To Die on Good Friday

A Review of Let England Shake by PJ Harvey

My Grandmother (seated right)

PJ Harvey is a storyteller, a spinner of tales from her own mind. Up to now every song, save perhaps for the covers, has seemed like an internal monologue, a stream-of-consciousness discourse on whatever her inward focus points at. Much has therefore been made about the sudden outward-facing direction of the music on Let England Shake and this collection of songs is indeed much more expansive than anything that has gone before. However, they are still stories. All that is different now is that they are about other people, suffering in the real world of the news, from the smudged black and white images accompanying the wind-blown newspapers of 1914-18 to the garish video of the most recent uprisings. At the time of writing it is worth noting that the song Written on the Forehead could be applied to both the blurry and common Middle-East wars we have seen before and the current revolutions of various severity that dominate the headlines of the moment.

When I first bought albums, they were valuable things, to be played from beginning to end, over and over so that the sound of the next track would burn into my head and surface as the previous one ended. These days, with selective downloads and shuffle, we all listen to our favourite songs in isolation, skipping the tracks we don't like or don't feel in the mood for. Let England Shake should be played through in order. Allow yourself to regain that internal echo of the whole collection, sink into the concept, let it wash over you. If you take account of the words and music, then this album hangs together without weakness or filler, without analysis or preaching, a single document of the ambivalence Polly Jean has towards her country, what it represents and what it has done to get where it is. She hands this set of observations over to us without politics, for it needs none, to show that both the past and future contain bad things, atrocious behaviour in the name of Queen and Country. But together with this you find hope, between the lines, hidden in the emotion that shows a love of country despite its flaws.

Uh Huh Her was an album of individual tracks, up and down with no flow, a set of unconnected points without smooth progression, decent enough individual songs but ultimately unsatisfying as a collection. But then again that is the way Polly keeps things fresh. In contrast Let England Shake is an album with a smooth curve. The emotional take of each track progresses from the domestic to the international in a way that to me shows there has been complex thought put into the ordering of tracks. Allowing for the outward-looking nature of this collection, the words are poetic in a way that I don’t remember seeing in a record since Graceland. The opening title track which was premièred in front of the then Prime Minister Gordon Brown on The Andrew Marr Show, seemed at the time an international comment with it’s direct sample of “Istanbul (not Constantinople)” from The Four Lads but on the album and stripped of this bathetic vocal it turns into a jittery analysis of England today, troubled by the dead of wars past. Here we have a novelistic opening, the establishment of a framework from which the flashbacks to the horrors of wars past can be examined in later songs. It details the progression of England from minor nation, through world-dominating empire to the faded country we are today, afraid to upset anyone. Except we still do. We pursue wars in countries that many times have buried us in those foreign fields and today send us back in planes, draped with The Union Flag and saluted in slow parades of repatriation, death seemingly removing the right of anyone to protest at the escapades that cause it.

The second song is The Last Living Rose, a beautiful and spare song that shows its beauty by using the word itself to describe England. The lyrics remind me of Dylan Thomas, possibly because of the reference to Dead Sea Captains. It imagines England on some nondescript evening, the viewer above London, looking at the silver streak of the Thames set amid the continuous black of the rest of the city merging into night. The final verse possibly echoes another English Poet, Ted Hughes, the hedge shaking under the moon. Earlier on it mentions the Thames as a “River, glistening like gold hastily sold for nothing”, maybe suggesting someone selling valuables quickly to get food. Or is it a sneaky dig at Mr Brown and his gold giveaway from a decade ago or maybe the tacky goldforcashdotcom websites of filler TV?

The Glorious Land is a Nursery Rhyme, a simple rant about a marshal land, ploughed by tanks and marching feet. It calls and responds in a simplistic picture painted of something like the perpetual war of Nineteen-Eighty-Four, pasted over a slowed sample from of all things, The Bed’s Too Big Without You by The Police (I know who I think gains more credibility in that combination). And we have to mention That Bugle. Pasted across this track is a short version of Assembly, the call to arms, that has me imagining that the short refrain of “Oh, America, Oh England” is a call for the two old enemies/friends to stand together in war and sod the rest of us ploughed under the tracks of mighty machines. This bugle call is so strange and out-of-time with the music of the track, that some reviewers thought it was an anti-piracy device on their promo copies. In these days of sampling and computerised music-making, this could so easily have been incorporated and stretched or squeezed to make it fit. Polly has ignored this, leaving it as a flaw like the deliberate mistakes in old carvings to show deference to the perfection of God. And instead of jarring, it works, fitting in but showing the music to be a proper work of emotion and live playing. Some have complained about the “Sixth-Form Poetry” of the words but maybe we need simplicity of thought to show when something is wrong. People who complain about this, thrive on complexity to show the emptiness of their own minds, lost in the myriad tiny details that pervade everyday life.

The first single from the album (it is difficult not to fall into the language of music review proper and use the phrase “culled from”), The Words That Maketh Murder again caused some dissent for the antique language of the title, but hey – it scans. This is Polly as War Correspondent, though I see the speaker of the words as more of a photographer. This is possibly a musical catalogue of those great Robert Capa coffee-table books, bringing the mess, mud and murder of war to the stay-at-homes, though it references Goya as well, placing us like little stick figures with camera and notepad in amongst those Chapman Brothers depictions of Goya’s War Atrocities. Again, it needs no preaching and I cannot tell if the borrowing of “What if I take my problem to The United Nations?” from Eddie Cochran is a plea for the UN to step up or the observation that they rarely can. The music is a stomper with cosy brass and inexpert clattering of the percussion which brings to me the vague notion of a loosely-convened band entertaining in the trenches. Here we still have a song of detached observation, not the darkness of mind that comes with those actually fighting. This is to come with the sweeping and filmic view of the next song.

All and Everyone is nearly six minutes long – devoid of cliché as if Polly has been taking note of Amis’ other war – a vista of the beaches at Gallipoli, ranging from the troops joking and smoking in the Trenches to the aerial view of that entire catastrophic battleground. And in everything is death, from the domestic survival of the individual troops to the overblown and strange description of weapons and men dropped in the sea and on the beaches. “Death was in the staring sun, fixing its eyes on everyone.” You are dead, outside any experience of life you have had up to now, this is the end. You have a statistical chance of getting home but it is not high. Maybe I have let myself get carried away, for Polly still does not preach to us, she just lets us make up own minds and however much mine was made up before this, it is fixed again. On first hearing this, I found it at odds with the other songs but looking back after repeated listenings I find it stands out of the flow only because it describes something so far outside any experience I may have had or hopefully ever could have. My admiration of War Poets makes me want to write War Poems but to do so just seems disrespectful to the men who went through real wars to earn the right to produce the art that they did. As one reviewer of the album says, many are the musicians beclowned by trying to depict war in music without the experience to back it up. Let England Shake somehow avoids this and I cannot describe exactly how. Maybe Polly has earned the right to describe War because she is the citizen of a country whose leaders still stand firm with America in Knee-Jerk reactions to attacks on lands where the majority of victims are civilian, albeit made militant by our own misguided actions. Like us all she lives in a nation where the Government ignores huge marches against war and then lies and lies and lies again when the brutal assault of our organised military on distant lands is revenged. This earns us the right to make comment on war. It has built anger in me and I admire that Polly’s response to this is so measured. As she denies she is a feminist she also denies she is a politician. She is just a human.

Time passes. Only you can see. On Battleship Hill sees us 80 years later, vistors to the memorials above Anzac Cove, still watched over by the natural sphinx high on the ridge. Musically the song starts as gentle folky strum with muted drums but Polly fades this down and comes in with her own almost-soprano requiem for the ghosts that stalk this field. She sings of Cruel Nature and how it has won again, taking back the earthworks and bomb craters and still the violence of the old and worst war remains as a perverse artwork. An icy piano picks out a descending scale to pinpoint the pain of this place, a musical finger pinch like those of a person making an exact point.

England is a pained and croaky lament, our hero’s voice doubling against an old song, Kassem Miro by Said Al Kurdi, from an album called Give Me Love - The Brokenhearted Of Baghdad 1925-1929. This is no sample, Polly sings against the whole song it seems, echoing the words in tone as if to synchronise the pain of English soldiers with those of Iraqi people, itself a doubling possibly with Iraq standing in for the Turks of the Ottoman Empire, those who The Empire fought at Gallipoli. This becomes a subtle way of acknowledging the death and pain suffered by all sides in an album that in name and ambition commemorates English-Speaking protagonists. This is a lament for two countries made less innocent by war.

And still more campaigns. We are made numb to the details of which war is that of In The Dark Places, we are gradually acclimatizing to the horrors, a small and insignificant taste of the real damage that war does to humans. The song seems to be the simple tale of a day in the life of a soldier, detailing the risk of his not returning but at times the lyrics hint at other meanings to the song. Sometimes I see it as further peaceful commemoration of lost friends but analysis seems pointless. The numbing is complete.

Bitter Branches creates a series of similes for twisted winter trees, or maybe it is Summer and the trees are stripped by shelling. They are soldiers with their rifles advancing or the arms of wives waving goodbye to the departing regiment. It shrieks with modernity over the traditional opening for a period drama, uniforms embarking through the steam of a station platform.

Paths of Glory (Imperial War Museum)

Hanging in the Wire could have been called Paths of Glory after the 1917 painting by CRW Nevinson, a reality censored during the war itself. This is an unromanticised view of the war, a shock to many people back home. Like Wilfred Owen’s Dulce Et Decorum Est, it describes the events and sights of the war and makes no angry point beyond what it describes. In this song, musically reminiscent of those on White Chalk, we see the unburied bodies of troops killed and now some way behind their own front line, their comrades forced forward to hold the line and unable to deal with the remains of their fallen pals. Obviously not the worst atrocity in a time containing many but a human failing, the burial of the dead, a last courtesy not given.

And now they bring the war if not to our location into our time. Written on the Forehead is a modern war. It points to the fate of civilians, increasingly involved in conflict. This place is a burnt-out Middle-Eastern country, light-brown scrubland, rough concrete waterways framed by reverse pyramids of black smoke on the horizon. There are two rivers here, one of water and sewage and one of humanity, whole towns displaced by the impersonal scream of unidentifiable aircraft. The song bounces along in a trance, with distorted organs and a sample of Blood and Fire by Niney the Observer. It has psychedelic lyrics about Orange and Tangerine Trees but this is not Lucy in the Sky, it is poor people forced out of their orange groves, by armed forces so mechanised that it is possible for the men loosing the weapons on the straggling columns of people to see themselves as nothing more than avatars in a computer game. Turn the barren scrub to blasted heath, the white buildings to the soot-caked London and this war could be ours or anybody’s.

The colour of the Earth may have you singing along but it will also have you choking at a sort of anti “Daddy – my Daddy” moment. It makes nothing more than a simple point of friendship and loss, a reduction of the sweep of previous songs, the epic view of entire battlegrounds reduced to the pain of a dying man crying in the dark and how his friend still remembers him.

And none of this really describes the music, the instruments. There is technology in here but nothing obvious – samplers maybe but nothing high in the mix. This is an album of instruments held in the hand, recorded properly without gimmick. It is both of the times it describes and of this time. Only one track – Written on the Forehead - has any root in the last thirty years of over-produced sound but even here it reflects the modern technology of the wars it describes. Elsewhere we have the imperfections of real people playing real instruments rather than the sound of machines bickering. The use of the Autoharp gives the music both the feel of a jangly indie track and a period sound, prevalent throughout the tracks, it underpins everything in my mind allowing what started out as solo demos to contain the original tunes which they began with. And yet this means nothing. Polly has been happy to release demos over the years and sometimes it is difficult to distinguish them from the full-blown recordings. And this is as it should be. The distinction between demo and proper track is an arbitrary one that for real music should make no sense.

As the last few men who fought in that First Great War die in defiance of the odds they were given by fate all those years ago, this collection of songs only now makes sense. And yet there is a continuum stretching from the dark days of 1914-18, through blitzes, invasions, incursions and various revolutions. Our wars are sanitized. In World War I, it was possible to hear the guns firing in Belgium and France from the streets of Southern England. The country was peppered with hospitals and sanatoriums and the flow of damaged humanity between them was obvious to everyone and everyone would have known someone affected. Even today, your average middle-ager can talk of a grand-father who fought or died or a grand-mother who nursed the survivors. If a butterfly can cause a typhoon on the other side of the world, then just one man's life cut short changes history. Here we talk about a whole generation profoundly damaged, leaders-to-be removed from politics, poets and artists, men-of-peace and men-of war, all gone, the whole structure of the world shuffled by the meaningless deaths of millions. These days we like our wars far-off, we like to keep the dead and injured to their allotted slots on the news bulletins, we do not like to see the soldiers who fight for us. It is crass to reduce all this to numbers of casualties, but one person dead for an undefined cause is wrong for just one person killed changes the world irrevocably.

I'm not sure if PJ Harvey is trying to educate us with Let England Shake. It makes no prescriptions – it simply tells us how it was and is and that this was and is a terrible thing. It is not like the great comedic shouts of more vociferous campaigners within the music industry, for the English do no like being told what to do – they like seeing what is going on and making up their own minds what actions are necessary. Secretly I wonder if politicians have long-known this. It certainly seems so from the lack of action in the language of Government and Opposition these days. None of this matters and I don't think this album is destined to change the world – no music really is and PJ is a refined taste in the simple world of pop today – but it should – it is worthy of analysis in English Classes as much as any of the great war poets. It deserves all the praise it gets and all the awards too. Buy it, listen to it often and just like we marvel at how soft-spoken Polly can make the shouty records like A Woman a Man Walked By, marvel at how she can also get inside the head and hearts of men long-dead. It will leave you happy and reeling in a strange way.