Particularly with female musicians, the word “confessional” tends to come up. Singer-songwriters whose music is intensely emotional, violent, or sexually explicit often have to contend with the assumption that their lyrics are autobiographical. From the ashes of PJ Harvey the band, she was constructing the first iteration of PJ Harvey the solo artist. Not making an overt political statement so much as she was experimenting with her persona, the Harvey of Rid of Me inhabited outlandish new looks and perspectives, seemingly as a way of dividing her newly public identity from her more vulnerable private self. Leno’s viewers, by contrast, met neither a righteous feminist (Harvey notoriously distanced herself from the term) nor a shrewish hysteric, but an earthy farm girl with an impish streak. Certain young musicians-mostly innovators with strong points of view who don’t check all the straight, white, male boxes-have the misfortune of entering the public sphere as society-wide Rorschach tests critics on both sides of the Atlantic just couldn’t resist projecting on Polly. Her Leno appearance feels like a truer representation of who she was at the time than any contemporaneous profile. She attributed the dark period to the end of her first real romance, an unpleasant experience at the Reading Festival, and the constant flood of feedback from the industry, fans, and-in a hint Witter must have politely ignored-the media.
SQUISH SOUND EFFECT PATCH
A SKY magazine profile from that period followed a typical formula: Reporter Simon Witter contrasted Harvey’s “suave, demure, elegant, womanly” mien with her “howling banshee music” and recounted confronting her with his insight that “while her ensemble says ‘Look at me!,’ its color scheme the classic camouflage of fatties and fence-sitters.” Then he shifted into sympathetic mode, asking about the rough patch she preferred not to call a breakdown, which took her from London to the seaside room in her home county where she recorded the Rid of Me demos. Even the cover of Rid of Me, Maria Mochnacz’s photo of the artist in the bath, which exposed only her head, shoulders, and a shock of wet hair in whip-like motion, caused an outcry.īy fall of 1993, rubberneckers had moved on to rumors that she’d had a nervous breakdown while writing Rid of Me. She had appeared naked from the waist up, her back to the camera, on the cover of NME in 1992, offending the delicate (and hypocritical) sensibilities of Melody Maker. The British weeklies lost their minds about every new song her band put out-and more so about every image of Harvey that accompanied them. If he’d been following her career in the UK music press over the past two years, Leno might have asked Polly about the controversy that had dogged her in her home country, where Rid of Me had reached No. “And after about two weeks, they drop off.” The crowd roared as though she’d made a joke. “For the male lambs that you don’t want to become rams, you have to ring their testicles with a rubber band,” Harvey explained, as frank as any lifelong farmer would be. She responded with a list of tasks that included castrating sheep. “So you still go back and do the chores?” Leno wanted to know. In the short interview that followed, he raised what must have seemed like an innocuous topic: Harvey’s rural roots on a sheep farm in Dorset. Leno pronounced her performance “very nice,” with all the forced enthusiasm of a high-school English teacher who’d asked the quiet girl to read her poem aloud. She closed by taking her hand off the strings, repeating the “Lick my legs” chant a cappella smiling more to herself than to the audience.
Her falsetto sounded involuntary and unnaturally girlish, a genderless being’s impression of women, as though the song of violent obsession had awakened some histrionic alternate personality within Harvey. On the album and in concert, Ellis had taken over the haunting falsetto backing vocals: “Lick my legs, I’m on fire/Lick my legs of desire.” Even the demo was mixed to layer Harvey’s throaty, menacing leads over her high-pitched chant.īut on Leno’s stage, she played both overlapping parts at once, and the effect was hair-raising. From a technical standpoint, it wasn’t a stellar performance.
So Polly appeared on Jay Leno’s “Tonight Show” accompanied only by her guitar. After the tense summer tour that had followed Rid of Me’s spring release, she had split with her bandmates, drummer Rob Ellis and bassist Steve Vaughan, in the trio they’d called PJ Harvey.
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