Saturday 18th April 2009 @ Anson Rooms, Bristol

This being a home coming of sorts for PJ Harvey and long time cohort John Parish, tonight’s audience stomps its feet, and as Polly sings in new single Black Hearted Love, calls out her name in rapture as they sense the duo about to appear. Harvey, dressed demurely in a white gossamer gown, paces coyly onto the stage behind a disarmingly shy smile, followed by Parish, wearing a pork-pie hat and displaying the slight hint of a pot belly. Besides being able to reach up and feel the sweat in the air – its hot in here, and the audience jam packed – the atmosphere is at boiling point. It’s at shows like this that you can feel the seeds of new bands beginning to germinate.

Immediately delicate and bashful, Harvey invariably catches you on your heels as she launches into oft-defiant, oft-spitting, oft-ferociously sexual punk-blues songs like Pig Will Not; songs in this case co-written with Parish – Harvey the lyrics, Parish the music. It’s in this collision between ferocious defiance and genuine fragility that she finds her power. It means that when Polly punches, she punches hard!

Between dancing seductively around the stage and pushing her voice to extremes (that belie her diminutive frame, and at times approach self-flagellation), Harvey produces an intense theatre using the often disturbing characters she creates in her songs – and embodies in performance – as a vehicle. A case in point being the devastating A Woman A Man Walked By, in which a woman wronged verbally castrates a “mummy’s boy” with “woman parts”, the refrain “I want your fucking ass! Stick it up your fucking ass!” stinging the ears. She’s the sexiest woman in rock, but with this, any tumescent heads in the audience are abruptly squashed. Fictional or not, to write these characters you have to have a dark place somewhere inside of you. The fact that these are the tunes the audience pops loudest for; that we seem to enjoy the view from the periphery of this darkness so much, illuminates something in all of us.

And for those of you who consider most of the above to be over-analytical bullshit, but for whom the shear thought of an electric guitar being thrashed through a fuzz-box makes you wet, well, when Harvey and Parish rock they rattle your bones.

PJ Harvey and John Parish: gig of the year thus far! Where the fuck were you?

www.pjharvey.lucidwebs.co.uk

James Davey
Photos:  www.ianbradleyphotography.com