PJ HARVEY
Sydney Opera House forecourt, March 13
THE COLOURS TOLD US, even before the notes did.
On her most recent tours, as the rooms got bigger, PJ Harvey progressively narrowed the palette in costume and stage setting. The boldly patterned and cut outfits of yore turned to Victorian simplicity in white, then workmen’s functional garb, widow’s weeds, and increasingly crimping lights, culminating in her and her band in severe black and leather binds in an almost militaristic presentation.
This time, under lights creating shadow spots rather than dark corners the colours on the men were more autumnal and forest floor, the clothes looser, and she was in a soft-white quasi-priestly robe with trees sketched on it. There would be sins and death and sex of questionable provenance – “There was trouble taking place,” she accurately sang in The Garden, late in the show – but there was a lot more story to tell than that, beginning with the folkloric creation of 2023’s I Inside The Old Year Dying.
Played in sequence and in full to begin the night, an album that had divided fans even more than the bristling reportage of its predecessor, The Hope Six Demolition – which, interestingly, was not represented in the 25-song set list – became an enthralling piece of theatre. It was a melange of set-piece staging (PJ sat at a desk or crouched before it; ending songs with eyes cast heaven-wards in contemplation; reaching out towards us just as the lights cut), contributed noise (animal squawks and screeches; the scratchy irritant of a reverberation), and the firmer, earthier, beautifully mixed voice she now offers.
And it was carried by a band – the absolutely central to all subtleties of mood and direction drummer Jean-Marc Butty, multi-instrumentalists John Parish, James Johnston and Giovanni Ferrario, and Harvey occasionally on autoharp, harmonica, electric and acoustic guitar – that even when visceral and agitated in A Noiseless Noise, played within the songs and lived the invocation in A Child’s Question, “Love me tender, tender love”.
If the show was divided in two - newest album in full; career-wide variety - it was not separated by approach. The theatricality, the exaggerated physicality and moves, remained, as did the plainness of the sonic palette and the containment/internal channelling of power that allowed for 50ft Queenie to be febrile, animalistic even, without overwhelming force, and a tenderly compelling Desperate Kingdom Of Love, done solo on acoustic, to sound like a dark western ballad for a captive Frankie Laine.
To Bring You My Love was sinew and bone, taut skin stretched almost to transparency; electric bass sealed Man-Size as a pressing blues cut through by violin; Dress was a properly sinuous experience, from its rhythm to Parish’s trebly soft counter-vocals. And then, closing the night and closing the circle with the Dorset village voicings of the first half, White Chalk held firm within its ghostliness, forlorn but not forsaken, colours diffused rather than stark.
Wonder struck. Wonder was full.
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A version of this review was originally published in The Sydney Morning Herald
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