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.
