School bells ring and a spotlight falls on an empty mic stand. Polly Jean Harvey stands in the darkness, waiting for the applause to dim before stepping into that beam of light.
Prayer at the Gate, the opening song on Harvey’s 10th album I Inside the Old Year Dying, sets the muddy, macabre tone. Over whistling synths and Jean-Marc Butty’s elegant drumming, like dragging feet, she makes her great voice eerily thin, as if she’s channelling a message. “Look behind, look before,” she decrees, eyes fixed on the middle-distance. “Life knocking at death’s door.”
I Inside is an intricate, tricky epic: folk, electronica and flashes of post-punk illustrate verse from her narrative poem Orlam. Written in the Dorset dialect, we follow nine-year-old Ira-Abel through one year in the imagined village of Underwhelm, a place both earthy and horrifyingly fantastical.
Tonight Harvey and her band (trusted collaborator John Parish, Jean-Marc Butty, and multi-instrumentalists Giovanni Ferrario and James Johnston) present the album in full, bleached by floods of white light. Field recordings haunt the stage – a gaggle of children, a dawn chorus – and Harvey ritualises each song with precise, considered movement. It’s not until album closer A Noiseless Noise that everyone – Harvey, her band, the audience – seem to unclench their shoulders, luxuriating in the song’s violent, cleansing squall.
After this the show is reset, and Harvey curates older songs around similar themes of transformation and transgression. A storming run through Man-Size and Dress brings the grit and swing of her 90s record, yet feels pointedly connected to this evening’s earlier dissection of girlhood. Down By the Water’s up next, and absorbing the crowd’s fresh surge of energy, Harvey comes in far too early. She grins, shrugs and shakes her curls, lapping the stage before arriving back at the mic right on time.
“Thank you for making us so happy,” she says later, as both a hello and a farewell, before covering Bob Dylan’s Dark Eyes. It’s immediately obvious why this intimate tour is the right time for such a simple, brutal, cryptic song: “I live in another world, where life and death is memorised.”
• This article was updated on 27 September 2023. The guitarist in the second photo is Giovanni Ferrario, not John Parish as previously stated.
