Underwhelm is not an obvious place to find happiness. “Voul village in a hag-ridden hollow. All ways to it winding, all roads to it narrow. Auverlooked bog, veiled in vog, thirtover, undercreepen, rank with seepings: Jeyes Fluid, slurry, zweat and pus, anus greaze, squitters, jizz and blood…”
The Dorset dialect takes some getting used to, but that’s far enough without trigger warnings. The world of Orlam, Polly Jean Harvey’s second book of poetry, is one of nature and innocence defiled by every horror imaginable, miraculously redeemed by the richness of its language and the sheer joy of its creation.
“I’d always wanted to go and investigate the folklore of the area that I had grown up in,” she explains of the book that also yielded her latest album, I Inside the Old Year Dying.
PJ Harvey took a year off after she started questioning whether music still made her happy.Credit: Steve Gullick
“I was interested in going back into nature and going back into the childhood imagination. You learn to value that childlike inquiry into things,” she says. “As an artist, I always just follow where I feel I’m being led. This was always on my list of things to do. And it felt like the right time.”
It’s difficult to reconcile Polly Harvey’s breezy conversation with the unsettling intensity of her work. The first time we spoke, around the time of her mid ’90s breakthrough with To Bring You My Love, she shared her amusement about “the axe-wielding bitch character from hell” that interviewers tended to expect: one of many voices she’s since explored.
Now, 10 albums into one of the most original and lavishly acclaimed careers in British rock and beyond, her timbre has shifted again: high and fey to channel imagined nine-year-old Ira-Abel of the village of Underwhelm, abused and haunted chronicler of Gore Woods under the all-seeing dead lamb’s eye god, Orlam.
The author’s mother, Eva Jean Harvey, is thanked “for her close reading” in the book’s acknowledgments, but the obvious suggestion that little Ira’s story is some kind of homecoming to her own sheep farm childhood near the Dorset village of Corscombe is met with a dubious pause.
‘I do have a hard work ethic. I go to my desk and I work nine-to-five most days, but going to my desk was no longer a joy.’
“It felt … rich,” she says guardedly. “I mean, there was so much information to access because it had been the place where I’d grown up and was of extra interest to me because of that.”
The dialect “is dying out”, though “you still hear a lot of it being spoken in the West Country. It was extremely easy to learn the language, [so] it obviously was encoded in me somewhere. A lot of the words are so memorable anyway, and sound often equals sense. You know, the way the words sound is what they are.”
PJ Harvey at the Sydney Opera House, February 2008.Credit: Domino Postiglione
This is true in the case of yollerheads (daffodils), tree-tears (leaves), vorehearing (premonition), winker (eyeball) and any number of less elegant body parts. But the book’s glossary is invaluable when it comes to the likes of heissen (a prediction of evil), biver (to shake with cold or fear) and ether-hunger (the hunger for earth, sometimes felt by persons approaching death).
“Some of what I wanted to explore in my examination of the country idyll is that, you know, it’s not idyllic,” she says with a laugh. “People that have grown up in the countryside know that it’s not just beauty and light and everyone’s happily engaged with nature.
“There’s a lot of bad stuff that goes on there, just as much as there is in cities. I wanted to give a little bit of a window into that. You know, humans are humans. We do bad things wherever we are.”
Orlam took eight years, Harvey says, “researching all of the mythology, researching the language and the ways of living in different eras in the West Country … My biggest driving force is wanting to learn. To completely submerge myself in a subject and educate myself in it, then put all of that study down and let my creative brain write, that’s such a joyous thing for me.
PJ Harvey later set her poems to music.Credit: Getty Images
“But no, it didn’t really feel like a homecoming,” she says firmly. “As an artist, you’re always on the outside looking in. I felt like an outsider, observing, working my way towards it. That feeling of observing keeps me separate from feeling at home anywhere, really.
“It’s not an unpleasant feeling,” she adds, but the process of observation has taken its toll over previous projects. Harvey’s last two albums have been steeped in war, from its poisoned roots in money and power to the macabre reality of limbs in trees to the endless aftermath that haunts the world.
The grim historical perspective of 2011’s Mercury Prize-winning Let England Shake was followed by Hope Six Demolition Project and The Hollow of the Hand, its accompanying book of poems with photographer Seamus Murphy, documenting travels in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Washington.
Asked how she managed to protect herself, steeped for years in live geopolitical horrors for the sake of art that is anything but easy listening, she’s momentarily taken aback. “That’s really lovely that you’ve asked that question … I didn’t know how to protect myself,” she says.
“Prior to writing Let England Shake, I spent four or five years studying war: past wars and current wars and art that had been made around wars and everything from first-hand accounts of torture to … you know, everything. And it did affect me.”
Soon after demoing those songs, she fell ill. She remembers calling her friend Ian Rickson, the British theatre director who stages her live shows, and telling him, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I just have no energy. I can’t do anything. I literally wake up after eight hours’ sleep and I have to lie down again.
“I thought there was something seriously wrong. I went for blood tests and all sorts of tests, and no one could find anything. And it was Ian who said, ‘It’s the work, don’t you see? This is your body and emotions responding’.
PJ Harvey and former partner Nick Cave in the film clip for Henry Lee.Credit: Dave Tonge/Getty Images
“Since then, I have been more aware of trying to practise resting my brain and therefore my body and emotions from the work because it did affect me in a big way. And it still affects me.”
The Hope Six project brought more internal challenges. The field trips had been “astonishing and quite life changing”, but when she came to work on the poems and the songs themselves – “two entirely different disciplines”, she’s learnt, over a decade-long mentorship with Scottish poet Don Paterson – the writing felt like hard graft.
“When I was first beginning to craft songs at 19, 20 years old, there was a sense of absolute joy in finding a way to express things through a medium I was in love with: music and song and singing … and I began to realise how far away from that I had come.
“I do have a hard work ethic. I go to my desk and I work nine-to-five most days, but going to my desk was no longer a joy. I think also being at that stage in my life – moving towards 50 – it felt like a serious question to ask myself, ‘OK, should I still be doing this? If this is not making me very happy, I don’t feel I can be doing good work’.”
After another rigorous world tour in 2016-17, Harvey imposed a kind of gap year to ponder the question. It involved going back to music theory she’d neglected as a girl and composing for stage and screen: the tense psychodrama The Virtues, the black Irish comedy Bad Sisters, Ivo van Hove’s London stage adaptation of All About Eve.
PJ Harvey performing in Sydney in 2017.Credit: Jamie Williams
“That was a really wonderful place to be because I wasn’t serving my own artistic journey or voice,” she says. “I was serving the director; I was serving the screenwriter, and that’s quite a different discipline. That was quite a restful place to still be studying music.
Loading
“It was through this process that I re-found my joy because part of the exercise in trying to be a better pianist or a better guitar player was to play other people’s songs. I’d try and play Nina Simone songs on the piano, or Leonard Cohen songs on the guitar, or Sandy Denny …
“In learning and playing these other people’s works, I sort of fell in love with music again and with song again; how lyrics and chord progressions can open your heart, open doors into places inside yourself you didn’t know existed. I found the power of that again, and it completely renewed how I felt.”
A rebirth at 50 is hardly a given in popular music, even if PJ Harvey’s music has mostly parted ways with rock for stranger pastures. Once again directed by Ian Rickson, the show she’ll bring to Australia in March begins with all of I Inside The Old Year Dying, before switching gears to range across a deep and demanding back catalogue.
Loading
“The reason my work sounds different, album to album, is because of that absolute craving to learn, experiment, make sounds I’ve never heard before; sing in a way I’ve never sung before, write a song in a way I’ve never written before. It’s just so curious and so interesting to me, and I’ve been like that my whole life,” she says.
“I can only say that the older I’ve got, the happier I’ve become, the more accepting of myself and others and the world I have become; the more beauty and positivity I’m able to see. I can only say wonderful things about the ageing process emotionally, but physically, as a performer … it’s not easy.”
I Inside the Old Year Dying is out now. Orlam is published by Pan MacMillan. PJ Harvey performs March 9 at Golden Plains, Victoria; March 11 at The Plenary Melbourne; March 13 at Sydney Opera House Forecourt.
