Girl, Uninterrupted

The Gore in Queensgate is one of the better London hotels of our acquaintance. Forget the brightly lit Tate modern minimalist pretensions of most cosmopolitan hostelries. This is a red velvet, old world, quasi-gothic vibe; the kind of place one might actually volunteer to have a drink in. It’s also where we find PJ Harvey conducting press duties for Uh Huh Her, her seventh album proper, on a glorious Sunday afternoon in May.

There’s a noticeable absence of undue process, no surplus bottlewashers or PR fusspots or air kissers. Check your baggage at the door and you’ll find Polly Jean sequestered in the Green Room wearing an orange vest and blue jeans, curled up in her chair with the self-possession of a cat, slight and soft-spoken but surprisingly warm and easy to talk to. The accent is not nearly as thick as expected, possibly blunted a little by extended sojourns in New York and now LA. Over the course of a half hour conversation, she smiles a lot. Twice she collapses into a full-blown belly laugh. And she is, of course, quite beautiful, the heart shaped face enshrined in Nick Cave’s ‘West Country Girl’ dominated by huge eyes and full lips, framed by a tousled but stylishly cut head of black hair.
Uh huh, that’s her.
Compared to the twin commercial peaks To Bring You My Love and Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea, Harvey’s new album is not her most musically cohesive or immediate collection of songs, but nor is it the graphic brinkmanship of Is This Desire or Rid Of Me. It is, however, an extremely potent record. Somewhere around the eighth listen, a yielding of sorts takes place: the melodies bloom, songs cohere and it becomes clear that Uh Huh Her contains a lot more perspectives, characters and camera angles than maybe any PJ album to date.
“That’s kind of what I wanted,” she says as she settles down to talk. “I didn’t necessarily want to have a flowing record, but I did want to have lots of strong songs that would stand up on their own; like here’s one character and here’s another, so they all have their own little worlds going on.”
She’s hardly kept her motivation hidden. On the sleeve of the album can be read a scrawled note from the work in progress: “I’m not looking for continuity of sound.” The musical settings morph from avant rock to dislocated blues and acoustic shapes, the common thread being Harvey’s guitar, which more often than not sounds hacked out of a tree like a chunk of rough folk art.
“It kind of comes about like that as well,” she admits. “I never ever feel like a guitar player. And I don’t play guitar for months on end. If I’m not writing I don’t play it, I don’t pick it up, I don’t look at it. So I play in a very ham-fisted way, I’m not a supple virtuoso at all; I don’t know where chords are or what their names are. I’m a good rhythm player, I can build a rhythm, but I can’t do a lot of fancy finger-work, so it’s all about wrestling with the tactile-ness of it. It is like hacking stuff out of a tree, it’s exactly what it’s like, and that’s why it sounds like it does as well.”
This approach generates a tripwire tension in Harvey’s music, in the same way that Neil Young always seems to be having a fight with his instrument, struggling to translate messages from the brain to the fingers, producing a sound that is fundamentally ineloquent but all the edgier and more emotive for it.
“That’s how I feel,” she says. “I feel very ineloquent, and it’s very rudimentary and I keep it purposefully so I think. Like I say, I don’t practise and I don’t want to, because I find I produce better work not really knowing what I’m doing, because then it’s all about feeling and nothing about intellect, it’s just exactly what you respond to as you feel it and hear it, and not as you pre-empt it or think it.”
This reminds me of accounts I’ve read of film shoots where the director opts for the take just before the one where the actor feels they’ve nailed it, the one that still has a sense of fumbling discovery.
“That’s exactly the same thing. With music it’s like catching things in a net, catching them before they’re overcooked, overdone.”
But then even To Bring You My Love, Harvey’s most produced record in the conventional sense, was filigreed with all manner of digital dirt. And if Stories From The City… was an experiment in the dynamic clarity that is a basic pre-requisite for most rock records, Uh Huh Her is music made of fetishistic fingernail and hair clippings and bodily emissions.
Consider the opening tune, ‘The Life & Death Of Mr Bad Mouth’ a bone-grinding amputated limb of a guitar part tattooed with words that seem to rewrite the assertion in the gospel of Thomas that it’s not what put in your mouth that defiles you, but what comes out of it, and also call to mind Francis Bacon’s obsession with oral diseases and tooth decay.
“That’s fascinating to me,” Harvey says, “I’m a huge fan of his work, his teeth paintings and screaming mouths, the way the mouth has been ripped and pushed across the whole canvas. Yeah, I can see that very much. I mean ‘Bad Mouth’ does feel like a wrestling match going on. I knew I wanted to get away from the Stories album and that was the starting point, I wanted to get to the opposite end of the scale. I think having made an album like Stories, it wasn’t really where my heart lied.”
I’m thinking that grammatical error could translate as Freudian slip. I’m also thinking of how Stories was in its way a precursor and twin to Lost In Translation: a dizzy tribute to what felt like an unconsummated love affair.
“I did it as an experiment,” she continues, “in seeing if I could make quite a high up, sparkly, clean-sounding, poppy, happy, energetic record, ’cos I don’t think I’d done that before. Having done it, it wasn’t really where my heart lies as a writer. And I think I am much more drawn to where this record lies really.”
Another note from the new album sleeve, one that reads like an Eno-ish oblique strategy: “If struggling with a song, drop out the thing you like the most.” An interesting idea – that if one sacrifices the very element around which everything else has been constructed, the piece of work will resolve itself, as though the trigger idea is merely scaffolding. One thinks of irate screenwriters protesting the editing out of a key scene, complaining: “That’s the only reason I wrote the whole damn thing!”
Such discipline sorts out the dilettantes from the pros. It also suggests that the difference between good and bad work is not found in grand themes but in details, capturing the small gestures and sensory minutiae that define seismic shifts in a person’s consciousness. Carver does this in his short stories. And the reason I can’t quite accept Harvey’s partial renunciation of Stories From The City is the wealth of forensic detail evident in songs like ‘You Said Something’, ‘Good Fortune’ and ‘The Mess We’re In’, where the listener seemed to occupy the position of fly on the wall, privy to her New York stories.
“Leonard Cohen does that brilliantly, doesn’t he?” Harvey says. “He uses tiny minutiae, specifics. Instead of ‘the tree’ he’ll say ‘the old elm’ that he walked past or something. It becomes much more universal at the same time. I find I’m much more able to relate and be moved by something that is very specifically dealing with a tiny detail or a thing that happened. I was interested very much on this record in that as well, I mean, things like using a tiny matter like writing a letter as actually being an opening for singing about the whole nature of love and longing and the universe.”
The song she’s referring to is ‘The Letter’, the first single from the record and a remarkable blurring of the cerebral and the physical that renders the writing of that letter as highly-charged erotic act. “It turns me on to imagine your blue eyes on my words,” she sings amidst images of uncapped pens and licked envelopes. I mention that when I interviewed Nick Cave a few years ago, he said he suffered from erotographomania, a compulsion to write love letters.
Harvey sits forward, head tilted.
“What’s the word?”
Erotographomania.
“Erotograph…”
Erotographomania.
“Erotographomania. And that’s an obsession with love letters?”
A compulsion to write them.
“I didn’t know that, that word.”
He figured the act of intense meditation on the person to whom you’re addressing the letter is akin to writing them a love song.
“It is, yeah. I can remember Nick talking to me about that actually. It’s almost that the process of the writing, or the process of the thought that goes into the writing of the letter is already connecting with that person.”
Come again?
“Well, say that the person that’s writing the letter, you’re thinking so intensely about that person you’re writing the letter to that the connection is already made, and maybe they’re thinking about you, ’cos they can feel you thinking about them.”
Which would make the posting of the letter a mere formality, like committing the song to tape.
“Yeah, it’s this whole ritual. The amount of emotion and time spent dwelling on that subject or person, or the emotion you’re trying to get into a song, you put so much of yourself into it, but at the same time it’s…”
She pauses, searching for the right words.
“… I mean, ’cos the nature of music, it is so untied down anyway, it is almost like a process of thought, you can’t pin it down and you can’t look at it, you can just feel it and send it and receive it really. The only time I feel close to the songs is when I’m writing, and when they’re finished, they’ve gone already, they don’t feel connected to me anymore. I like the idea that the songs are written for other people to go and buy and have and it’s theirs really to do what they want with it, it’s not mine and I’ve let go of it long before.”
Tom Waits says its like making three-legged chairs. As soon as it can stand, move onto the next one.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah! (laughs) That’s brilliant!”

Probably the closest Harvey gets to Waits’ world on Uh Huh Her is the child bride ballad ‘Pocket Knife’, whose roots could equally be in Appalachian weirdness, New England witch hunts or Plymouth Brethren fatalism. I tell her the vocal on this tune sounds like she’s playing a consumptive Elizabethan waif.
“Yeah, exactly, and it’s you,” she responds. “I could imagine being quite a young girl. In order to get my voice in the right emotional territory I will imagine myself at an age range. On this record quite often I dived into different ages to sing a song. On ‘Pocket Knife’, I felt like I wanted to sing it in more of a 14-year-old’s voice.”
Those who regard such surruralist moments as southern gothic pose tend to forget that many of the pilgrim apocalyptics who colonised the new world departed from her backyard in Dorset, Devon and Cornwall.
“Where I grew up was very remote,” she says, “and I think I had to create my own… I mean, I used my imagination all the time because you have to create the situations you want to be in, otherwise there’s only one colour on the palate really, beautiful countryside but not much else. Especially when you can’t drive and you’re just stuck there. So they are perfect conditions for growing an imagination that can take you all over the place. And there’s a lot of strangeness that happens in remote place, a lot of weird people, weird things happening. It’s quite magical, but quite strange as well. The weirdest people that I’ve ever come across in my life are the people you meet in remote countryside towns.
Does she go back home much?
“I’ve still got a place there. I go backwards and forwards, I’ve got a place in LA, which is almost the exact opposite to that.”
I would imagine so. How does she function there?
“Um… as a voyeur more than anything. I feel very on the outside of things looking in, observing the differences. I find it fascinating and love it because it is the opposite. I don’t like being in any one of the places for too long, I like making the jump.”
Given where she’s living, and the good account she gave of herself as Magdalene in Hal Hartley’s The Book Of Life a few years ago, will she act again?
“Yeah, I think if the part came along that I felt really moved by and thought I could do a good job on. I have had other offers since that but I haven’t liked any of the parts or haven’t felt the script was strong enough. I think for anything to take me away from music, if I was doing a film I’d stop everything else and really do it, throw myself into working at it all the time.”
I read somewhere that she’s a huge fan of Charles Laughton’s Night Of The Hunter.
“That’s my favourite film ever. That one and the original Cape Fear. In fact, Robert Mitchum is my ideal man.”
Really?
“Yeah. I can’t tell you how much I adore Robert Mitchum. I’ll watch him in anything. Even that terrible series he did, what was it, The Winds Of War or something like that. I’ve always been completely in love with Robert Mitchum since I was a child really. He definitely does it for me.”
What is it, a sort of gruff Heathcliff thing?”
“It is. They were the old fashioned gentlemen, weren’t they? Not necessarily gentlemen but just… men. The old fashioned man.”

Of course, with Polly Jean Harvey, desire is rarely just that. A song like ‘It’s You’ (“When I’m not with you/I dream of my hair just falling out”) gets all tangled up in the Jungian jungle, where subliminal lust meets that age old dream of being naked in the front of the class.
“Yeah, and your teeth falling out!” she laughs. “It’s very strange that song, because when I was making the record my hair started falling out in handfuls, and it actually was because I had very low iron levels, but it got very, very thin, you could see all my scalp. But that was before the song was written; it was like pre-empting this thing happening. It was kind of the ongoing joke – but not a really funny one – when I was making the record, ’cos I had to go and see a doctor and get blood tests and everything.”
And this was because of iron depletion?
“They said it was a combination of very low iron and grief ’cos my grandmother had died and it was like a shock thing, and it happened exactly three months later, which is apparently when it affects the hair, by the time it takes the follicle to actually fall out from the shock. So literally over two weeks my hair fell out. (laughs) But it is a classic fear story.”
So is she comfortable in her own skin? Or put another way, does she live in her head or her body?
“I’d say that as I’m getting older I’m moving downwards into the body. I think I spent most of my life in my head, apart from writing music, which is why I probably do it, ’cos it’s the one time that I take the head off really, and it’s much more a physical, emotional feeling, gut feeling, and that’s why I probably am driven to do it. I need it ’cos it gets me out of this brain. But I think as I’m getting older I am, I’d say, pretty comfortable in my skin. More than I’ve ever been, and it seems to get more so the older I get.”
How does that manifest itself?
“I think just being able to allow myself to enjoy things a lot more. Not thinking situations through beforehand too much and stopping myself doing them. Just being in the moment more, I think. Going with the flow rather than thinking about what it might be like, or what it was like. I stopped writing, I used to keep a diary, I don’t do that at all anymore, I never really write unless I’m writing a song. That seems a part of it.”
Okay, stock question: does the writing of the songs fulfil any sort of therapeutic role for her?
“I don’t find that making music gives me any therapy in terms of making the thing that’s wrong better. I suppose I subscribed to therapy in the fact that I had it for years to help me through illnesses, and it did work (laughs) in that way. But I don’t find that I can self-help through music, no.”
Apparently as people get older the brain cells associated with anxiety die off.
“There certainly seems so little point in getting really anxious or worrying about stuff as you get older, ’cos there are far more important things to be taken care of.”
This certainly seems to apply to Harvey’s career trajectory. Like Bob Dylan, like Tom Waits, like Patti Smith, Harvey has managed to negotiate the fine line between cult and mainstream artist to the point where she sells enough records to sustain herself, but not so many that she gets hobbled by commercial expectations and big budget panic every time she releases an album. Nice trick – if you can pull it off.
“Yeah, I’m amazed that I’ve managed it really,” she concludes. “I think it started from the very early days. Then I was very black and white about everything: ‘I will do this; I won’t do that. If you make me do that I’m just going to stop playing music. I’m not making another record and I’m not going on stage!’ So it was, ‘Alright, well, don’t stop, just do it then.’”
She laughs at length.
“It worked!”

Uh Huh Her and ‘The Letter’ are out now on Island/Universal