Revolver - Interview - Winter 2000
                                     Who's That Girl?
                    [ "I got something to hide here called desire" - Patti Smith ]

               PJ HARVEY

               After building her last two albums around hushed tones and shadowy character
               sketches, Polly Harvey searingly - and sometimes sneeringly - revisits her past
               on Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea. Why? It's a question Harvey
               prefers not to address too directly. Like most lyricists, she communicates best
               via the clipped cadences of song. And while she concedes that the tunes on
               her new record tell the story of a happier woman, or at least one more capable
               of reconciling with the wily ways of love, she demurs as soon as things get even
               remotely personal. Fair enough. Bit on 1998's Is this Desire?, there's no doubt
               that Harvey questioned whether those wily ways were worth their cost; these
               days, swooning even as she continues to dice up desire on much of Stories,
               she seems more comfortable scratching at other people's skin. And living in her
               own.

               Your new record is much more explicit and emotionally direct than Is
               This Desire?
               I purposefully wanted to get away from concentrating so much on atmosphere
               and soundscape like I'd been doing and really get back to very simple
               songwriting with one guitar and one voice. Where I'm at personally and what I'm
               feeling at the time determines whether I need to distance myself or be very
               direct.

               What changed your approach in that way?
               I've been writing a lot of poetry, and that's made me look at lyric writing very
               differently. I write a lot of freehand prose, kind of rambling stuff that I hone down
               into poems that might become songs. A lot of it is rubbish, but it's something I
               do every day. And to go from a poem to a song you have to be more crass
               somehow. Poems can go firing off in any direction. But I wanted these songs to
               have a certain resolve.

               You said that your six-month stay in New York was a big inspiration.
               How so?
               It's a foreign country to me, and I had to relearn everything - my approach to
               being with people and places. I found myself really opening my eyes and
               looking at things. I remember walking down the streets and looking up at the
               sky, the facades on the buildings, the carvings that you see there. All these
               things. I never do that at home because it's so familiar to me.

               How does that come across on the record when you go back and listen
               to it?
               I get a really positive feeling from this record, much more than I've felt from any
               of the others. What I do to other people's records that I have - and need - is
               make them my own. And when I listen to Stories, it fills me with this positive
               energy that I usually rely on other people's records for. These songs do that for
               me, and that's quite a difference. It allows people in quite a lot more. It's not so
               shut down.

               Andy Battaglia