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PJ Harvey at Perth Festival: As she returns to the stage, the English music icon reveals her retirement plans

Polly Jean Harvey was “utterly exhausted” when she completed touring her 2016 album The Hope Six Demolition Project. The Grammy-nominated release, created with a big band of familiar and guest musicians in recording sessions open to the public at London’s Somerset House, featured songs written during the English singer-songwriter’s travels through Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Washington D.C. Like previous release Let England Shake, which earned Harvey a second Mercury Prize to make her the only artist to win the UK’s most prestigious album honour twice, The Hope Six Demolition Project focused on war — the ongoing conflict in Afghanistan, as well as the long shadows cast by World Wars I and II. As the 55-year-old iconoclast explains from Dorset — she has a home in her birthplace in the south-west of England, as well as in London — she’d spent more than a decade in the trenches, so to speak. Making, and touring, two albums set in a “very political, violent landscape” had taken its toll. “It was a really, really long time to be buried in very dark material that was often troubling and upsetting,” Harvey says in her gentle yet direct manner during a video interview. “I was suffering without knowing it. I sort of came off the Hope Six tour and felt like I’d lost my love of everything, not just music.” She decided to take a hiatus from music. “It was exhaustion as much as anything,” Harvey says. “But it was also moving towards my 50s. “I needed to ask myself, again, ‘Is this the thing I should continue to do for the rest of my life? I’ve got 30 years left, if I’m lucky. Do you want to keep doing this? Is it still fulfilling you?’ “I had to take a bit of time away from music. “I promised myself that I wouldn’t do anything unless I felt a huge, urgent desire to do it.” Did she plan to do a spot of gardening? Surely, the diminutive force of nature behind indie rock firestorms such as 50ft Queenie, Man-Size and Sheela-Na-Gig would not go quietly into the night? How seriously did Harvey consider retirement? “Very, very seriously, actually,” she says. “So seriously that I sat my managers down and said ‘Look, I know you took me on as a performing artist of music. You know what? I’m going to write a book of poems’. I said ‘Now, you’ve got a poet’. “And I gave them permission to dump me if they wanted to. “They were amazing. They said ‘No, we believe in you and no matter what you’re doing, we’re not going anywhere’.” Harvey also sat her parents down to tell them PJ, the alternative rock goddess of the past few decades, was no more. That phase of her life was over. “It was serious for me,” she insists. She wrote scores for theatre and television, including the soundtracks for both series of Irish black comedy Bad Sisters, Shane Meadows’ miniseries The Virtues, and the National Theatre’s Charles Dickens adaptation London Tide. The latter was directed by Ian Rickson, who has helped stage-design several of her tours. Harvey also chipped away at her second book of poetry, Orlam, a dark magical realist tale set in her native West Country about a nine-year-old heroine, Ira-Abel Rawles. Published in 2022, the tome draws on local folklore and was written in a vivid Dorset dialect. “I had to learn it,” she says of her local vernacular. “The interesting thing was that a lot of it almost seemed to be in my blood. “I remember as a young child hearing the older people in the village I grew up in using some of those dialectal words that came very naturally to me, and it didn’t take long for me to learn them.” Orlam represents a “change of scale” and a “resting place to restore” herself after the bloodied battlefields of Let England Shake and The Hope Six Demolition Project. “I’d been looking outwards for a long, long time and I want to go to a very small place,” Harvey says. “Orlam comes down to one child, one village, one small woodland — that’s it.” The book could be considered Harvey’s Alice In Wonderland. “I like that,” she laughs. “It is a fairy tale, and a very strange one.” One particularly “curiouser and curiouser” aspect of Orlam is the character Wyman-Elvis, the ghost of a Christ-like soldier, whose message of Love Me Tender makes it clear to whom Harvey is referring. “You can do anything in poems,” she says. “As long as you can back it up, as long as you make sense, as long as it has clarity, you can do anything you want.” Harvey says Elvis Presley was one of her first loves, her first idols, when she was the same age as young Ira-Abel. “I was transfixed by his beauty and his voice,” the singer says. “I mean, that voice is incredible and utterly just so transporting and so moving, and so filled with power and longing and fragility.” As she wrote Orlam, Harvey also created visual representations of the story, either in ink drawings or woodblock prints. “I don’t make divisions between what I do,” she says. “I’m an artist and sometimes I draw, sometimes I sing . . . it’s all the same for me, really. “Orlam is a classic example because it ended up as a book with drawings in it, which later became songs.” Harvey’s first book of poetry, The Hollow Of The Hand, influenced the lyrics on The Hope Six Demolition Project. Similarly, Let England Shake started out as words on a page before music came along. “That was the first time I really started to write words separately from music,” she says. “I knew I had to because I knew I was trying to say something around this gargantuan topic of war. Like, where’d you even begin? “I thought ‘I’ve got to get the words right because if the words fall down, everything falls down’.” She separates PJ Harvey, poet, and PJ Harvey, lyricist. “Because you write a song doesn’t mean you’re a poet,” she insists. “Poetry is an entirely different discipline. “I find it much harder, and the words have to be a lot denser and carry a lot more meaning and a lot more weight because with a song, the music does half the work. The words can be a brushstroke. I never assumed I could be a poet because I was a lyricist.” During the writing of Let England Shake, Harvey joined local poetry groups in Dorset and London, including The Poetry School in Lambeth. There, she met Scottish poet Don Paterson. “He’s still my teacher now and I meet him once a month for a three-hour lesson,” Harvey says. Despite being a globetrotting, award-winning rock star, Harvey says she was treated no differently from anyone else. “Going to poetry classes and sharing your work is a very difficult and vulnerable thing to do,” she says. While she was composing scores for theatre, making woodblock prints and taking poetry classes, Harvey also began to miss playing music. She gravitated towards the piano and picked up a guitar to “meditate” on the songs she loved by Nina Simone, Bob Dylan, Neil Young and even British punk rockers The Stranglers. She learnt finger-picking to play her favourite Leonard Cohen and Joan Baez songs. “That became a joy for me and then naturally . . . songs just started coming out again,” Harvey says. Rickson and Harvey initially attempted to turn Orlam into a theatrical production, roping in her friends, actors Ben Whishaw and Colin Morgan, to read parts. “It didn’t work,” she concedes. “So, we went back to the drawing board. “In the meantime, I turned some of (the poetry) into songs. I wasn’t planning to make an album out of a book of poems, but it just sort of happened.” That album is I Inside The Old Year Dying, unveiled in 2023. Nominated for the best alternative music album at last year’s Grammy Awards, her 10th studio release features regular collaborators John Parish, whom Harvey met in English rock band Automatic Dlamini back in the 1980s, and producer Flood. Whishaw and Morgan perform spoken-word parts on the record. Harvey reveals work on her 11th studio album will continue after she completes touring for I Inside The Old Year Dying with her first visit to Australian in eight years. The visit includes a concert at Kings Park as part of the Perth Festival. These performances will be more intimate than the shows for The Hope Six Demolition Project, which featured an almost militaristic marching band with blazing horns and drums beating out a tattoo. In fact, every visit since Harvey’s first foray Down Under for the Big Day Out in 2001, when she rocked audiences with the songs from the Mercury Prize-winning Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea in a shiny red halter-neck dress and white cowboy hat, has been different. The gothic gigs on stripped-back 2007 album White Chalk saw her on stage strumming an autoharp. Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour has nothing on Harvey’s concert history, with each tour homing in on her latest body of work. This visit will be no different. While she will perform I Inside The Old Year Dying from start to finish at her Perth Festival show, the second half will include career highlights from her early alt-rock albums, including 1992 debut Dry and the following year’s Rid Of Me. “Obviously I was a much younger woman when I wrote those songs and you can’t just leap straight back into that youthful persona,” Harvey says. “But I can find other ways into them. “I enjoy playing those songs, and I also like acknowledging where I’ve come from. “As time goes by, the albums and the songs almost feel like nothing to do with me. “If you think back to when you were 20, it feels like another era, another world — it’s hard to remember. “I just have to treat the songs like they’re not part of me. “It’s almost like someone else’s song. But I thrive on that.” And Harvey is thriving on music again, admitting rumours of her career mortality were greatly exaggerated. Her retirement is off. “That’s not happening,” she laughs. “Music’s now the love of my life again. “I just live and breathe to make songs and sing them.” PJ Harvey plays Kings Park on March 4 as part of the 2025 Perth Festival. Tickets on sale now.

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PJ Harvey at Perth Festival: As she returns to the stage, the English music icon reveals her retirement plans

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The West Australian exclusivePJ Harvey at Perth Festival: As she returns to the stage, the English music icon reveals her retirement plans

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PJ Harvey at Perth Festival: As she returns to the stage, the English music icon reveals her retirement plans