FEATURE:
The Blossoming of the Last Living Rose
PJ Harvey’s Let England Shake at Ten
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THERE are some great albums celebrating…
PHOTO CREDIT: Cat Stevens
big anniversaries this year. One that I was keen to mark is the tenth anniversary of PJ Harvey’s Let England Shake. The eighth studio album from the iconic Harvey, it was released on 14th February, 2011 by Island Records. Even though production commenced around the time of White Chalk's release in 2007, Let England Shake is a move away from a more piano-heavy sound. The album was written over a two-and-a-half-year period; recorded in five weeks at a church in Dorset during April and May 2010. One can feel a certain sense of atmosphere and gravity on the album. Whether that was because of the recording setting or a conscious effort from Harvey to make something very different to White Chalk, I am not sure. Upon its release, Let England Shake received plaudits. Not only did many include it among their favourite albums of 2011; In September 2011, it won the the Mercury Prize - It was PJ Harvey's fourth nomination overall (including 2001's winner, Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea); making her the most successful artist in the prize's history. Let England Shake won Album of the Year at the 2012 Ivor Novello Awards. PJ Harvey’s most-recent studio album is 2016’s The Hope Six Demolition Project - and it was another terrific release. One can buy Let England Shake from Rough Trade…and I wonder, like she has done with some of her classic albums, there will be a new release with demos included – like we have seen with Dry, To Bring You My Love, and Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea.
I think, ten years after its release, Let England Shake has grown in stature and importance. It is an album that has immediacy and instant impact, but one listens through the years and discovers new things. It is one of PJ Harvey’s best albums; one that should be cherished and studied for years to come. Before rounding things off, I want to bring in a couple of reviews for Let England Shake. Firstly, an interesting interview from Uncut has caught my attention. Harvey was asked about the album and what it represented to her:
“For me the most important thing is to hopefully create and achieve what I desire at the onset of the project. And I’m quite a good judge myself of whether I’ve managed to do that or not. And it’s not often that I will make a record like Let England Shake, where I know after I’ve finished writing it that that’s a very strong piece of work and I couldn’t have done any better. That doesn’t happen very often. Having said that, I knew that for me, White Chalk was an album like that, too. I had a very clear idea of what I was setting out to do with that piece and I felt that I did it, and I think it’s a really strong album. For me it’s a very successful album! But in terms of how many it sells it doesn’t make sense at all.”
Ask what was the first mystical inkling she had of the mood and direction of the album and she is quick to steer the conversation back on-message.
“I had wanted for many, many years to begin to explore my feelings towards the wider world in song, to what goes on that we read about and hear about through the news. I’ve always been very affected by what’s happening in the world. Profoundly so. I feel so moved by things every day. And such a feeling of impotence, like we all do. What can you possibly do to change anything? I’d long wanted to be able to start to bring these feelings into songs and I didn’t know how. And I also knew that I would have to do it very well or not do it all. It’s such a dangerous tightrope to walk. I really didn’t want to write bad songs on such important matters. And often your heart can be in the right place, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to do good work. So I was very wary of that.
“Part of the reason this album happened was that, as a writer, I was finally at the stage where I was more confident that I could carry it off. I had more craft of language at my disposal than I had before. And it was that coupled with the greater sense of urgency and frustration, and that feeling of impotence. It was those two things that made me think, ‘OK, if I’m feeling this profoundly moved, upset, frustrated by what’s happening, can I use that in song?’”
Throughout Let England Shake there are echoes and allusions to earlier artists wrestling with national disgrace, from the seedy homesickness of “The Last Living Rose”, recalling both “The Queen Is Dead” and William Blake, through to the chords of “The Dark Places” echoing “There Is A Light That Never Goes Out”, and “The Colour Of The Earth” picking up something of The Clash’s “Straight To Hell”. Polly herself has suggested that two major inputs were the dreamy devastation of The Doors and the bilious poetry of the first two Pogues albums. Founding Pogue Spider Stacy is touchingly gobsmacked at the suggestion of influence.
“I am beyond flattered that she should have been listening to us while making a record of such beauty as Let England Shake. There is no one else like her. She’s peerless, one of the very few contemporary artists in any discipline whose clarity and profundity of vision have sharpened and deepened over the years to a point where she now seems to be working in a field defined only by herself. Her empathy, her erudition, the sense of the connection between blood and clay and the bones and roots of the world echo something that could so nearly be lost, but is always somewhere to be found, hovering in the air or lying in the soil below us: the dark red life of these rainy islands”.
I am keen to round things off soon but, as Let England Shake is such an acclaimed and brilliant album, it is wise to reference a couple of reviews. In their review, this is what AllMusic had to say:
“PJ Harvey followed her ghostly collection of ballads, White Chalk, with Let England Shake, an album strikingly different from what came before it except in its Englishness. White Chalk's haunted piano ballads seemed to emanate from an isolated manse on a moor, but here Harvey chronicles her relationship with her homeland through songs revolving around war. Throughout the album, she subverts the concept of the anthem -- a love song to one's country -- exploring the forces that shape nations and people. This isn't the first time Harvey has been inspired by a place, or even by England: she sang the praises of New York City and her home county of Dorset on Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea. Harvey recorded this album in Dorset, so the setting couldn't be more personal, or more English. Yet she and her longtime collaborators John Parish, Mick Harvey, and Flood travel to the Turkish battleground of Gallipoli for several of Let England Shake's songs, touching on the disastrous World War I naval strike that left more than 30,000 English soldiers dead.
Her musical allusions are just as fascinating and pointed: the title track sets seemingly cavalier lyrics like "Let's head out to the fountain of death and splash about" to a xylophone melody borrowed from the Four Lads' "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)," a mischievous echo of the questions of national identity Harvey explores on the rest of the album (that she debuted the song by performing it on the BBC's The Andrew Marr Show for then-Prime Minister Gordon Brown just adds to its mischief). "The Words That Maketh Murder" culminates its grisly playground/battleground chant with a nod to Eddie Cochran's anthem for disenfranchised '50s teens "Summertime Blues," while "Written on the Forehead" samples Niney's "Blood and Fire" to equally sorrowful and joyful effect. As conceptually and contextually bold as Let England Shake is, it features some of Harvey's softest-sounding music. She continues to sing in the upper register that made White Chalk so divisive for her fans, but it's tempered by airy production and eclectic arrangements -- fittingly for an album revolving around war, brass is a major motif -- that sometimes disguise how angry and mournful many of these songs are. "The Last Living Rose" recalls Harvey's Dry-era sound in its simplicity and finds weary beauty even in her homeland's "grey, damp filthiness of ages," but on "England," she wails, "You leave a taste/A bitter one." In its own way, Let England Shake may be even more singular and unsettling than White Chalk was, and its complexities make it one of Harvey's most powerful works”.
I hope there are other features being written about the tenth anniversary of Let England Shake, as it is such a compelling album. When they sat down to judge the album, The Guardian offered the following:
“Scrupulously avoiding the usual cliches that arise with self-consciously English music – Kinksy music-hall observations, eerie pagan folkisms, or shades of Vaughan Williams – the central sound is guitars, wreathed in echo that makes them seem as if they're playing somewhere in the middle distance. Around them are scattered muzzy electric piano, smears of brass, off-kilter samples and musical quotations: a reference to Eddie Cochran's Summertime Blues somehow works its way into The Words That Maketh Murder, while an incessant trumpet reveille sounds during The Glorious Land, out of tune and time with the rest of the song. Somewhere along the way, the Four Lads have vanished – instead, their song's incongruously perky melody is played on a xylophone – but on Written on the Forehead, she performs a similar trick with an even more unlikely source – reggae singer Niney the Observer's Blood and Fire, a deceptively cheery paean to imminent apocalypse. Its weird juxtaposition of subject matter and mood infect the whole song, which is possessed both of a beautiful melody and a lyric about people trying to escape a rioting city and drowning in sewage.
Meanwhile, Harvey's voice certainly has its dramatic moments, as when it rockets into boy-soprano territory during On Battleship Hill, or unexpectedly takes on a carefully enunciated mock-aristocratic mien. But frequently what it most obviously evokes is a rather cool ambivalence. When she debuted her new high register on White Chalk, it sounded tremulous and spooked: here it's almost blank-eyed as she details The Words That Maketh Murder's battlefield carnage: soldiers falling "like lumps of meat", trees hung with severed limbs. It's a curious idea, but it's a masterstroke. Rock songwriters don't write much about the first world war, but, perhaps understandably, when they do, they have a tendency to lay it on a bit thick: you end up with songs like the Zombies' The Butcher's Tale, so ripe it sounds more like the work of a fromagier. Harvey clearly understands that the horror doesn't really need embellishing: her way sounds infinitely more shocking and affecting than all the machine-gun sound effects in the world.
You're left with a richly inventive album that's unlike anything else in Harvey's back catalogue. That, she told Marr last year, is the point: "My biggest fear would be to replicate something I've done before." Let England Shake sounds suspiciously like the work of a woman at her creative peak. Where she goes from here is, as ever, anyone's guess”.
With the poetry of Harold Pinter and T.S. Eliot cited as influences, as well as the artwork of Salvador Dalí and Francisco de Goya, the music of The Doors, The Pogues, and The Velvet Underground and the films of Stanley Kubrick, Ken Loach and Ari Folman, Let England Shake draws from a broad palette. In addition, Harvey discussed researching the history of conflict, including the Gallipoli Campaign, and reading modern-day testimonies from civilians and soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. One can feel all this history, culture and politics running through an extraordinary album. Ten years after is release, PJ Harvey’s wonderful Let England Shake…
STRIKES a chord and moves the listener hugely