In 1993, back when musicians still had albums to sell, Polly Jean Harvey, 23, took over Jay Leno’s Tonight Show and did everything she could to assert her power and do a little damage. This was an early 90s answer to The Who setting off explosions on The Smothers Brothers, Elvis Costello going off script to sing “Radio, Radio” on SNL, and Johnny Rotten dropping the f-bomb on the BBC, even though there was no scandal, no rules broken. (Elvis Costello watched and compared it to Howlin’ Wolf on Shindig.) “Rid of Me,” the title track of the album she was promoting, is about a woman who gets her hooks into you and never, ever lets go. You could hear that she internalized the Delta Blues, but also the absurdity of Captain Beefheart, the poetics of Dylan, the character studies of Waits. Her most palpable influences were men, but her expression, her subject, her sound—even as she sang about “coming up man size”—was very female, a particular kind of female. The song 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
Those are the opening lines. From there it goes to “I’ll tie your legs /Keep you against my chest” to “I’ll make you lick my injuries.” Most of this is sung in a growling contralto, but then she repeats a phrase in falsetto: “Lick my legs, I’m on fire/ Lick my legs, I’m desire.” It is a ransom note of a song. Her sparkling, sleeveless dress looks like prom attire. She has no band. Everything comes from her. She’s on fire. She’s desire. When the three and a half minutes are up, there are no survivors. When she then has just a couple of minutes to chat with Leno and his other guests--back when musicians could get couch time--she very sweetly and politely devotes most of the discussion to one of her duties on her parents’ sheep farm in Dorset: ringing testicles.
There was no mistaking it. Harvey was emerging as an artist like none other, expressing what it was like to be a woman in ways that hadn’t existed before, certainly not in rock and roll. On one devastating song, also on Rid of Me, the refrain was “You leave me dry.” No one had sung so blatantly about female dissatisfaction before--not quite like that--and no one had done so with such originality and artistry. (Don’t you think “Please Please Me,” the Beatles’s first #1 single should have been sung by a woman?) She sang about an ordeal a dress through, along with the woman wearing it. She even sang, “I’m happy and bleeding for you.” Women were certainly getting real in the early 90s. (1993 was also the year of Liz Phair’s frank and unpent Exile In Guyville.) Seduction was a performance, even stretched out to absurdist proporti0ns.
Look at these, my child-bearing hips
Look at these, my ruby red ruby lips
Look at these my work strong arms and
You've got to see my bottle full of charm
She was selling her body and then complaining about being left dry. The next year, just to really make her point, she sang a duet with Bjork—another forever phenom who started in the early 90s—on the Brit Awards. The song? A simmering, smoldering take on “Satisfaction.” These two women hijacked Mick and Keith's ode to sexual frustration, and “Please Please Me” could have been the next logical step.
When all this was going on, I was going to Sarah Lawrence, a liberal arts college that somehow didn’t quite realize it had gone coed. To be a straight male student at Sarah Lawrence was to be like Smurfette, and if one was drawn to a particular kind of neurotic woman, PJ Harvey was there as a kind of Virgil. She was telling us how she wanted to be appreciated and feared. When you grow up on a sheep farm, you know how to stop the lambs from becoming rams.
Harvey, starting with Dry (1992), kept on releasing album after album of terrifying brilliance. Courtney Love, no pillar of modesty, recalled seeing her with her husband Kurt Cobain in that crazy year of 93. After the show was over, she said, “Thank God there’s someone better than me!” To Bring You My Love (1995) takes you from hell and back; hell is more than a metaphor here, it’s a place where she “laid with the devil.” She also scores points against female competition (On “Down by the Water”: “I lost my heart/ Down by the bridge … To that blue eyed girl/Became blue eyed whore"), and the voice, the guitar, the writing--all of it--kept getting increasingly assured. One album, Stories of the City, Stories of the Sea (2001), was a love letter to New York, to a passionate love affair, to inspiration itself. She sang a duet with Thom Yorke—dueling muses singing overlapping lines about the mess they’re in.
The emotional descent was inevitable, and she reported from there, too. For the first time, on half of Uh Huh Her (2004) she was quiet, plaintive, vulnerable. One song’s title, “The Desperate Kingdom of Love,” said it all:
Holy water cannot help you now
Your mysterious eyes cannot help you
Selling your reason will not bring you through
This was a new, more tender Polly. That young woman who lived to shock was now shocked herself. Her voice became higher. That guttural rocker was gone. She started playing brooding piano. She sounded plaintive. The guitar was sometimes replaced with an autoharp. She got deeper into poetry, deeper into English history. The accolades kept coming: Grammys, Brit Awards, a Mercury Prize for Lifetime Achievement, even a Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (John Lennon returned his).
I find it hard to accept that Harvey is a member of the empire. She still sounds too cool for that--more like someone who would be cast out of it. I still want her to sing “Lick my legs, I’m on fire” and “Cast out of heaven, cursed God above/ Lain with the devil to bring you my love.”
Polly Jean is all woman, 5′ 4″ but I feel she’s also a bigger man than I. When she was ripping up Jay Leno, I was filling my head with too many books and too much coffee. I didn’t just want to read Kafka and Mann, Proust and Joyce, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, Donne and Milton and Shakespeare—I wanted to conquer them. I wanted to possess them, and anyone else and their opinions. I had been a Sybaritic derelict before Polly and even though grad school and freelancing kept me on a treadmill, I would eventually collide with the music I missed when I was arguing with fellow junior, insufferable snobs about Mahler conductors. What would have happened if Polly had gotten to me then? Would I have dropped out? Started a band?
Lately, she’s been going more in the direction of my twee early 20s, of my more recent world of letters. She is denying us rocking out and publishing poetry in a forthcoming book with Picador, which publishes paperbacks from FSG, my last publisher.
Polly apparently gets depressed when she’s not performing, which makes me concerned about her state. I’ve never met her, but a guy I know was in a relationship with her, and he cheered her up for a while, and she even changed some of her lyrics to reflect this new buoyancy. It all ended when she found him at a bar kissing Kate Moss. Kate Moss? That Kate Moss? I was blasting Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis in my dorm room and busting out papers on Joyce and Kafka in the 90s and that was quite on the nose. He must have realized too late that you don’t mess with girl from the sheep farm.
Now “Down By the Water” made an appearance on Yellowjackets, a Showtime series about teenage girls turned cannibals on a desert island in the 90s. And it feels about right. These kids are turning into savages, but not as savage as Polly. That sound from my speakers, growling “Long Snake, Moan,” growling, “Who the fuck do you think you are?” I’m a few years behind you, Polly. I need you to give me courage that I won’t fall apart when I hit 50, that I won’t fall apart today. Can I be as fearless as you seem to be, Polly? Can I come up Man-Size like you?
Now that she’s making the transition to literature, I think she would have approved of my going for the books while others on my campus were blasting Dry and Rid of Me. I got to her when I was ready.
Lick my legs, I’m on fire. Lick my legs, I’m desire.
Courtney Love, who messed up a lyric when she made an otherwise credible cover of “To Bring You My Love,” said that she went to a Patti Smith show and yelled, “Bring it!” Smith replied, “Honestly, I’d rather be at home reading Ulysses.” To everything there is a season, a time for bringing it, a time for introspection. Polly, we are close in age, but I will always struggle to be your contemporary.
David, I’m also a huge fan of PJ Harvey and I thoroughly enjoyed this piece. I recently wrote a piece about her as well and I’d love to get your feedback on it if you have time to read it. Thanks for sharing this essay.
https://medium.com/the-riff/an-introduction-to-pj-harvey-1ce7d375eb68?sk=c4a260d27ff514a84bc2c4a474f5cd91