How PJ Harvey Brings Her Characters to Life on Tour

D
ozens of characters live and yearn in PJ Harvey‘s songs. There’s the Devil-plagued stalker narrating “To Bring You My Love”; the “prettiest mess you’ve ever seen” in “Angelene”; and, most recently, the lost girl, Ira-Abel, beguiled by an oracle and a ghost-like Elvis figure in all the songs from Harvey’s 2023 album I Inside the Old Year Dying. She brings all of these characters to life with unique performances on her current tour, which kicked off a North American leg last week.

“This show is a theatrical piece,” Harvey said last Monday on a Zoom from Philadelphia, a little jetlagged after landing in the U.S. the day before but sounding eager to perform. “I’ve really enjoyed presenting this show and the storyline, the narrative that it takes you on. And I’ve enjoyed embodying the story through my body and my bodily movements.”

With dramatic lighting and plenty of room, she swayed and posed on the stage of New York’s Terminal 5 on Monday night, acting out each song while wearing a dress that evoked I Inside the Old Year Dying’s woodsy imagery. Her band, composed of musicians she’s worked with for years including John Parish, are all in varying degrees of costume, and they moved around to accommodate her performances as she struck ballet poses, crouched, and performed shadow-plays against a screen for each song. The first half of the concert is dedicated to I Inside the Old Year Dying, while the second includes songs that date back to her 1992 debut, Dry. Her performance is enchanting and captivating and during most of the concert, you could hear a pin drop as the sold-out crowd absorbed the spectacle.

For the past 15 years or so, Harvey has collaborated with theatrical director Ian Rickson to make her concerts into events. “When Let England Shake came out [in 2011], that was the first time that I invited Ian to direct my live shows because I was becoming more and more interested in the show being not just a rock & roll show,” she says. “[My concert] is not theater, it’s not dance, it’s not rock music. What is it?”

Harvey and Rickson blurred the lines even further for this tour. In rehearsal, she tapped into the meanings of each song on I Inside the Old Year Dying, a collection of shadowy songs whose lyrics began as poems in Harvey’s novel-in-verse, Orlam. That book told a multilayered story about one year in the life of a nine-year-old girl growing up among ghosts in the woods of Dorset, England, where Harvey grew up. As she interpreted the rest of the songs, the presentation grew and grew.

In a wide-ranging chat, Harvey discussed songs from her whole career and how singing songs like “Dress” and “50ft Queenie” from her first albums feels different at age 54 than when she recorded them. She says she finds the newer material the most transformative. “I do feel very childlike and playful in some of the songs on the new album,” she says. “Maybe my age doesn’t matter as much as the leap that you take in your mind to inhabit the story of the song.” Either way, Harvey says she’s having a blast onstage for the first time in a long time.

You’ve said this is the most you’ve enjoyed doing a tour. Why is that?
It’s just a whole mixture of things, really. The more albums I’ve made, the more material there is to choose from. The balance of the band and crew members has really worked well; everyone gets along very well. And the audiences have been amazing.

And this is all something that’s registered in a deeper way for you?
I think just being a bit older and a bit more open as a person, and therefore as a performer, means that I’m able to be in the moment a bit more than when I was a younger woman. I’m able to be connected to the music and the moment that I’m in with the audience on a different, deeper level than I used to be.

Do you feel a transcendent quality when performing the songs live?
I think so, in the sense that I do feel that maybe another dimension of consciousness is maybe more possible for myself, the audience, and the band. It’s hard to know, isn’t it?

The band and I always have a debrief after each show and reflect on how the show was for each of us. And I’ve noticed that more and more, one of us has had that transcendental feeling where you are not so aware of the body that you’re in, but you become sort of part of the music or the moment; you’re not having so much of a border between yourself and the moment in time. I find that really tremendously rewarding.

There’s also a sense of otherworldliness with the songs on I Inside the Old Year Dying.
Yeah, they are definitely a sort of in-between-worlds place, a place that’s sort of poised on several thresholds. It’s definitely not black and white, but all the gray in between.

What sorts of things has Ian Rickson helped you achieve with this tour?
I would come up with ideas in rehearsal, almost improvisatory, in terms of my movement and “address,” because as a singer in a band, you are addressing the audience. Am I pleading? Am I demanding? What’s my body language as I am singing these words to people? Ian and I think about all of that a lot, and I’ll improvise in rehearsals as to what a starting point might be. Then Ian helps me craft that through rehearsals.

Do you see each song as a distinctive character? Is “50ft Queenie” different from “Angelene” and Ira-Abel in “Prayer at the Gate”?
Definitely. Every song’s different. My performance is largely dictated by the audience really, because of what I feel from them or what they’re drawing out in me. It’s so magical in that it’s here and then it’s gone, and it will never be the same again. And it’s purely dependent on that night in that room with those people.

How do you interpret the older songs?
Doing songs now that I wrote 30 years ago, like “Dress” or “50ft Queenie,” I inhabit them in a very different way as a 54-year-old woman than I would’ve done as a 20-year-old woman. So the words take on different meanings. I do the presentation differently. And it has to be done authentically, or it doesn’t work. So I really have to choose songs that I still feel I can inhabit as a 54-year-old, that still makes sense to me.

Since you mentioned “Dress,” from your first album, Dry, what strikes you about that album now when you listen to it?
Some of the things I was exploring as a young woman were so new to me. I wouldn’t explore them now because I’m a different person. I know those things now, so I don’t need to explore them again. And some things that just don’t sort of fit anymore I wouldn’t feel comfortable singing. I really need to feel that I can put across, in a believable way, the words that I’m singing. And in order to do that, I have to believe them myself at the starting point at this age and at this time in my life.

“50ft Queenie” was your breakthrough single in the States. What’s the story behind that song?
Gosh, it’s so long ago that I wrote it. I can’t remember how it started. It might have even been a film title. Was there a movie called Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman or something like that? I probably saw something quite funny in that and had a riff and put it together with a song. A lot of those songs were actually quite playful. I think at the time, they were taken very seriously, but I was having a secret smile to myself with many of them.

You recorded the album that’s on, Rid of Me, with Steve Albini, who recently passed. How did he give you a unique perspective on your own music?
He really strengthened me into believing in myself. He definitely helped my self-confidence in his own belief in my music and in myself as an artist.

I looked up to him so much. I’d admired his work for many years. And then when I got to know him, I just was hugely respectful of him, and he was very wise and very straight-talking, and I feel like I learned such a lot about life and music from him. I think the biggest thing that he did for me was my confidence in myself and in my music. He boosted me to believe in myself.

Do you remember anything that he said to help you believe in yourself?
Not the specific words. He only ever said that he was just bringing out what was already there. He was very humble about all of his amazing recording techniques and ideas he’d have of the way to record, and would say, “I’m just recording this, but you made these songs.” But there were also all sorts of things to do with life as well.

As the years went on, we sort of lost touch, but for a while we were close friends. And he would be someone that I would go to if I was struggling with something, anything to do with life, not just music, because he was very good at giving advice and also very straight with people. He would honestly tell you what he thought in very simple terms, not tread carefully. I admire that in people. I want people to speak honestly and truthfully and not withhold things for fear of upsetting me. And he definitely was that sort of person.

Who do you look to now for that kind of advice?
Well, throughout my whole life that’s been John Parish. That’s never changed for me. I met him when I was about 16, and then I joined his band [Automatic Dlamini]. And John’s 10 years older than me, so he was 26. He became like an older brother, a sort of father figure, a teacher, a mentor. He taught me how to play guitar. He taught me how to be onstage. And he’s taught me so many things about being a human being. I have so much love and respect for that man.

And he continues to be a very special person in my life that I turn to when I need help. He’s been by my side all these years and he’s by my side onstage now. I can’t ever imagine not wanting him right by my side with every idea that I have. Even now, I’m starting down the road of my next project, and he’s very involved in it. I talk to him about it all the time. He’s my musical partner in life, and I feel so grateful that I’ve walked this planet with him.

Is he straight-talking?
Absolutely [laughs]. John’s had me in tears many times, very straight-talking. He pulls me up when I need pulling up. He is also very straight with me on my creative work. He lets me know if it’s weak. He lets me know if he thinks it’s great. He always tells me what he feels, and he’s nearly always right, annoyingly [laughs].

You’ve said that you don’t see I Inside the Old Year Dying as a companion piece to your novel-in-verse, Orlam. Why is that?
I was probably trying to express that I didn’t feel one was dependent on the other. I don’t feel that the book, Orlam, is dependent on the album to work, and I don’t feel that the album is dependent on the book to work.

It wasn’t actually my intention to write songs out of the book of poetry; it just sort of happened. It’s quite difficult to lift poems and put them into songs because poems are quite different forms to a song. A poem is often very dense. It has to work within the words on the page. And so with poetry, you end up with a lot of words, or you end up with dense words packed with information — that doesn’t always make for a good song.

Songs can be very, very simple because the music does half, if not more, of the work for you. So I ended up with very dense lyrics to the songs. I learned a lot from it. It’s made me think that for the next project, I’d probably keep songs quite separate to poems. A song is a song, and a poem is a poem; I’m not going to try and set poems to music. But I’m glad that I did it for this piece. And it also made for a really interesting theatrical show, which maybe wouldn’t have happened if it hadn’t been for these complex lyrics being told as a story.

You previously tried that with your poetry book The Hollow of the Hand, which informed The Hope Six Demolition Project.
The poems were a lot simpler then. I was a younger poet. My words weren’t as complicated or as dense as they became in Orlam. And obviously Orlam’s written in the Dorset dialect, which added another layer of density. So the words were simpler [in The Hollow of the Hand], and I think moved into song quite easily.

Since you mentioned the Dorset dialect, one word you use a lot in the songs is “wordle,” which means “world.” When did you find out about the online game Wordle?
Not until after the book, and I was horrified to read that there was a Wordle after my wordle. It added another level again. But yeah, also I just love language. I love seeing how a language changes in dialects.

I noticed that an anagram for Orlam is “moral.” Is there a moral to Orlam?
Yeah. All of the names in the book have two or three meanings. And “Orlam,” yes, indeed, part of it was “moral” is within it, but also “lamb” and also “oracle,” and also “oral.” It was just full of things. [“Orlam” is the name of the book’s oracle, the eviscerated eye of a lamb.]

I think of Orlam like a fantastic fairy tale, in a way. And most fairy tales do have a moral. You could look at the shape of the book as being a circle and starting with “Prayer at the Gate” and ending with another “Prayer at the Gate,” and that cycle of life and death, and how they are all intertwined. If you want to look for a moral, it’s that: The beginning is the end, and the end is the beginning.

And there’s a lot of change in between.
Yeah.

Do you think the poems and songs will be related to one another in your next project?
I think the theme will be. As an artist, I sort of jump into something I’m really consumed by, and that becomes the theme for a number of years. As you get older, and you see that there’s a finite amount of years left to do all the things you want to pursue… I choose what I want to get lost in for years at a time quite carefully now.

What have you been reading lately?
Well, I’ve been very submerged in Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot. It’s not the first time I’ve read it; I’m probably reading it for the 30th time. I’m very deeply into Rainer Maria Rilke, particularly Duino Elegies, at the moment. I’m reading a lot of Seamus Heaney; I go back to Seamus’ work all the time. He’s such a master of storytelling and of rhyme and chime. I’m also reading the Book of Job. I dip into a lot of different things.

But also, I’m working with my editor of many years, Don Paterson, a Scottish poet, and my teacher. I did enjoy Don’s last book of poetry, which was named after a pub, The Arctic.

How do you work with Don on your poetry?
We meet once a month. I bring him work, and we look at the work, we look at what’s bad, what’s good. I learn from it. We move on. I write more. A lot of what I read is things that Don has said, “You should read that.” And then, we often reflect on the work. So we’ve been reading a lot of Rilke together lately.

You recently said that if you wrote a memoir, it would be a fictional autobiography. What’s the tallest tale you’d tell about yourself?
Well, I’d have to give it more thought than just a quick thought in an interview. But it has appealed to me that one day I’ll set the record straight in a way that doesn’t have a nugget of truth.