‘ARMS AND LEGS in the trees. There is flesh quivering in the heat. There are deformed and orphaned children. Heavy stones are falling. Death is everywhere.” With two big cultural prizes, the Man Booker and the Mercury Prize for the best UK and Irish album of the year, in the news this week, you would think those lines came from one of the shortlisted novels, and not the lyrics to a song.
But Polly Jean Harvey’s album
Let England Shake
– written about war and battles from Gallipoli to Helmand – beat off the poppier delights of Adele to win the Mercury, making the 41-year-old singer the only musician to win the prize twice.
Over the years she has also won six Grammys, been nominated for a Brit Award seven times and had a further two Mercury nominations, but you’d still walk past Harvey in the street without recognising her.
She won’t be parlaying her unique feat into an assault on the mainstream music market. The Mercury is very much a pointy-headed-critics’ affair and has
nowhere near the commercial wallop of, say, promoting your new single on The X Factor. The woman who was once described as "a blues-rock sorceress trafficking in social politics and dark, tormented songwriting" did her best to smile long and hard and say all the right I'm-not-worthy things after picking up her award at a ceremony in London last Tuesday night, but she would have hated the clicking cameras and the microphones thrust into her face.
She confesses to being “an extremely quiet person who doesn’t go out much and doesn’t talk to people” and sums up her media persona by saying, “People paint me as some kind of black witchcraft-practising devil from hell, that I have to be twisted and dark to do what I am doing.”
In many ways, Harvey is a throwback to an almost-forgotten age when musicians would plunder their souls and bleed their emotions into the grooves of a long-playing record without feeling the need to update us regularly about their opinions and personal lives – or “developing a multimedia platform” as it is now called.
Harvey has an almost ridiculously old-fashioned belief that music should speak for itself and typically throws her hands up and runs away when people want to know about the woman behind the magnificent music. She is the very antithesis of the brash and loud modern-day R&B or hip-hop singing star.
Harvey was born, fittingly enough given the emotional earthiness and sturm und drang of her music, in the depths of Thomas Hardy country near Yeovil, Somerset. Her father was a sculptor; in her early 20s she was accepted on a prestigious sculpture course at London’s St Martin’s College of Art and Design in London. (Alumni include Jarvis Cocker and members of The Clash and The Sex Pistols.) She turned down the offer in favour of concentrating on music, but remains an accomplished sculptor and has had her work exhibited – always in out-of-the-way arts centres.
Brought up on a diet of her mother’s record collection – Howlin’ Wolf and Robert Johnson – she was never going to go the urban designer-angst route of an Alanis Morissette. Solemnly introspective, she imbues her lyrics with ponderous allusions to classicism and mysticism. Because of the resonance and depth of her emotional expression, she gets lumbered with descriptions that call her, for example, “the female Nick Cave”.
There was a certain poetic symmetry when she and Cave embarked on an intense but short-lived personal relationship. Their break-up informed Cave's breakthrough album, The Boatman's Call;his ever-popular song Into My Arms(much used at weddings) is all about Harvey.
“I knew the songs were about me; I didn’t mind,” she told this reporter in an interview a few years ago. “With Nick, I find his music and mine follow similar paths and we’re both interested in exploring similar troubles and similar joys. We’re very similar people and he’s now one of my closest friends – someone who understands me.”
When you meet her you're struck by her West Country accent and how tiny she is. For this album she became a "war correspondent", spending more than two years researching wars and conflicts and interviewing survivors and veterans of campaigns, much as a novelist might do. She pored over books of war photography and read everything she could from those involved (both people in the military and locals) in Iraq and Afghanistan. As a result, Let England Shakeis the closest you can get in the rock world to the works of war poetssuch as Rupert Brooke and Wilfred Owen.
The album had its roots in 9/11. When Harvey won her first Mercury award (on September 11th, 2001), she was unable to make it to the ceremony in London as she was grounded in Washington DC, watching the Pentagon burn from her hotel window. The disconnect of being expected to make a smiley acceptance speech by video on the night of 9/11 was an issue she wanted to explore – not to mention the events in Iraq and Afghanistan that followed.
"If you're going to talk about giant subject matter, you've got to do it well," she has said about her research for Let England Shake. If she waited 10 years to express her feelings it's because she didn't feel skilled enough as a writer to tackle such a subject.
It’s unlikely that her second Mercury prize will have any real impact on her career. She’s certainly not going to exploit the award and will be content to remain in an area where her work sells solidly, not spectacularly. She will never jump through the hoops required for “market penetration”– she’s more likely to be in her cottage in Devon with the door safely bolted and the phone off the hook as she sets about composing a new opus.
Curriculum vitae
Who is she?Polly Jean Harvey
Why is she in the news?She is the first person to become a double winner of the prestigious Mercury Prize for the best British and Irish album of the year, beating the joint favourite, Adele, in the process.
Looks likeA fortysomething Goth
Let's claim her as IrishWhen U2 were on the Island label, their manager Paul McGuinness heard Harvey's work. He became her manager and has been guiding her career since. Well, it makes her more Irish than David Gray.
