Let there be light

Polly Harvey has blazed a trail in women’s rock, and was instrumental in dragging it back into the mainstream. But the pressures of fame have taken their toll. Now back from that ‘dark time’, a new album sees the singer in a different, almost optimistic mood

It has never been music to potter around the house to, or to sip cocktails to, or to wake up to on a bright Sunday morning: Polly Jean Harvey's music has always been reserved for those long, dark nights of the soul - guaranteed to make us feel much worse, but somehow better at the same time. It has been her job to Feel Our Pain. Her songs have been bleak, angry, ghoulish. And Harvey herself, all paper-doll fragility, has always been the incarnation of angst, yowling her scary, disconcerting lyrics about unsettling things (voodoo, drowning, coffins, guns). She may never have possessed the distinctive grandeur of her most obvious predecessor, Patti Smith, but she blazed a trail of slow-burning sensuality, fury and eccentricity that helped bring women's rock out of the margins and into the charts in the late 90s. She was always a cut above the maudlin Morissettes and Phairs of this world. The only trouble was that, after a while, Harvey seemed to have so much more pain to feel than the rest of us could muster.

Until recently, that is. There were signs of a slight breeziness on her last album, and there are tracks on the latest one that even have an optimism and lightness of touch previously unheard of from the supposed cauldron-stirring lady of darkness. In the flesh, though not exactly serene-looking, Harvey looks tanned and fit, as opposed to pallid and unwell, formerly her salient characteristics. She's tiny, but not spectrally thin, as she has been in the past, and she has strikingly large, long-lashed, hazel eyes and a wide, full mouth that goes slightly wonky when she speaks in her soft, West Country lilt. She has an intense, measured way about her. She's very still and composed, speaking confidently but also cautiously, articulating each sentence carefully.

She says that her new album, Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea, is so named not so much because of the locations in which it was written (New York and Dorset), but because she has always liked the Jungian notion of "the sea being the subconscious and the land the conscious". The creative process draws from reality, she says, but also from the imagination, and is about returning to the imagination that we had as children. "It seems to me that we spend a lot of our lives trying to get back to that simplicity, the vibrant imagination, we had as kids."

She's not nostalgic about her childhood, though - "I don't dwell too much on things that have gone. I try and live on a day-to-day basis" - and won't go into enormous detail about her childhood, because she doesn't want to. But she does say that Dorset was a wonderful place to grow up, and "alive with ideas and the space in which to create them". Her mother, a sculptor, and her father, a stonemason, brought up their daughter to the sound of Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, John Lee Hooker. The Harveys lived near a remote village with a population of 600, and their house, along with a few others, was set apart. There was no shop, just a post office and a telephone box. Polly used to hang around with a group of local boys. "We had a gang in our offshoot village, and there were just boys. No girls to play with." Harvey began playing piano, violin and saxophone at the age of 11, and then taught herself to play the guitar at 18 - she'd been interested in writing since she was a child, and found that it was a good way to bring words and music together.

Now 30, Harvey still lives for most of the time in Dorset, in a house by the sea. She's very close to her parents, and always plays them early demo tapes of her albums, because she respects their opinion and because they have a lot of musical knowledge and interest. "It seems appropriate," she says. Having bohemian parents, her teenage rebellion took a rather different form than most. "My rebellious stage was probably when I started buying Duran Duran records instead of listening to Captain Beefheart," she laughs, "and my mum was, like, 'What on earth are you listening to?'"

She was 20 years old when she moved to London, and decided to defer a place to study sculpture at St Martin's art school in favour of signing a record deal. But the transfer from the countryside - and from the bosom of such a tightknit family - was a shock. In 1992, she released Dry. It was a jagged, raw album, drawing on swampy blues, with hints of Patti Smith, Captain Beefheart and grunge thrown in - the songs were angry and intense, the vocal style was a distinctive, banshee-like roar. Everything started happening at once, she says, and what should have been an exciting time, full of hope, turned into a nightmare - and the first of two nervous breakdowns.

For a start, she was unprepared for press interviews, she says. "I'd had quite a sheltered upbringing, and was very open and honest, and so went to interviews totally unprotected." Of course, that candour did her public profile absolutely no harm - she was an interviewer's dream, but she believes it harmed her. "I was just wide open, and got damaged because of it, and ended up feeling very invaded." At the time, she was struggling with money, negotiating with solicitors, managers (she went through two of them) and agents. "It was quite frightening, and all too much. Then my personal life was in tatters at the same time [she had split from photographer Joe Dilworth]. I don't know what the definition of a nervous breakdown is. I just know that I stopped functioning properly, and I was unable to look after myself, and everything kind of fell apart." She went back home to Dorset and "shut off for a while".

The follow-up album, Rid Of Me, was no less harrowing or dark, and still full of fury and naked emotion - on the title track, she toyed with male fears of the Fatal Attraction-style bunny-boiling woman. It was her most relentless, hit-free album. The third, To Bring You My Love, was less emotionally direct but intense nonetheless, earning her a place on the Mercury Prize shortlist and a clutch of Grammy nominations. Until then, her appearance had been austere - scraped-back hair, no make-up - but with the release in 1995 of To Bring You My Love, she underwent a Ziggy Stardust-style transformation, appearing at Glastonbury in a smoulderingly glamorous ensemble of pink catsuit and exaggerated false eyelashes. "The songs could carry it," she says of her image at the time. "I've always enjoyed dressing up, and I wanted to experiment with it." There was a dark, theatrical edge to her performances, and her distorted, wailing told of drowned daughters and voodoo rituals. The glam image had to do with something else as well, she says: "There was confusion with myself at that time as to who or what I was, and it was a way of looking for answers."

Another breakdown ensued. The period from the end of 1995 until 1997 was a "very dark time", she says. By the tail end of 1995 she had been on tour for a year and was "very worn and very disillusioned. Emotionally, mentally or physically, it wasn't a healthy time. I was running on empty. I'd kind of lost sight of why I was doing this, and I don't think that would've happened if I'd have been of stronger mind and body but, as it was, I was just very low, so I really hit the bottom of the barrel and thought about stopping it all and not even continuing with music. Even through to Dance Hall At Louse Point [a dance collaboration with John Parish and choreographer Mark Bruce], it was a very difficult time in my life, probably the hardest time I've ever had." She says she's not sure why it happened a second time around. "I just think every individual is predisposed to behaving in certain ways under certain conditions, and I think it was a mixture of the person that I am, the spirit that I have, and being in those situations that wasn't right for me at that time."

She was also, of course, painfully thin - and lurid rumours abounded. The phrase "self-loathing" was used a lot: it seemed to tally well with her nihilistic lyrics. It was generally assumed that she was anorexic; Courtney Love, a great admirer, once pointed out that one of Harvey's lyrics about lying in a glass coffin was, in Jungian theory, an image representing an eating disorder. "I think that everyone's entitled to their own opinion," Harvey says carefully. "Certainly, when I used that image I wasn't thinking about that at the time. I was probably thinking more of Snow White. Maybe Snow White was anorexic," she laughs. It may be that her skeletal appearance was due to something entirely different. In any case, it's not something she has ever talked about publicly, or admitted to. "That's a conscious decision," she says firmly. "And I'm not going to talk about it now. That's no one's business but my own." She went to stay with friends in Bristol. "I had a lot of support around me." She went into psychotherapy. Is This Desire?, a rather more upbeat album, followed in 1998.

But it is the new album that really shows Polly Jean Harvey in a different light. There are still the angry moments of visceral guitar rock for which she has become known, and the hallmark blues and orchestral balladry are there, too, albeit more finely honed. But there's a new mood that is less claustrophobic, less sinister and more positive, both lyrically and musically. She produced and performed all the tracks, along with Rob Ellis and Mick Harvey. The vocals are less technically distorted than on previous ones, which sometimes goes in her favour and sometimes doesn't - there is the occasional moment when she seems to be struggling to hit the note - but it's a beautiful, seductive album, and probably her most commercial and accessible to date. The country-inflected ballad, You Said Something, for instance, and the elegiac, piano-filled We Float, with its soaring vocals, are gorgeous, and there are Björkish touches in the love song, Beautiful Feeling. Then there's This Mess We're In, a soft duet with the haunting voice of Thom Yorke of Radiohead. She finds Yorke's voice very moving: "He's an extremely good songwriter, and instrumentally they're a very strong band. They do seem to be looking for new ground all the time, which is admirable, and very exciting to see and to hear." It has been said that Polly Harvey is the female version of Radiohead and that, just as the music of Thom Yorke mythologises male confusion and dysfunction, so hers represents the female equivalent. She doesn't see it, however: "They're just songs about living, not about one sex or another."

Gender has never been an issue with her. She says that most of her influences have been male (Dylan, Neil Young, Captain Beefheart), because that's what she's drawn to musically, and there's no other woman to whom she aspires, though she admires Marianne Faithfull. She has never come across obstacles that have been insurmountable through being a woman, she says; she just operates from her own gut instinct. When she first emerged on the music scene, she was briefly assumed to be of a feminist inclination, then she caused a stir by posing topless on the cover of NME. "It wasn't premeditated, and I was quite unprepared for the uproar that it caused. I really hadn't thought that was how people would react."

Whether this response is naive or disingenuous is hard to say. Surely she's aware of her own sexual presence - it's certainly not something she plays down in either her music or her performances. "Obviously, I'm aware of that and I love playing with it, and I think that sexuality is a very big part of music and of performing and making images. It would be like denying part of my character not to do it. Music's a very sexual thing. It's much more to do with the physical than the intellectual."

Not that her songs are about sex. "They're about emotions that go with love in any form, love of a cat, God, a person, the world, the countryside, anything. Some of that is sexual love. I think all songs are love songs - they're all about love or lack of love." She doesn't like to talk about her lyrics in detail because she believes that, once she has released her songs, it is up to the listeners to interpret them.

The trouble with such reticence, however, is that you will often be caricatured in terms of your more extreme lyrical moments. From the time of her first album, Harvey was perceived as an angry, macabre eccentric, a witchy "Dark Lady", and that image has stuck. "People like to categorise you," she says, "and it happens to a lot of people. Some of my male friends are always thought of as these dark, macabre, melancholy miseries, and then you meet them and they're the funniest people with great senses of humour. Certainly a lot of my work has looked into the darker side of things, because that's what fascinated me at the time, but I think you do have to see it in context. I've been doing this for 10 years, and my work is miles away now from what it used to be."

Perhaps in an attempt to escape the confines of the Polly Jean Harvey persona, she has in the past few years experimented with acting, appearing in a few short films, including a musical cameo (as a bunny girl) in Sarah Miles's A Bunny Girl's Tale. She also acted in New York director Hal Hartley's The Book Of Life, a millennial satire. She had met Hartley when he used some of her tracks in his 1994 film Amateur.

She found acting both fascinating and "very difficult", and, though she's wary of the "now I'm a pop star I can be an actress/write a novel" syndrome, she would like to do more acting. In The Book Of Life, she plays the role of a modern-day Mary Magdalene. The Harveys were not a church-going family - "Quite the opposite: very rarely did we go" - but while researching the part she became fascinated by Christianity and the Bible . So much so that today she wears a crucifix around her neck. Does she have a religious faith? "I don't know if I could answer that really yet," she says cautiously. "I have my own beliefs, which I probably won't talk about. It's a very important part of my interest, and I'm aware of religion and its impact on everyone and everything." There was a time when she was portrayed as some kind of black magic sorceress, and there has been such darkness in her songs, let alone in her psyche, that you can't help wondering if she believes there are any forces of good at work in the world. "Yes, I live with hope that things can change and people can change."

Her music, she says, is "a place where I can try and give something to others that might help in some way. I make the songs, and I hand them over and then people can make them their own. Music can say a lot of things that words can't express." She seems keen to distance herself from the violence that is still present even in some of her new songs. She can't help but respond to what is going on around her, she says: "As a writer, I think it's one's duty to keep what's going on within your work. It's a personal response to what I hear and read and see."

Of course, there's more to it than saintly duty and altruism - there's a steely, ambitious side to Harvey as well. There's the Polly Harvey who disbanded the group, known collectively as PJ Harvey, after the first two albums, with the name, of course, reverting to her - they're her songs, it's her career, and that, it seems, is the way she likes it. And with the shrewd and powerful Paul McGuinness (also U2's manager) now in charge of her business, she is well placed for a long and fruitful career. Her main ambition, though, is not, she insists, to sell more records and become more famous, but to improve her writing - both her songwriting and her poetry and prose, with which she has been experimenting lately. She likes the discipline required to write poetry. "There are a lot more records in me yet, and it takes hard work and dedication. I want to keep doing that as I want to do it, and not be swayed by outside influences."

She seems a self-sufficient kind of person. She is said to be reclusive, although she insists that it's a "myth" that she has neither television nor telephone in her Dorset home. "No, it's all modern," she laughs. "I don't do email, though. I write letters." She has friends in the music business, and others in normal jobs - "I need both" - and her recent spell recording in New York was a sociable time. She says she's thinking of moving to San Francisco for a while - "A friend has a spare room going" - and maybe spending some time in Russia, too. There have been times when she has been single, and it felt right at the time, she says. "I don't find it difficult being in my own company, and it doesn't worry me or upset me if I'm not in a relationship." And she says that was true even when she was at a low ebb emotionally.

Her most high-profile relationship was around three years ago, with the musician Nick Cave. They are like peas in a pod - not only do they look uncannily alike, their music shares the same gotha-billy intensity. It has been said that he was rather more affected by their break-up than she, and that he wrote the moving and rather beautiful album, The Boatman's Call, about her after she ended the relationship. Harvey is not sure if it's all about her, however. "I think it's about many different loves in his life." But he is someone who she "respects enormously as a songwriter". Does she ever feel sad that it's over? "There's a time and a place for everything," she says in a measured tone. "And I look back at that time with Nick as a wonderful time. I only have an enormous amount of respect for him and admiration and love, and it really was a great time in my life."

She won't say if she's in a relationship at the moment, though some of the lyrics on her new album seem to indicate that there has been someone in her life. She says she's quite idealistic about love, and not very pragmatic when it comes to relationships. "I'm much more instinctive, and dive in and get messed up." She laughs lightly. She's resolutely uncynical about men, though, and, while she doesn't "gaze out of the window thinking of red roses", she does think it is an amazing thing. "I don't think that true, all-encompassing love for another comes along very often. It's a wonderful thing that should be treasured." As for the prospect of having a baby, she's sanguine. "I tend to think that I'll take whatever comes my way, that whatever comes my way will happen or won't happen, and that's the way it'll be."

She's so focused, so apparently sorted, that it's hard to imagine how she ever wasn't. But, clearly, it is something she has worked at. Being "together" has helped her write this album. "I think this myth that, in order to be creative, you need to be angst-ridden and tormented and probably addicted to something is complete rubbish. I don't buy it at all. I've found being a more balanced person with more clarity has only enhanced my creativity, because I'm able to think straight and take information in and put it out. It makes good headlines - that's what people want, musicians drugging, sexing and drinking themselves to death - but it's a pop star/rock star myth, which is actually stupid." Not that she's averse to the odd drink. "Certainly, it's a nice way to relax, and very enjoyable, but it definitely doesn't help my writing." And drugs? "I've never got into drugs in a big way. I just don't need it." And as far as any moral viewpoint on the rights or wrongs of drug-taking, she's keeping schtum. As she does.

When she saw Marianne Faithfull perform in New York last summer, Harvey was blown away. "I've never seen someone with so much poise and grace and absolute control. She held the audience in the palm of her hand without even trying. She had so much charismatic strength, it was astounding." But then, only those who have lost control are likely to prize it so highly. So you can't really blame Harvey for her careful, circumspect approach. The rather impassive, controlled way about her probably enhances the PJ mystique and enigma, but, more important for her, it must help to preserve what you'd imagine must be a rather delicate equilibrium. She's an intense creature and, with her guard up and her boundaries firmly in place, she's protected - from herself as much as from anything else. She says she's stronger now than before, and "I know what my limits are, and what I will and won't do". There was a time when she was so low, she felt that she wanted to stay there. She describes the feeling as "all-encompassing. You feel numb and, for a while, you want to feel like that, but then you realise that you don't any more, and by then it's too late, and you have to work really hard to pull yourself out of the mire."

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