Tonight’s selections from PJ Harvey’s second album, 1993’s Rid of Me.
Since 1992, when she released “Dry,” her début album, PJ Harvey has made complex music that channels a primal, earthly energy. For me, her work has always conjured images of the natural world, a certain rawness and danger: a prehistoric volcano rupturing, or a big cat darting elegantly across a plain. — The New Yorker
Rid of Me
Polly Jean Harvey, vocals/guitar: I’d done a foundation course in art school and was going to do a degree in sculpture, but instead of doing that, I’d signed a record deal and deferred my place. After making Dry, I thought, “I’ll make one more record.” Then I thought people will probably get bored of me. So I deferred my college course again to write Rid of Me.
Rob Ellis, drums: It was a funny time for all of us. We’d gone from playing gigs in local pubs just before the first album to suddenly John Peel promoting us, having an album in the Top 10 of the charts, and playing big festival crowds. We were from this tiny little country county in the west of England and were very innocent. So each of us were dealing with the fact that we’d been thrust into this situation. Polly had gone up to London, she had an offer to go to college. I was thinking of going to music college. It was still floating around that this thing was not permanent and potentially this wasn’t going to be a career. So Polly was up in London and she was very unhappy.
Harvey: I remember starting to write in a flat I was living in, a horrible, horrible little flat that I was sharing in Tottenham. Tottenham is quite a rough area in London. We were living in a very damp flat with gas heaters, and I had a poky little room at the front of the house. In order to access any of the rest of the house you had to walk through my room. We were on the lower floor, so the people up above us would make noise. I remember starting to write the song “Rid of Me,” sitting on my bed in my damp front room by the gas heater. When I’m writing towards a record, there’s often one song that emerges as the lynchpin. At that time, I very much wanted to write songs that shocked. When I was at art college, all I wanted to do was shock with my artwork. When I wrote “Rid of Me,” I shocked myself. I thought, ‘Well, if I’m shocked, other people might be shocked.” The sound of the words was powerful, and the rhythm felt clean and simple to roll off the tongue. I knew that this was the type of song I was trying to write. — SPIN
50 Ft Queenie
Like the music of Pixies, whose 1988 debut Surfer Rosa [Steve] Albini had produced, the album thrives on sudden shifts in volume and tone. It opens, on “Rid of Me,” at a whisper. Even the drums sound like echoes from a mile away until, midway through the track, every instrument shifts to a scream and Harvey spits out the chorus—“Don’t you wish you never, never met her?”—her voice coated in venom. The abruptness only magnifies the impact. Each song is a different scary pop-up book: Turn any page and a three-dimensional monster could leap out at you.
At other moments on the album, it’s the sparseness of the instrumentals that throws Harvey’s words into relief: “I might as well be dead,” she bellows, amid the droning guitars and clanking percussion of “Legs.” Then, suddenly, the song is ending, and only the ghost of a strum accompanies the chilling final line, “But I could kill you instead.” On “Dry,” written for the album of the same name but saved for Rid of Me, a similar quiet sets in the first time Harvey utters the defining kiss-off of her early career: “You leave me dry.” [...]
You wouldn’t have known it from the way Rid of Me was psychoanalyzed, but most—possibly all—of its songs contain or are written in the voices of characters who are not literally Polly Jean Harvey and the men who crossed her path. She has called “Highway 61 Revisited”—the raucous Bob Dylan rag that she covers here as a frantic invocation of Patti Smith—a formative influence on her songwriting. Beginning with a dust-up between God and Abraham, before flashing forward to the 20th century the blues-rock classic really does fit seamlessly with her original compositions. Her stories, from the possibly abusive relationship detailed in “Hook” to the Miltonian encounter between Eve and the serpent that comprises “Snake,” often take the form of dialogues, with Harvey giving voice to women, men, and various other animals. — Pitchfork
Man-Size
The back story to Rid Of Me revealed an artist in a state of mental exhaustion. Much of the album was written in Harvey’s home county of Dorset in October 1992. At the time, Polly was suffering from what she would describe as a "breakdown". Over the previous 18 months, Harvey’s life had changed beyond recognition and she had fled her North London flat for the tranquility of the English coast.
Originally from the tiny village of Corscombe, the country girl had moved to the capital to further her music career. With the ‘Dress’ single immediately creating a huge impact, she was immediately thrown into a hectic touring schedule. While the first album had been released by the small Too Pure imprint, Harvey was further stressed by finding herself at the centre of a major label bidding war. [...]
On top of that, the singer-songwriter had just endured the painful ending of her first proper relationship – an experience that would inspire a number of the most jagged moments on Rid Of Me. By October, Harvey wasn’t eating properly and could barely bathe or clean her teeth. Her mother drove her back to Dorset to recuperate and find solace in the countryside. Back home, Polly would write a new batch of songs. "It’s going to get ugly," she would tell a friend at the time. — The Quietus
Dry
Harvey grew up on that farm with her sculptor mother and her quarryman father – plus their record collection, full of blues (John Lee Hooker, Howlin’ Wolf) and rock (Hendrix, Beefheart). “Keith Richards is one of my heroes,” she told Rolling Stone in 1993. That heritage runs deep in Rid of Me – it’s like Exile on Main St. fan-fic where her voice is Keith and her guitar is Mick. Hence a brilliant stroke like “Dry,” where she kisses off an inept lover with power chords, thudding drums and a woozy slide-guitar solo that hits like pure sarcasm, with the four-word chorus: “You leeeeave! Meeee! Dryyyy!” She sings the line with different venom each time – sometimes stretching out “leave,” sometimes spitting “dry” – but her guitar gets the nastiest punch lines. [...]
Rid of Me dropped the same summer as Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville (IVH diary) – two albums that fans had always wanted to exist, and two albums that fans felt we’d been awaiting for years. (Just in time for Labor Day, we also got the Breeders’ Last Splash.) In the wake of grunge and riot grrrl, new freedoms had opened up for feminist weirdos to make noise. Harvey and Phair sounded nothing alike on the surface, but they shared the sense of a soft-spoken loner plugging in her guitar and finding her voice. This was something new. As critic Jen Fleissner wrote in the Village Voice, “In the movies, girls almost never get to be funny (vs. Jodie Foster/Meryl Streep serious) and occupy center stage. One of the biggest deals in music this year turned out to be women grabbing the limelight and acting not just pissed off, but funny, too. Even funny and scary at once: ‘Tarzan, stop your fucking screaming!’ or ‘I take full advantage of every man I meet.'”
Harvey isn’t coy about claiming classic-rock tropes, whether she’s desecrating Dylan (“Highway 61 Revisited”) or voodoo-child–ing out (“Ecstasy”). She even tweaks the cliché of naming a song after her last album, à la Led Zeppelin’s “Houses of the Holy” or Elvis Costello’s “Almost Blue.” Her blues moves seemed so taboo at the time – the blues, like astrology, is something each generation embraces or rejects to taunt the previous one. But she had an impact on fellow spirits like Kurt Cobain, who went on to sing a Lead Belly song a few months later for Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged. Cobain, who famously listed Dry as one of his all-time favorite albums, was so floored by Rid of Me he played it for interviewers. As Dave Grohl told Rolling Stone in 2014, “Kurt loved PJ Harvey. We had always imagined playing our song ‘Milk It’ from In Utero with her. It’s a twisted song, almost like something that could have been on her record Rid of Me.” — Rolling Stone
Legs
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Highway 61 Revisited
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