he said, Yeah, alright." She laughs again.

What was it like working with him in studio?

"Just great. He came and stayed with us for a couple of days, where we were working. He's a fantastic musician, and brought some very unusual, very interesting ideas and angles into the songs, if you like: things that would change the songs completely. Very unusual ideas. I mean, almost Eastern European melodies, he was coming up with. And obviously the way he sings 'This Mess We're In' is entirely his own way, in this very special voice that he has. It was just great, working with him, and I've learnt a lot."

My goodness. All this positivity, this newfound ability to see beauty and light in everything, this appetite for everything that there is in life, good and bad: this as the locals down in Polly Harvey's Little Italy might call it gusto. The Kids cannot help but draw some conclusions.

I'm guessing that you're probably fending off a lot of questions at the moment as to whether you had a Big Romance while you were in New York?

Polly beams, and her smiling non-answer is a kind of answer. "Yes," she says smartly, and puts on a gallant parry-and-thrust accent: "and I shall continue to fend them off."

Does it bother you that people get so curious?

"Oh, no, obviously people are naturally inclined to it. I just know where I draw the line between, you know, what I will talk about and what I won't. It s important to keep one's privacy."

It must be frustrating, though, I'd guess, if you're a private person in the public eye, if you want to run around the place with a bloke the way the protagonists in some of these songs do. It must be limiting.

"I've never found it so, no. I think I'm quite a chameleon, when it comes to just blending in. I've never had to change the way I conduct myself, at all, and I still do an awful lot of things on my own, I'm a very independent person. I go to movies, I go to galleries, travel the subway I never have any trouble. I think that people kind of don't expect to see you in a situation, and they don't notice that you're there anyway."

(I was actually asking about conducting a relationship in public when one is a private person, but never mind – as if she would have told us about it anyway.)

Anyway, I resume, if people are picking up on the fleshiness and rampant sexuality of this particular album, it's maybe because all its romanticism is based in a reality that most people can understand. It's not about huge tales and myth-making, it's about the profound, intensely-felt bliss of the everyday love-miracle.

"Yeah. I'm glad you've said that, because that's how I feel about it as well. You know, a lot of people say to me, oh, this seems to be your first record of love songs. No, every song I've ever written is a love song. Not necessarily love between a man and a woman, but love of a place, or the world, or God, or a thing. So, yeah, these are love songs. I mean, in my terms, it's all about love."

Listen to Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea below: