PJ Harvey live

PJ Harvey

Guardian festival, Hay-on-Wye

Ian Gittins
Monday May 29, 2006
The Guardian

"I've never played the piano in front of people before, so I'm incredibly nervous," says Polly Harvey. "Every time I play a duff note, I'm going to pull a face like Les Dawson."

Few people would compare Harvey to the late rubber-visaged comic but she remains one of rock's true chameleons, and tonight's solo show - her only European festival appearance of the summer - sees her unveil another tantalising musical change in direction.

Clad in a demure black dress ("my 1940s war look"), Harvey fires straight into some of the most casually apocalyptic moments of her stellar 15-year career. Early nuggets Dress and Man-Size remain curt, vengeful blows to the solar plexus, Harvey still looking frail yet heavy with gravitas as she wrestles with her guitar for solutions to intractable problems.

Her music invariably throbs with a ferocious, militant honesty, and Horses in My Dreams evokes Patti Smith not just in the lyrical echo but via its visceral urgency. Then the serrated Who the Fuck? from 2004's Uh Huh Her sounds colossal, a feral, inarticulate tirade spat from the end of her tether.

Yet it's the new material that intrigues. Harvey says she has written an entire album on piano and moves to the feared instrument to deliver The Mountain, a volley of loaded melancholy and spectral, treated vocals. Bitter Little Bird is even more haunting, recalling Liz Fraser's elegiac reading of Tim Buckley's Song to the Siren. An album in this vein would be a remarkable addition to her canon.

There's even time for comedy: when her vintage organ ("£50, it cost") squeaks to a halt, Harvey deploys her best Pam Ayres tones to instigate a deadpan routine with her roadie: "Shall we turn it off, and turn it on again?" Maybe those Les Dawson comparisons weren't so far-fetched after all.