The mellowing of PJ Harvey

By GRAHAM REID

It's the day before yesterday, their Big Day Out appearance is still 24 hours away, and Polly Jean Harvey and her band are in the Playground rehearsal rooms in Newton. They are running through a real-time rehearsal of their set which is being timed to the second. They have 55 minutes on stage and Harvey wrote out the song list in the van on the way here only an hour ago.

It's the first time they've played together in more than three weeks but you wouldn't know it. The songs come together on the first run through.

They take a break and Harvey, more tanned but as slight as expected, obligingly chats over a cup of tea. Very rock'n'roll. She is relaxed, in excellent humour, and engaging company.

Is this the woman whose Rid of Me album of 93 was nominated by Q magazine as one of the "best miserable albums of all time"? This small figure struck fear into the hearts of hardened rock journalists?

Maybe once, but there is another Polly Harvey now, one more at ease with herself and her craft. It is there on her recent album Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea. And it's here on this couch in a sparse room in central Auckland.

This Polly hoots about that Rid of Me nomination, an accolade new to her. She doesn't think it was a miserablist album, preferring to describe it as dark and angry, but is genuinely amused by the Q description.

Already we have entered the world of image and myth which surrounds this 30-year-old from a hamlet in rural Dorset, the woman whose intense songs with seething sexual undercurrents endear her to amateur rock psychologists.

As befits her formidable reputation, she is dressed in black, but she is not as anorexically thin as she was six or seven years ago and laughs so readily it's fair to ask what the greatest myth about her is.

"That I'm some dark, angry, man-hating, damning, miserable woman of rock. A lot of people who haven't met me are quite scared and anticipate being very nervous around me because I'm going to fly off the handle at any minute. And I'm nothing like that."

Fiercely protective of her private life, she concedes, however, the image offers her a shield to shelter behind when it has suited.

"Yeah, I guess. It means people don't know what I'm like — and I don't particularly want to let people in to exactly how I am anyway. Before, I used to flounder through everything and would get caught out and hurt and feel like my private space had been invaded."

Harvey's more relaxed demeanour has made its way into her music. Her City/Sea album suggests a sense of release from the voodoo blues and melancholy undertow of her former work. It's an optimistic, less claustrophobic step into the light, albeit in an emotionally taut way.

"I guess I am in a more stable and sound state of mind, generally feeling a lot more at peace with myself," says the woman who suffered two nervous breakdowns earlier in her career. "I think a lot of it is just getting older and a better perspective of one's self. You start realising things you thought were dreadfully important aren't really. I used to be such a perfectionist and would worry about getting everything exactly how I wanted it played."

Previously she wouldn't allow leeway for the band to breathe or find a new way of playing her songs, now she's more interested in seeing what others can bring to her material. It's a letting go.

"In time songs change. They start off one way and just move all the time. They'll hit different peaks and change character. It's having to know that and to let that happen. It's about being in the moment more and not trying to pin things down which is what I used to do a lot."

She admits she wouldn't have wanted to be in PJ Harvey's band six years ago.

It is perhaps ironic that what inspired the most recent music from this woman from the windswept shores of England was living in the pulsating metropolis of New York. She was surprised she took to the place so quickly.

Harvey's music has always explored American blues and the dark southern Gothic folk tradition, but now she has turned toward urban poetics and is drawing comparisons with the likes of Patti Smith.

She gravitated to the city and the style through writers such as Neil Young and Bob Dylan and wanted to challenge herself to write in a more lyrical and poetic style.

"Not only that, but I wanted to sing in a much more melodic way. I was drawn to that place at that time and I don't know where I might go next. I'm drawn to newness and finding new ground and to do that I have to find myself new information as well."

She speaks of the Jungian metaphors of the city and the sea of the album title: the sea is the subconscious, the city the conscious. She finds an analogy in her own creativity.

"I often think songwriting is like the blurring of the two and when I'm writing I don't feel very real, I feel suspended in time and place. It's a bit like being in one's subconscious or asleep. I live by the sea when I'm at home in England. I walk the tide line often and you've got that duality of the land and of the sea as the subconscious or the dreamscape. I like to play with that idea because it does seem to me to be something about creativity, and my creative writing seems to bounce off those two things."

If Jungian analysis is out of the orbit of most of rock culture it hasn't hindered her career. Her nomination for the Brit Awards next month as best solo British female artist is testimony to that.

But, having had so many awards and nominations, does another mean much? Does she shamelessly think, "I hope I win"?

With a self-effacing laugh she says she still gets excited "in the same way as I still get excited if we play Top of the Pops." And yes, she does look at who she's up against, but "in my heart I know it doesn't mean anything. I'd like to win and I still enjoy all of that but if I don't win I don't look devastated."

So this former daughter of darkness gets a kick out of Top of the Pops? Another PJ myth happily shot to hell.

And here's another: Her manager is Paul McGuinness who has helmed U2's career, so with his muscle and half a dozen acclaimed albums which have translated into healthy sales, she's got it made.

"I still struggle to keep afloat and have to be very careful when I'm touring. I keep costs down as much as I can. So yeah, that's a myth."