PJ HARVEY: STORIES FROM THE CITY… AT 20 | FEATURE
Assessing the latest artefact from the Dorset dervish’s stellar discography to get a deluxe reissue, David Nobakht discovers that Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea still shines after two decades.
Island Records’ PJ Harvey reissue campaign reaches her fifth solo album this month, with the re-release of Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea accompanied by a collection of demos. Comparing any given demo to its completed counterpart generally shows just how accomplished Harvey’s songs were from the start, yet it is intriguing to discover what tweaks were made in the studio for the finished result: the aural equivalent, perhaps, of discovering a box of unreleased Stanley Kubrick cuts at a car boot sale.
Polly Jean Harvey had already established herself as an artist who kept her audience on their toes with her individuality, image changes and creative quest to never rest on her laurels. A West Country girl who had grown up listening to Howlin’ Wolf, Captain Beefheart and Bob Dylan but who first set out to become a sculptural artist, by 2000 Harvey had amassed a catalogue of highly distinctive albums.
After many months of touring 1995’s well received To Bring You My Love, with its songs of gothic voodoo, folklore, betrayal and skulduggery, the boundary between being creatively true to oneself and fulfilling touring and industry demands that had come with the album’s success left Harvey “running on empty.” The easy option would have been to quickly repeat the formula of TBYML’s abrasive, dirty blues for her next album, but Harvey did nothing of the sort. Is This Desire?, released in 1998, has co-producer Flood’s multi-layered dark and jagged electronic flourishes sprinkled throughout tales of various advocates, both male and female anxiously questioning their existence on an album that flits between dreamlike beauty and nightmarish brutality.
Flood had, a few years prior, added vicious electronic accompaniments to Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral, and while not following the NIN route of recording in the one-time Manson murder mansion, like Trent Reznor Harvey was in search of some “unsettling” sounds. “Quite a painful album to make, and still not one I can listen to very easily at all,” is how she later described Is This Desire? to Australian radio station Double J. Some critics seemed to expect something more akin to her earlier LPs: if not the cinematic delta blues-infused songs of TBYML, then the stark, grungy confessionals of 1993’s breakthrough Rid Of Me.
As they say, sunlight follows the night and it most certainly did for PJ. Mick Harvey, of Nick Cave’s Bad Seeds, came on board as producer for ITD?’s followup album. “She was making quite a straight record in a funny way. I’m not quite sure how she got to that point because it didn’t seem very typical of her, to be honest. But, you know, she’s a real ‘zone’ person. She gets into the zone of what she wants to do and that becomes the focus,” Mick told Uncut; “I want it to be my beautiful, sumptuous, lovely piece of work,” said PJ to Q magazine.
Eventually released in October 2000, if she set out to make an album of “perfect” pop songs her take on pop is dramatically different to most. Although Harvey has played down the notion that Stories… is her ‘New York album’, some of the songs were written there. The opening three tracks are mighty: Big Exit, Good Fortune and A Place Called Home set the scene for a near-perfect album, before the sublime One Line with “I draw a line / To your heart today / To your heart from mine / A line to keep us safe.”
Beautiful Thing’s acoustic guitar twang has a Morricone-like beauty to it, and Thom Yorke on backing vocals. You don’t often find pop songs with talk of “heroin and speed / of genocide and suicide, of syphilis and greed,” but that comes with The Whores Hustle And The Hustlers Whore, seemingly an ode to inner city survival and corruption. This Mess We’re In – again with Thom Yorke, this time as a duet – works equally well with Harvey singing solo, as the demo disc demonstrates.
You Said Something is enough to make one want to be on a “rooftop in Brooklyn” with the Empire State Building in view, and a song as infectious as any of Harvey’s peers’ finest hours. Kamikaze – more fleshed-out and multi-dimensional, in the Rid Of Me vein, and concerning self-destructive behaviour – seems at odds with the LP’s broad ambience. Maybe that was the idea, with the clue in the title: Kamikaze drops in like a wasp disrupting a picnic, its inventive live drum trickery something you could envisage being sampled on a jungle track.
This Is Love sounds like Harvey’s previous greats rolled into one widescreen track on which she creates her own wall of sound in a tribute to the dizziness of love. Horses In My Dreams has a vivid charm, the aural equivalent of Cormac McCarthy’s words coming to life in a song. The album ends with We Float, a dreamily dark piano-led beauty and one of the most beautiful songs Harvey has made.
With its sleeve that shows Harvey in designer shades, black dress and gold handbag surrounded by the bright lights of a Manhattan street, Stories… suggests a departure from Rid Of Me, with its black and white photo of the musician swinging her hair in a Bristol bathroom, or the distressed Polaroids used for Is This Desire?. Her latest missive’s aesthetic reflected perfectly on the artist and music within, a subtle sans serif font speaking to the album’s uncomplicated and direct nature. Harvey once described her image as being something like “Joan Crawford on acid”, further elaborating that its appeal lay in the “combination of being quite elegant and funny and revolting, all at the same time.” With Stories…, though, the colour cover photo seems to be Harvey taking a step back from this type of visual persona – yet its 2004 followup, the largely home-recorded Uh Huh Her, shows Harvey in a completely different light, and 2007’s piano-heavy White Chalk alternates once again. (Researcher Abigail Gardner dives deep into Harvey’s changing visual style, in her book PJ Harvey And Music Video Performance.)
“The most accomplished album of her career” is how The Observer described Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea; “Polly Harvey is in a league of her own,” wrote the Sunday Times. Just under a year later, on September 11 2001, she would accept her Mercury Music Prize win from a hotel in Washington DC with her window offering a view of the Pentagon in flames. The album gave no obvious clues to where Harvey would go next, with the arguable exception of This Wicked Tongue, a bonus track tacked to the end of some British and Japanese CD editions; what did transpire was different, but by no means less enthralling.
“I had never tried to make a sparkly-sounding pop record before,” PJ Harvey later told The Guardian. “Having explored that area, it’s not really where my heart and soul lie. I learnt that I’m naturally drawn to uneasy, difficult music.” Should one be faced with an appropriately difficult decision – one PJ Harvey album to keep above all others – consider this magnificent album the frontrunner.
PJ Harvey’s Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea is reissued by UMC/Island on Fri 26 Feb, with the Stories… Demos album released on the same day. Info: here
words DAVID NOBAKHT