When you’re young and invincible, Polly Jean Harvey is your siren. In 1993, at 23, she went on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and ripped up NBC by screaming, “Lick my legs, and I’m on fire, lick my legs, and I’m desire.” This woman was calculated and unhinged at the same time; you didn’t know where the act stopped. Then she sat down on the couch and spoke sweetly of her chores on her parents’ sheep farm, in Dorset, which included “ringing the lambs’ tails and ringing testicles.” After about two weeks, she said, the testicles dropped off. She had us at hello.
Harvey already had one album behind her, Dry (1992), and was plugging Rid of Me (1993). When she sang the title track, she got her hooks into you and would not let go. Every album sounded different from the last, as if each one were a new challenge, even a dare. Kurt Cobain was a fan, and when he and Courtney Love checked Harvey out, Love said, “Thank God … there’s someone better than me!” Elvis Costello said that watching her on The Tonight Show was like seeing Howlin’ Wolf on Shindig! She could growl, howl, and screech, and sometimes she sounded so vulnerable, she took all the oxygen out of the room.
In Harvey, you hear the deepest Delta blues, the absurdity of Captain Beefheart, the poetics of Dylan, the character studies of Waits. Her most palpable influences are men, but her expression, her subject, her sound—even as she sings about “coming up man-size”—is very female, a particular kind of female. “Rid of Me” is a stalker’s lament. The riff is sturdy, but the emotions are not:
Tie yourself to me
No one else, no
You’re not rid of me
You’re not rid of me
She sang about female sexual dissatisfaction like no one before her, belting, “You leave me dry,” and daring anyone to stop her. “Is this desire?” asks a song. Answer: Yes. “Down by the Water,” from To Bring You My Love (1995), is now on the soundtrack of Yellowjackets, a show about teenage girls turned cannibals, and it seems just right. Yet when you hear those songs, you hear someone in absolute control—her voice, her guitar, the lyrics, sparse, elegant, no sugarcoating. “Forsaking heaven / Curse God above / Lay with the devil / Bring you my love.” Harvey goes places most people fear, and she does it for you.
She is now a heavily decorated national treasure, a recipient of an M.B.E. from Queen Elizabeth and an unprecedented two Mercury Prizes. Her recent work has been quieter, plaintive, almost meekly poetic. The electric guitar has been replaced by piano, by Autoharp, more acoustic than electric guitar. Her verse has been published in The New Yorker. The growling contralto is now an almost child-like soprano. “The Desperate Kingdom of Love,” from Uh Huh Her (2004), is a stunning surrender. She is on track to become Dame Polly.
When Harvey appears in Barcelona today, kicking off a summer tour in Europe, expect many songs from her latest album, I Inside the Old Year Dying (2023)—delicate, gorgeous, haunting. As for the songs of our wild youth, which ask questions such as “Don’t you wish you never met her?” Answer: Hardly.
PJ Harvey tours Europe and the U.K. this summer, with a North American tour to follow, beginning September 11
David Yaffe is a professor of humanities at Syracuse University. He writes about music and is the author, most recently, of Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell. You can read his Substack here