PJ Harvey
Review:
When PJ Harvey announced her retirement from touring in an
interview a few years ago, the rock world sighed with sadness.
She had earned the title Queen of Rock after a series of
consistently thrilling albums and spell-binding shows, and there
was no obvious successor to the throne.
She must have been having a bad day, because here she is on a
sparse Hamer Hall stage adorned with just piano and fairy lights,
dressed in a white Victorian ball gown marked with the word “grow”
on her thigh, resuming her love affair with her fans.
Harvey was chatty and friendly throughout the night, and showed
no signs of stage fright.
“I was watching you come in,” she says in her quiet English
lilt, “and I thought, ‘what a well-dressed bunch of people’.”
The crowd, some who had come from as far as Bangkok and
Adelaide, returned the compliments, cheering and laughing at every
exchange, with some going further by yelling out “We love you, PJ”,
“You’re beautiful” and “Do you want to go for coffee?”
Unlike Kiss and John Farnham, who went back on their words after
promoting “farewell tours”, you get the feeling Harvey’s brief
retirement had more to do with her fragile mental and physical
state than money.
This vulnerability is exposed on her haunting new album,
White Chalk - on which Dorset’s white-chalk cliffs seem to
act as a metaphor for her brittle mental state and raw emotions -
which made up half of the show.
Seated at a piano, she seemed to channel spirits and the ghosts
of her deceased ancestors - as well as Kate Bush - on spooky
sorrowful ballads The Devil, When Under Ether and
Silence.
If you closed your eyes during the title track, you could
imagine her serenading you while tiptoeing around Dorset’s white
cliffs on England’s south-west coast.
Much of the new material may be bleak and harrowing - abortions,
her dead grandmother and feelings of sadness, regret,
claustrophobia, loneliness and longing pervade the songs. But
Grow, Grow, Grow, which she described as the linchpin of
the new album, ended on a optimistic note when she sang: “Teach me,
mommy, how to grow/how to catch someone’s fancy/underneath the
twisted oak grove.”
Throughout the 90-minute show, Harvey was a study in contrasts:
angelic and demonic, soft and loud, down and euphoric, beautiful
and ugly.
She came across like bluesman Howlin’ Wolf, wailing like a
banshee on the bluesy, guttural To Bring You My Love, and
then like an innocent school girl on B-Side Nina.
She performed skeletal demo versions of older songs, and while
the lush Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea
material suffered from the lack of a band, her namesake and regular
collaborator, Melburnian Bad Seed Mick Harvey, returned to back her
on several songs after opening the show with his own set.
Other gaps were filled with her dynamic vocal range and by
clever manipulation of sounds through vocal samples and distortion
pedals, which she deftly tap-tap-tapped with her steep black
stilettos.
It was a grand comeback. Long live the queen.
