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So then, the big ones. Birth, death, sex, childhood, parenting: these were the themes of PJ Harvey’s show, the first of two at the Roundhouse. They were arranged around a full-length rendition of her new album, I Inside the Old Year Dying. The opening words were sung by the British singer-songwriter as she stood in the eye of a single spotlight, hand reaching out towards the audience. Her voice was as high as she could make it, not so much airily ethereal as strangely unworldly: “As childhood died . . . ”
High seriousness can be unintentionally comic. But with the momentary exception of the wild vibrato that she brought to the word “love” during a later rendition of back-catalogue classic “To Bring You My Love”, Harvey avoided the melodrama of a performer striving for significance. A longtime chronicler of the visceral stuff of life, with a reputation as one of the most consistent yet also unpredictable rock musicians of the past 30 years, she has devised a mesmerising staging for her current tour — carefully plotted and stylised but also elemental, like ancient Greek theatre recast for a gig.
This affinity isn’t as fanciful as it might seem. Harvey is back in the world of music after a successful foray into narrative poetry with her book Orlam. Using west country dialect, it tells the fantastical story of a young girl in rural Dorset, which is where Polly Jean Harvey grew up. The 12 tracks of I Inside the Old Year Dying are based on poems from Orlam. The singer enacted them with theatrical gestures, such as the timorous glance backwards that she gave as she moved from the lip of the stage during “Lwonesome Tonight”, a haunting fable about a weird, sexually charged apparition in a forest.
These vivid tales — ripe with nature imagery, but rotten also with the taint of something wicked this way coming — were given atmospheric musical expression. Murky synthesiser drones and sparse guitar motifs lent the songs’ rustic setting a knotty post-punk character. Drummer Jean-Marc Butty used mallets to create a full sound, the steady beat of seasons passing. The other musicians were Giovanni Ferrario, James Johnston and Harvey’s collaborator since the late 1980s, John Parish. They wore beiges and off-whites, a neutral backdrop to Harvey in her sleeveless cream dress.
There was a needless guest appearance from the actor Colin Morgan for several songs, singing an indistinct backing vocal and tapping at a tabor. But otherwise the spell cast by Harvey and her band was total. The dialect lyrics had an anachronistic feel, like the “scrid of flesh” in “All Souls”, although Harvey sang in a placeless modern English accent. Accentuated by the mix of electronic and organic instruments, the performance had the timeless feel of deep myth.
The set’s second half comprised 13 older tracks, picked with a poet’s eye for associations and a musician’s ear for consonance. Children were a linked theme, from the dying first world war soldier “calling for his mother” in “The Colour of the Earth” (sung by the four men of the band) to the mother drowning her daughter in the grisly blues of “Down by the Water”. Birth and death were entangled, like the “people getting born and dying” that Harvey sang about in “Angelene”.
“The Desperate Kingdom of Love”, played alone by Harvey on acoustic guitar, was addressed to a lover who was “a sickly child”. After this hushed, intense number, the volume got louder and punchier, leading to a final knockout in the encore. “C’mon Billy” was a pressing number about a woman calling for the absent man who fathered her child. Then the mood switched to the hazy title track from 2007’s White Chalk. Using her high register again, Harvey sang enigmatic verses about a pregnant woman who ends up with blood on her hands. She ended by moving closer to the microphone stand, but silently, without singing. There was nothing else to say: the big themes had been dispatched.
★★★★★
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