Queen of the World (PJ Harvey, August 11, 2017)

On the day I left Budapest, I saw an English language newspaper for the first time in 8 days. One glance at the headlines and I was like, Nope. What’s that quote from the Young Fresh Fellows? “I wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then,” and by then, I meant, yesterday. Because ‘yesterday’ – metaphorically speaking -- I was at Sziget Festival awaiting PJ Harvey in a bean bag chair, surrounded by Europop, techno beats, foreign voices and the pungent smell of sausages, and I thought I’d never get up again.

Sziget Main Stage during Rudimental

For one thing, I was in a bean bag chair. For another, I’m old, and I’d climbed Buda Castle Hill that day in 100 degree heat. (Remember Lucifer? If not, see last post.) I was exhausted.

So. Lying in a bean bag chair, staring at the Hungarian sky, thinking. It felt to me like the air was alit with information, buzzing across our heads like the fairy lights and the circus poles and the fireworks and the music. The whole place was rocking. I wrote my Ph.D. dissertation on rock festivals, but I’ll be honest: this was my first time attending one in seventeen years. Sziget is one of Europe’s premiere summer rock festivals, the Coachella of the Ottoman Empire. It takes place on an island in the Danube and calls itself “the Island of Freedom,” but the only thing that’s really free there is data charges – if you have a European carrier.

Still. You do get to take a boat there. Plus, I was there to see PJ Harvey, to which one can only say: fuck yeah!

In 2001, PJ Harvey won the Mercury Prize for her album “Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea,” and she did so again ten years later in 2011 for “Let England Shake,” putting her in the Guinness Book of World Records. Yet when someone in Budapest asked me what kind of music she played, I was at a loss. I could name some song titles, but none he’d know, and as for the sound…Punk? Blues? Folk? Jazz? Indie? None of those words work. You could call her a blues artist at a considerable stretch, because she does cover some real blues songs – her version of “Wang Dang Doodle” is, in my opinion, as good as the original, or at least it’s transposition of gender and power makes it  deeper and more personally meaningful to me than the original, and that’s saying something. But a fan of Etta James (or Bonnie Raitt) would be startled to hear this jagged and edgy, harsh music put in that category.

John Peel once wrote that Polly Jean Harvey “seemed crushed by the weight of her own songs and arrangements,” but that’s not exactly right: what he must have meant was that we are. Her art is demolition. She eviscerates songs and reconstitutes them so that their notes and emotions are rubble, carefully sifted and then built back up into brand new edifices. And then, she has this band: nine, count them, nine men in black, and it is breathtaking to see her conduct them; to see them conducted by her. They are her commandos, and she is a witch controlling a coven of scary old white male warlocks, and what a sight that is to see. More than any other female artist I have ever seen, she demands complete attention.

I was close up but my camera sux.

She demanded it of me at Sziget, and she got it. Having just come off a show high in a tiny nightclub where a wall of guitars pinned me to the ground all night, I may be forgiven for thinking that an outdoor daylight festival full of drunken Magyar revelers was possibly not the ideal venue for her, but I was wrong. There in the crowd, I pushed forward to the very edge of the crush, to the place of danger where it becomes uncomfortable, and there I stopped. The terrain we were on was quite unpleasant: bottles and cans and other detritus stomped into a melange on top of a “floor” made of screwed down plastic, but the sky was an awesome pale violet color when she ascended the stage, and it was lit up with Festival fairy lights, and her sound, when it began, well, the only way to say it is, it tolled.

Imagine seeing an artist so good that you can ignore them for 16 years and when you check back in they are far, far better than you remembered. That was what this was. The best shows are the ones where you suddenly think, mid-show, that there is no better place to be on earth than where you are at that moment, when you feel like the artist is literally sucking the air out of the sky in order to form the music out of it, when it seems like what you are hearing must be being heard all over the continent. This was it. I haven’t followed her catalog since 2001, but I knew each (unknown) song intimately - it was as if I'd been listening to  ”Dear Darkness.” “The Ministry of Social Affairs.” “All and Everyone.” “The Words That Maketh Murder.” “The Wheel.” “The Community of Hope,” and other numbers from her last three albums for years. Hearing them for the first time in this context was like a sonic deflowering. It was extremely intense.

Only at the end of the set did she play some cuts from “my” era: “Fifty Foot Queenie,” “To Bring You My Love” and “Down By The Water,” and they were fantastic, a chilling distillation of anger, remorse, and the brutality of lust – but they were not even my favorite songs of the night.  “Fifty Foot Queenie” – hey, I’m king of the world, you ought to hear my song/ ah, come on measure me, I’m fifty inches long – surely now evokes the pathetic tweets of our dear leader, but the later material, from the last two records, though, is if anything even better suited to these crazy times. To reflect on the deaths of soldiers 1500 years ago, to describe WW I, to honestly assess the awful abyss of love and death and psychosis, to speak the unspeakable about the ravages of living life, feels so fucking apropos right now that it’s positively cathartic.

Here's to witches and their craft

And Polly never spoke throughout her entire set. She merely sang, stared, and welded a saxophone, a pixilated Lisa Simpson with a swans down fascinater on her head. Near the final number, “River Anacostia,” she broke the spell by introducing her bands members – Mick Harvey, John Parish,etc. – and, one by one, they all came forward to the front of the stage. Some beat drums, but the drums faded out, until they were all singing a capella, a ten person line of intensity, creating one long black stare that pierced the Hungarian night.

Then: silence. Blessed, blessed silence, 'til the clock started ticking a gain and we were blasted back into the here and now.