PJ Harvey...PJ's dark, white chalk...

[KiwiCoromandel]

In eight albums over 15 years, the writer and singer PJ Harvey has given us not just the bride stripped bare but the murderess laid out, the temptress set free, the wounded in agony and the mother left childless. Intensity of emotion has been matched by intensity of expression in almost primal shades of raw guitar and voice, and in layered complexities of sound you could almost call mainstream, except for their refusal to play nice.

It has been sex and blood and anger, loss and sweat and fear. And darkness. Always darkness. "Dear darkness, won't you cover me again/dear darkness, I've been your friend many years/won't you do this for me dearest darkness," she sighs on her new album, White Chalk.

In its accompanying promotional material, Harvey is presented in a stark monochromatic manner. The images may well have come from a daguerreotype, the sound is principally piano and voice, and the album's 11 tracks are peopled with characters who - in tone, shape and temperament - speak of another time and another sensibility.

One woman describes the sensations while under ether (one assumes for an abortion), another declares to her lover, "I freed myself from my family, I freed myself from work, I freed myself and remained alone," while others are women desperate to free themselves from their longing as much as their strictures.

We're not talking florid displays here. Most of these women have spent their lives being, as Isabel Archer says in Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady, "a woman of ardent impulses, kept in admirable order". However, the order is cracking and emotions are spilling out.

To these ears the women are, to borrow a phrase from John Fowles's narrator in The Magus, "born in the grotesquely elongated shadow of that monstrous dwarf Queen Victoria". They could be from Thomas Hardy or something altogether more gothic.

"It definitely has a storytelling, filmic quality to it," Harvey says. "It feels quite timeless. When I listen to it, I'm not sure what century or what world it is and I really enjoy that. I find it very exciting that sometimes it feels 100 years old and sometimes it feels somewhere in the future that I don't recognise and therefore my ear listens to it as if for the first time."

As with her switching back and forth between music and art - she likes the physicality of sculpture as an antidote to the intellectual and emotional effort of recording - Polly Jean Harvey has moved almost reflexively from one style to its polar opposite with each album since her 1992 debut, Dry.

Her move away from the raw blues of her last album, Uh Huh Her (itself a stark contrast to the lush sounds of its predecessor, Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea), could have been predicted. But few would have expected the austere Victoriana of White Chalk.

"As you go through life, you change and grow and it goes into whatever you're making or doing," she explains. "More than ever I've found that my way of writing songs is changing. I've begun to realise over the last two or three years that I almost see a song before it becomes music. Using my imagination in terms of constructing a picture - it sounds like I'm mostly bonkers, doesn't it? - I could see these stories and began to write them at the piano or [with] just a pad and pen.

"I kept allowing my imagination to go with it, almost trying to get back to that quality one has as a child where you can create, fabricate stories out of nothing. Or you can create a playmate or make anything happen. I just wanted to throw the gates open, really, and these little tales started coming through and then I began to document them as well as I could.

"Why this specific atmosphere? I don't know. I'm a very instinctive writer and I tend to go where it takes me and not question it too much, even for myself. It's not something I even choose to analyse. I just try to do what in my guts feels right."

For Harvey it's not just a matter of visualising. She once said that she would use objects, materials and smells. "A smell will evoke a feeling which I want to create or a colour. It's very much based on visual things and on my senses, sensations. I carry a lot of stuff with me wherever I go. Photographs, pictures, personal objects that I like and smells. They're really important to me.

"I am a very sensual, emotive writer. I tend to try and document human emotion, about the body and feeling, rather than about the brain."

For all that, there is never a sense with any of the characters in her songs that this is purely an emotional response by them or by Harvey. These are characters capable of analysing their responses and behaviour, or who are at least conscious of it.

"Yes, definitely. Unravelling what it means to be a human being," Harvey says. "I guess that's ultimately what many artists try to do, certainly what I try to do, try to make sense of the world around."

Does she feel she is getting better at writing?

"I am. I feel that this album in particular was very realised, very focused, and became what my original vision was. It has a greater strength for that. With some bodies of work, I lose my focus or the songs don't quite come fully accomplished, they are not quite there.

"This whole body of [new] work, not just the songs I chose to put on this album, were very realised songs that had a beginning, a middle, and an end: something happens, something changes and then it's over. I'm really enjoying exploring that way of writing more."

Harvey is as softly spoken and polite as any West Country farm girl who, for all her travels, always returns to Dorset, near her parents. And her periods of living in London, New York and Los Angeles - not to mention intense creative and emotional relationships with the Australian musician and author Nick Cave and the American actor and painter Vincent Gallo - have had little effect on either the gentleness or the country burr in her accent.

She has been sniffling through this conversation. She has a cold, is clogged up and wondering where summer went this year as she sits wearing two jumpers and watching the rain on a freezing London morning.

Who would want to go out in that? The last time she was in Australia, nearly three years ago, Harvey told me she wouldn't be touring any more. Reminded of her words, she sighs. "It's a very difficult relationship to have with one's work, doing what I do. I wholeheartedly love performing, I need to and want to get up in front of people and sing songs to them. It's an absolute need and passion and drive. And yet the way it needs to be done, purely practically really, is that you need to do large blocks of touring."

In 1995 she said: "When I'm not touring, I hate the thought of touring and can't understand how I ever manage to do it. When I am actually on tour, I love it, and can't imagine ever living without it.

"But I've got to the point where I really don't enjoy going out for months and months and months, though I absolutely love playing. Every time I'm in the middle of a tour, it seems unbearable, which is why if I do an interview at that stage I would be going, 'I really can't do this any more.' "

This album, which is perfectly suited to being performed alone, has given her a way out, or a way in if you like.

"Right now I'm playing solo, which makes it much more flexible, so I can do two shows and then not do anything for a month and then do two more shows," she says. "The show really is a retrospective. I've got brand new songs on the piano right up against old songs on the guitar and I'm really enjoying that. I am playing a lot of different instruments so I am constantly moving. It's really good fun."

source:Bernard Zuel/SMH

image:http://www.flickr.com/photos/davemitchell:P.J Harvey...new album "White Chalk"...