PJ Harvey - London Brixton Academy - 15/7/04
4/5
By: Tim Dellow
A lot has changed since the last time Polly hit the stage. Around the release of her last record 'Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea', she was dealing in lush, feminine rock, arguably pandering to the MOR tendencies of the Mercury Music Prize board. Back then, her predominantly female line-up, of six or more musicians, accurately backed the 'Horses'-style songs, thumping their hooves and neighing at the crowd. Now, she returns with three boys, to match the aggressive, minimalist crash of her new album 'Uh Huh Her'.
The first to take the stage is the towering Germanic bassist, looking like a cross between a Clash shitty Rocker and Frankenstein's monster, thumping primordial stew out of his thudstaff. Pounding percussion from the left channel, augmented by a floppy-haired lad who can't keep still, the guitar flying out of his hands and up into the air with every runaway excretion of diuretic feedback, a speeding Thurston, catapulted onto the drum kit, at times complimenting the other drummer's rhythms in a furious pound-out.
And the lady herself. Oh Jesus f**king Christ, have some mercy. She wails it... bleeding red-lips that seduce and scare off in one move. The hand-maid tight rouge dress, a spangled tac-bag and her own portrait printed on her rear.
She whispers, she screams; 'I'm soiled but aloof.'
[I am the male gaze, she shows it to me, seducing me, the object of my desires in this roasting black sweatbox, I can smell her.]
PJ is perhaps the only woman whose female fans want to f**k her as much as the male. The tattooed lady in the front row, her arms scratched with bruise blue pictures of Polly, the figure next to me, silently sobbing throughout the encore.
Contrast with the macho-f**kwits who scream shit like, 'I love you... marry me.' As if you could contain a woman like that with your Stella-breathed proclamations of spurious desire. As if you'd want to. Guys. Take a leaf out of the ladies book, they understand adoration, and it's a mutual thing. Suck it.
Drawing heavily from the new record, and throwing down skeletal fractures of tracks from 'Stories...', and the odd yesteryear bonus ('To Bring You My Love', for one), Polly cremates our hearts into ash black smoulderdash. Straddling the mike-stand with a phallic directness she pulls us back into her, 'Who the f**k do you think you are? What do you know about love?', her free flowing agro warding off imitations from a miss Karen O. She bites and she spits throughout the hottest sex show of our lives, before tenderly kneeling down, and kissing us better, massaging our love bites and licking our sores. Emotive true love; hard, fast, and passionate as a blood wedding.
Artists in this article: PJ Harvey
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