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| Birth Name(s) : Polly Jean Harvey |
Date of Birth: N/A |
| Status:
Single
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Partner:
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| Profession:
Singer-songwriter |
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Full PJ Harvey Biography
A few of the accolades received have been the 2001 Mercury Music Prize, six BRIT Award nominations, five Grammy nominations and two further Mercury Music Prize nominations. Currently, she has two albums on the Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, as well as being named as 1992's Best New Artist and Best Singer Songwriter, later being named 1995's Artist of the Year by Rolling Stone, along with being rated the number one female rock artist by Q magazine in a 2002 poll.
Harvey was born in Yeovil, Somerset, England and brought up in nearby Corscombe, Dorset. The daughter of a stonemason and a sculptor, Harvey grew up on a small sheep farm in Dorset. At an early age her parents introduced her to the blues, jazz and art-rock which, she told Rolling Stone in 1995, would later influence her: "I was brought up listening to John Lee Hooker, to Howlin' Wolf, to Robert Johnson, and a lot of Jimi Hendrix and Captain Beefheart. So I was exposed to all these very compassionate musicians at a very young age, and that's always remained in me and seems to surface more as I get older. I think the way we are as we get older is a result of what we knew when we were children". She later spent a period of time listening to rock bands such as U2 and The Police as well as Soft Cell, Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet. In her teens she became a huge fan of the seminal US indie guitar bands Pixies, Television and Slint, though not, as many critics have suspected, Patti Smith (a frequent comparison that Harvey dismisses as "lazy journalism"). More recently she has claimed inspiration from Russian folk music, Italian soundtrack composer Ennio Morricone and classical composers like Arvo Pärt, Samuel Barber and Henryk Górecki.
After the departure of Ellis and Vaughan in August 1993, Harvey embarked on a solo career exploring collaborations with other musicians. To Bring You My Love (1995) was produced by Flood and John Parish, and quickly became a staple of alternative rock. To Bring You My Love was a worldwide success, selling over one million copies, according to BPI. A more bluesy record than its predecessors, it saw Harvey broadening her sonic palette to include strings, organ and synthesizers. It also generated a surprise modern rock radio hit with the single "Down by the Water". The album received a glowing critical response and ended up being voted Album of the Year by The Village Voice, Rolling Stone, USA Today, People, The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. Harvey was also voted Artist of the Year by Rolling Stone and Spin. Her album was ranked third in Spin's Top 90 Albums of the '90s, behind Nirvana and Public Enemy.
In 1998 she released Is This Desire?, which met a more muted but overall still positive critical reception. Despite the few naysayers, Harvey herself cited it as her personal favourite; it saw her temporarily leaving the guitars behind and focusing on building dark, studio-based mood pieces around electronics, keyboards, piano and bass.
In a recent issue, Hot Press magazine praised her for crafting "some of the most erotic, powerful and positive love songs ever written".
In 2004, Diplo extensively sampled "Down by the Water" for his remix of "Still Tippin'", the breakout single of Houston rapper Mike Jones (also featuring Slim Thug and Paul Wall). Diplo used the sample again in 2006 in "Now I Hollar" by the indie hip-hop group Plastic Little, a track featuring Spank Rock and included on the album She's Mature.The album cover of White Chalk
In November 2006 she started working on her eighth studio album, White Chalk, with Flood, John Parish, and Eric Drew Feldman. It was released in Europe on September 24, 2007, and in the United States on October 2. The album marks a radical departure from her usual style, consisting mainly of piano ballads.
Outside of the better-known musical career, Harvey appeared as Magdalena, a modern-day character based on Mary Magdalene in Hal Hartley's 1998 film The Book of Life, and had a cameo as a singing Bunny Girl in the Sarah Miles-directed short A Bunny Girl's Tale. She is also an accomplished sculptor who has had pieces exhibited at the Lamont Gallery and the Bridport Arts Centre, as well as a published poet.
Offstage, Harvey has cultivated a reputation for eccentricity to match her music; for example, Steve Albini claimed she ate nothing but potatoes while making Rid Of Me. Harvey describes herself as "an extremely quiet person, who doesn't go out much, doesn't talk to people", and rejects the notion that her songs are autobiographical. She told The Times in 1998, "The tortured artist myth is rampant. People paint me as some kind of black witchcraft-practising devil from hell, that I have to be twisted and dark to do what I am doing. It's a load of rubbish". She later told Spin, "Some critics have taken my writing so literally to the point that they'll listen to 'Down by the Water' and believe I have actually given birth to a child and drowned her." In 2006, Blender included her in their list of the hottest women of rock, calling her a "blues-rock sorceress trafficking in social politics and dark, tormented songwriting.". |
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