Invisible Hits is a column in which Tyler Wilcox scours the internet for the best (and strangest) bootlegs, rarities, outtakes, and live clips.
"I feel I am filled with complete opposites," Polly Jean Harvey told the Los Angeles Times in 1995. "Half of me loves doing what I do, and the other half wants to just be really quiet and on my own in the country."
The intensely private singer-songwriter's ambivalence toward fame has been a constant throughout her 25+ years in music, and she often takes long breaks from the stage (she hasn't toured the U.S. since 2009). But even if Harvey's not sure about rock stardom, she's proven herself to be one of our best rock stars, delivering gripping live performances time and time again.
The only question when she walks onstage is: Which PJ Harvey are we going to get? As shape-shifting and persona-obsessed as Bowie, she rarely stays in one place for very long. Harvey has a thorny new album to grapple with this week, but now is also a good time to look back at her onstage journey so far.
Automatic Dlamini // Joiners Arms, Southampton, UK // January 1990
First, a little bit of prehistory. A still-teenaged Harvey joined up with John Parish’s Automatic Dlamini in the late 1980s, providing guitar, backing vocals, and saxophone. This murky clip from late in her stint with the band is focused primarily on Parish’s charismatic frontman antics, but Harvey’s guitar work and blues-inflected vocals are immediately recognizable and distinctive. She most likely already had her sights set on a solo career at this point, but both Parish and Automatic Dlamani’s drummer Rob Ellis would remain regular collaborators in the years to come.
Yeovil College, Somerset, UK // December 1991
There were some powerful power trios operating in the early 1990s—Nirvana, the Melvins, and Dinosaur Jr. come to mind—but for my money, none packed the visceral punch of the PJ Harvey trio, who began gigging in the spring of 1991. At first the trio featured Rob Ellis and Automatic Dlamani bassist Ian Oliver, who was replaced by Steve Vaughan when he rejoined AD. Proof of their prowess early on is this electrifying 35-minute Somerset set, captured a few months prior to the release 1992's Dry, a strong debut where Harvey and co. make a glorious, aggressive racket. The music nods in the direction of Slint and the Pixies, but here, close to the moment of conception, it sounds strikingly unique—and still fresh to this day.
Kentish Town Forum, London, UK // May 1995
Less ambitious artists might have ridden the dynamic wave of the PJ Harvey trio for years. But the group disbanded at the end of 1993, just after a profile-rising slot opening for U2. PJ’s 1995 masterpiece, To Bring You My Love, brought her even more attention—and this time around, she seemed ready to embrace the spotlight, on her own terms anyway. This video of her London set in May of ‘95 is an amateur, single-camera affair. It’s captivating nonetheless. Ditching her signature black tank top, Harvey dons a shimmering dress and false eyelashes; the makeover could be wry commentary on the demands made of female performers, particularly those moving toward the mainstream, but Harvey also just owns it outright, commanding the stage throughout this set like the 50ft Queenie incarnate.
"The Wind" // “Later... with Jools Holland” // November 1998
The tour in support of To Bring You My Love saw Harvey playing before larger audiences than ever before, most notably on an ill-advised slot opening for alt-schmaltzers Live, then at the height of their fame. Stadiums don’t leave much room for subtlety, however, so PJ dialed back the theatrics when it came time to take her next solo album, 1998’s Is This Desire?, out on the road. Her vocal on “The Wind,” performed here on Jools Holland’s show, rarely rises above a whisper as her band builds up a skeletal pulse of percussion and lonely slide guitar. Subtle, yes. Less intense? No chance.
Reading Festival // August 2001
Harvey hadn’t put her inner rock demon out to pasture just yet—check out her snarling, distortion-fueled set in front of the Reading Festival hordes in the summer of 2001. Prowling the stage like a powder-keg mixture of Robert Plant and Patti Smith, PJ ably supplies the raw energy required to sate a mid-day crowd in the sweltering August air. Highlights from 2000’s Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea rank among her hookiest, most immediate songs, and she delivers a handful of them here with a confidence and swagger few performers naturally possess.
"White Chalk" // “Later... with Jools Holland” // November 2007
A few years later, Harvey U-turned yet again with the ghostly White Chalk, an album dominated by high, haunted vocals and plaintive piano, an instrument she was barely familiar with before the writing process began. The fragile tone carried over to live performances in support of the record, which featured Harvey alone without backing musicians. Harvey told the A.V. Club, “I was looking for a new way of challenging myself, and this is probably the most frightening thing I've done: to stand on a stage on your own.”
“The Words That Maketh Murder” // Mercury Prize Awards 2011
The uncompromisingly political Let England Shake, from 2011, saw Harvey taking on another unfamiliar instrument: that old folkie standby, the autoharp. Playing “The Words That Maketh Murder” at the Mercury Prize Awards—for which she took home top honors that year—decked out in a long white gown and headfeathers, Harvey looks like some kind of Edwardian alien, offering up strange truths to anyone who’ll listen. What she’ll tell us next is anyone’s guess. But we know by now she’s always worth hearing.