Finally, she’s putting her foot down. Dressed in a tight white
dress with a huge belt across the centre that’s part Ophelia at
a royal ball at Elsinore and part straight jacket as haute couture,
Polly slams her heel into the stage and spits: “I will NOT!”
On record, she sounds like she’s shaking with rage when she does
this, but live, roaming the stage at the end of a superb show, job done,
slight smirk on her face every time she stamps her feet and screams
“NOT!”, she looks like a woman deservedly having a lot of
fun.
It takes a while to get there, mind. To begin with, this collaborative
gig with John Parrish seems relatively tame for an emotionally charged
talent like PJ Harvey. Possibly because her last public appearances
– alone on the stage, utterly compelling – were the best
of her career, seeing her accompany John Parrish’s humid blues
is all rather pleasant – not really a word you often associate
with Harvey’s work. But as they stray further and further away
from those crackling, swampish sounds, the more interesting and worthwhile
the night becomes.
For “The Soldier”, the backing is simply a ukulele and a
melodica, but with Harvey’s voice given the room it needs to really
hypnotise and lyrics about “walking on the faces of dead women”,
it’s brilliantly unsettling rather than merely twee. On “Leaving
California”, she adopts a doomed diva falsetto, as she airs a
lament for what appears to be a failed love. Later in the encore, she
pinches her nose to turn her voice into that a 90-year-old Beth Gibbons,
as the band follow at a respectful distance playing funereal music.
Tellingly, the stage is bathed in bright white light for a lot of the
performance. It’s as if they’re saying: This isn’t
artifice or drama or even rock’n’roll – we’re
just going to experiment with a few ideas and we want you to see it
all happening. “Passionate, Pointless”, for example, sounds
like it’s being beamed in from the 1920s, bleeding out of black
and white movie footage of The Great Depression. Similarly, the growling
blues of “A Woman A Man Walked By” is engaging enough, Harvey
sneering ‘stick it up your fucking ass”, but it’s
only when it melts into the percussive blur of “The Crow Knows
Where All The Little Children Go” that it truly takes off.
It’s a journey, of course. All great creative works are. And while
there are moments of Harvey and Parrish remaining in their respective
comfort zones, they’re eclipsed by the many, startling instances
when they just head out there. Pinching their nose, slamming
their heels, and trying not to laugh as they go.
Ian Watson
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