PJ Harvey is wearing the strange Victorian dress she sported on the cover of White Chalk and begins to play the riff from ‘To Bring You My Love’. To stage left sits an upright piano with its front-piece removed, to the back are Orange and Vox amplifiers, to the right there’s a synthesiser, assorted pedals, a cymbal, and an autoharp. The piano is adorned with assorted lamps and gewgaws (including an owl and a cactus). She moves with ease from piano, to guitar, to synth, to autoharp. There’s no band – just her roadie-manservant strolling on and off handing her one instrument, taking away others. She performs naturally. She’s lost the rock ‘n’ roll poses she’d been toying with on previous tours. Between songs she talks in her Dorset accent and jokes along with the audience. She seems... human.
But the music is something else entirely – she’s got incredible control of dynamics. Songs swell and shrink. Her voice can go from delicate, pitch-uncertain vagueness, to enormous glass-cutting pitch-perfect clarity in one line. When she plays ‘The Devil’ the movement of her hands, the metronome and inner workings of the piano are like a weird little rickety clockwork diorama. On guitar she can still conjure up all the energy and rawness of ‘Dry’ or ‘Rid Of Me’. She performs ‘Grow Grow Grow’ and ‘Down By The Water’ with autoharp in her hands and a foot-organ at her feet. At the first encore (she chooses not to leave the stage) someone calls for ‘Sheela Na Gig’ – she asks for the first line and then plays it in its ragged glory.
Now, she could just be a really good musician who works hard at writing beautiful songs. But here’s what I really I think – sometime in the last few years PJ Harvey ripped the black-heart from some primordial demon and ascended to an Alan Moore/Aleister Crowley- style pantheon of rock and roll. And it’s a religion to which I'll gladly subscribe.