FEATURE:
Fountain and Water
PJ Harvey’s Dry at Thirty
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NOT only can you buy…
IN THIS PHOTO: PJ Harvey in San Francisco in 1992/PHOTO CREDIT: Jay Blakesberg
PJ Harvey’s amazing debut album, Dry, on vinyl; you can also get the recent Demos version of it. As Harvey’s debut is thirty on 30th March, I am looking ahead to an incredible moment in music. One of the most impressive and distinct of all time, it is worth spending a bit of time getting to know the background to Dry – in addition to sourcing a couple of critical reviews. The first feature that I want to highlight is from 2020. In spite of PJ Harvey being young when her debut came out and not like any other artist, she was fully-formed and hugely confident:
“Straight out of England’s rural Southwest, Polly Jean Harvey always had a spiritual connection with the American South – the birthplace of backwoods-gothic sin and redemption – and of the blues, which she discovered through her first musical hero, Howlin’ Wolf. With that lineage, it was no surprise that the debut album by this young Englishwoman was unlike anything else that appeared in 1992. Almost three decades later, it’s no stretch to say that it’s still startling. Albums like Dry are so way-out-there that they don’t belong to a decade or scene.
The feral blues-rock underpinning Harvey’s volcanic presence on the record raises the hair on the back of your neck. More than that: hearing Dry‘s gnarled guitar/bass/drums attack is like being in the same room as something disquieting and eternal. Though Harvey’s sonic armory later included a bit of goth, a little electronica, some plain old rock, and something approaching pop, it was the blues that unlocked her storytelling abilities.
The other remarkable thing is that despite being only 22, PJ Harvey was already fully-formed as a singer and songwriter. This “guitar-toting succubus,” in Rolling Stone’s description, had an emotional spectrum that skewed toward drama, and she had no filter. But she wasn’t out of control – as some contemporary reviewers speculated – she was just conveying her truth, figuratively ripping away Band-Aids to show some wounds, while leaving others safely covered.
One 1992 rave review – that didn’t quite grasp her – contended that Dry was an “honest irrational outpouring.” (The reviewer also claimed she’d reinvented “post-rockist guitar.”) In fact, the album was only irrational in the sense that human feelings are irrational. Honest, though, it certainly was. While Polly Jean later rebutted the assumption that her songs were autobiographical, Dry was undeniably influenced by her own life.
She and her band (Rob Ellis, drums; Stephen Vaughan, bass) had moved from her home village of Corscombe, Dorset (population 445), to London in 1991, and it was a wrench. While the move was musically productive – they signed to indie label Too Pure and were championed by influential Radio 1 presenter John Peel – Harvey was deeply unhappy. Her first real relationship had just ended, she was renting a damp flat in North London, and the city felt overwhelming.
Thus, the songs that ended up on Dry have a definite narrative arc. Over 11 tracks, the mood gradually shifts from heartbroken pleading to a thirst for revenge. Aptly, it kicks off with a discordant clang – that’s Harvey’s guitar, welcoming you to the opening “Oh My Lover.” Dark and bass-heavy, it grimly gives her boyfriend permission to see another woman while still involved with Polly.
On “Dress” and “Sheela-Na-Gig” (the first and second singles), Harvey first adopts a teenage whine, begging the guy to look at her in the dress he bought her; in the second song, she offers him her “childbearing hips…ruby-red ruby lips,” only to be rebuffed by his brutal retort, “You exhibitionist…Wash your breasts, I don’t want to be unclean.”
All of this, including the furious payback tracks “Joe” and “Hair,” is thrust along by Harvey’s caustic guitar-playing and the cavernous noise kicked up by drums and bass. In the latter song she’s Delilah, cutting off Samson’s crowning glory as he screams, “Wait!” an image that any wronged lover will relish.
Oh, and there are some first-class hook lines on Dry: the chorus of “Sheela-Na-Gig” especially, is a roaring singalong that could have been made for festival crowds, and the delight of it, is that it’s about ancient stone figures of women displaying their labia.
It’s easy to see why Courtney Love once said, “The one rock star that makes me know I’m sh_t is Polly Harvey.” Madonna, too, is a fan, and there are clear affinities with Björk, whose solo career took off a year after Dry; both women are restlessly creative, and not bound to any template. Natasha Khan of Bat for Lashes was also inspired by Harvey’s “honest, real, quite intimate nakedness” while making her 2012 album, The Haunted Man.
If Dry still packs a punch almost three decades on, imagine how it sounded at the time. And imagine how she appeared to an early 90s audience. The front cover is an extreme close-up of her bruised-looking lips and the back shows her in stark monochrome, topless and watching the camera equivocally. Yet she bridled at the idea that she and her music upended conventional feminine mores: she just was what she was. Dry is a stunning debut from an artist who more than lived up to her early promise.
Featuring some of Harvey’s best tracks - Sheela-Na-Gi, Dress, and O Stella among them -, it is no wonder Dry remains such a popular and fascinating album. The Demos album is worth getting, as it is powerful and revealing. A tremendous artist who, few would have guessed in 1992, has gone on to become a legend and an icon. Many artists start life quite modestly, though there is such conviction, wonder and raw talent right through Dry! Thirty years later, it remains one of the greatest albums ever. I will end with a couple of reviews. NME had their say in 1992:
“Women are reputed never to be disgusted. The sad fact is, they often are, but not with men, they are most often disgusted with themselves." Germain Greer, The Female Eunuch
EXCEPT POLLY PJ Harvey. She's the final nail in the coffin of the carefree, careless boy music critic. Behold, she is the one-woman saviour of indie sex! From out of a regenerated but already self-pollinating indie universe she came, sounding sooo different from Thousand Yard Stare and Midway Still that she might've been from another planet of sound altogether.
Last year's 'Dress' 45 was a wildcat among homing pigeons. Minimalist, hard-faced, ferocious, string heaven, it put the indie boys in a spontaneous lather and nailed mini-label Too Pure to the map. Now you will hear this a lot over the coming weeks - and you'll hear it again and again as this incredible band make their ascent to mainstream acceptance - but I'm putting it into speechmarks: "PJ Harvey has got balls". Do me a king-sized favour! Is it not time we stopped attaching bullocks to things we think are good? Is there not an element of actual lazy journalism in bestowing the gift of sperm production on a female artist who makes the grade? Patriarchal hogwash. You don't need to be Tim Booth, with his "God made us to her own design" guilt-trippery, to be offended by this daft, out-of-date sexist slur. Polly J Harvey Hs assets, strengths, attributes, talent. She is so great, she is a man. Cheers.
"Much to discover/I know you don't have the time", she sings - and when I say sings, I don't just mean enunciate words in tune to a provided melody, Polly dredges these sounds from the pit of her dissected soul and drags them out of her mouth with clenched fists. There is, indeed, much to discover on the low-key, 11-track debut by this Yeovil three-piece. And you should make time. From the first opening vocal wrench that is 'Oh My Lover', you know you're a million miles from the hard(on) sell of corporate nutter-chic(k) such as Tori Amos or even Sinead (God strike me down!). We have come to expect hard work and running up and down and ankle-breaking effects pedal punishment from our best On stars in the last couple of years - but this, as they say, is personal. Doing it for the kids, she may be, but swat is she doing , exactly?
PJ Harvey is the name of the band; this includes cool, grumbling bassist Stephen Vahghan and deft, unmannered drummer Robert Ellis. PJ Harvey is the name of the band's raison d'être too - it is her bruise-like lips that are pushed in your face on 'Dry's' sleeve, it's her songwriting credit that takes these clever, repetitive, low-slung guitar poems into another dimension; it's her submerged, naked body that shocks from the album's back cover. In this case, the blokes are the accessories.
"I'm naked/So cover my body/Dress it fine" she sings on 'Happy And Bleeding', the album's cornerstone. The appearance of Polly's chest on this record's packaging may find itself, erm, misused in the grubby mitts of the lonelier Indie Sadboy, but let's hope they toss themselves off to death, while PJ goes on to greater things. It's problematic, for sure, this brazen, 'artistic' statement - but if you can't rise above it, you won't get far within.
When PJ says she's "bleeding for you", is it some martyrdom kick, or a lover's threat, or a metaphor for pain? One is drawn quickly to the conclusion that it's a 'woman's thing', but things get real messy when you burden a songwriter with your own gender-specific guesswork. Elsewhere, though, PJ urges the onlooker to "Look at these child-bearing hips/Look at these, my ruby red lips"(Sheela-Na-Gig) - she's washing that man right out of her hair ("Turn the corner, another one there") and on 'Dress' she's clearly addressing the pressures of fitting accepted female stereotypes - "It's hard to walk in a dress/It's not easy". You feel as if there's some absurdist gender panto going on in Ms Harvey's mind”.
I will end with Pitchfork’s from 2016. From its release to recent years, people have been awestruck and moved by one of PJ Harvey’s greatest albums. Among the many strengths of Dry are its vivid and rich lyrics:
“From Dry’s first line, Harvey relishes in that ambiguity, forcing the listener to figure out what they’re feeling and why. “Ohhh myyy loverrr,” she rasps in her thick accent, as if seducing someone with her dying breath. She’s assuring her man that it’s fine for him to see another woman simultaneously, promising she’ll soak up his troubles while he can take whatever he likes: Her character understands that his time is limited, his satisfaction paramount, and that compromise is the fate of all women. The bass thuds like a domino line of falling oak trees, while a harmonium’s eerie whine makes the song feel like a dark, lost folk standard.
She follows the streak of subjugation: A frenzied prayer to the Virgin Mary on “O Stella,” to guide her through the night on “Dress.” Then comes “Victory,” where she’s a post-punk Vera Lynn lustily imploring the boys to “sweat, dig—I’ll mop it right off your brow.” On the earthy lurch of “Happy and Bleeding” she loses her virginity and turns from fresh fruit to rotten peach both “long overdue” and “too early,” her “idle hole” then rejected on “Sheela-Na-Gig.” That’s the first half of Dry: blitzing the rigged path young women must walk from innocence to sullied castoff. It’s rife with disappointment and violence, but Harvey treats the double standard for the absurd cabaret it is, making perfect sense of it through her formative blues vocabulary. She plays victim in her words and aggressor with her guitar, adopting a libidinous swagger that’s as nasty and thrilling as the abuser who keeps her coming back for more. Nobody sings like PJ Harvey sings on Dry, veering perilously (but exactingly) between wheedling, raging, vamping, always with a sly wink.
These extreme contrasts confused critics at the time: Dry played like a feminist statement but she refused the label, wondering why anyone remarked on her sexual lyrics when plenty of rock and blues bands had gone further before her. Mostly dressed in black, her hair scraped back severely, she seemed to eschew image, but then posed topless on the cover of NME. She insisted that there was no depth to the lyrics, and professed to being baffled by people’s attempts to interpret them, but her considered use of female archetypes to depict a woman’s fall and subsequent vengeance told a different story. All of these things were true at once, part of her distancing push-and-pull. As she told Spin in ’93, “The biggest protection you can have is if people think they’ve got you and they haven’t got you at all.”
She pulls the same trick on Dry’s scumbag subject, going into the record's vengeful second half. She’s Delilah to his Samson on “Hair,” flattering him into submission and cutting off his mane. “I’ll keep it safe,” she sings, sounding emboldened by power, before flipping on a knife edge, realizing: “You’re mine.” The bass zooms as if mapping the swift transfer of power; the rhythm section pounds like Samson’s impotent rage. “Joe” is the record’s most manic moment. There’s no quiet-loud shift, just pure piledriver dynamics as she spits nails at the treachery she’s experienced: “Always thought you’d come rushing in to clear the shit out of my eye/Joe, ain’t you my buddy, thee?”
But rather than commit bloody murder as you might expect, she retreats on “Plants and Rags,” “[easing] myself into a body bag,” and finding solace at home: “Who thought they could take away that place?” she asks as the violin swirls to a deranged squall. Her love of Slint comes through on the menacing fretboard harmonics of “Fountain,” where she washes herself clean and a Jesus-like figure shrouds her modesty in leaves. On “Water,” her first utterance of the word sounds like she’s dying of thirst. By the chorus, when she’s walked into the sea, invoking Mary and Jesus again, she sounds as though the crashing waves are emanating from her own throat.
Critics have theorized that she drowns herself at the end of the album, to rid the shame from her body. But it sounds more like a rebirth; the cure to her dryness, finding satisfaction on her own terms and eradicating the need she had looked to someone else to fill. Dry is an exciting, scary joyride through the dawning realization that learning to please yourself yields far greater pleasure than relying on others to do it for you: These gory myths are her lover’s discourse, an apocalypse—in the revelatory sense—that she would push even further on 1993’s Rid of Me (after her immediate fame resulted in a nervous breakdown). Following the NYC gloss of 2000’s Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea, she attempted to tap back into this sound on 2004’s Uh Huh Her, but the lack of her debut’s extreme urgency limited its success. On Dry, Harvey’s character may appear to subjugate her gratification, but it’s all there, bursting out in the zeal of her playing.
“It’s the same kind of excitement, playing music, as in a sexual relationship, and the two go hand-in-hand,” she told a French TV show in ’93. “And I think I find music physically exciting as well—actually playing loud music and standing in front of a bass amplifier is quite a sexual experience, I think.” She tells a story about playing in Chicago, and how every time Steve Vaughan hit an A, she got vibrations right up to her middle. “Wonderful,” she muses. “We play a lot of songs in A as well, so it was a good night.” The French journalist gurgles like a stunned baby, unable to process this frank, feral waif who’s got it all figured out”.
Prior to 30th March, I wanted to spotlight a classic album. I don’t think we will get an anniversary release, as the Demos album came out a couple of years back. Anyway, fans around the world will give their thanks and love to a masterpiece from PJ Harvey. As astonishing as any debut, Dry is an album that will…
NEVER lose its brilliance.