PJ Harvey

PJ Harvey biography

Polly Jean Harvey (born 9 October 1969) is an English musician and singer-songwriter. Raised in Corscombe, Dorset, Harvey formed the band (calling it PJ Harvey) as a teenager with drummer Rob Ellis and bassist Ian Olliver, who was replaced with Steve Vaughan. The trio released their first album Dry in 1992. Ellis and Vaughan left the band after the release of Rid of Me (1993), and Harvey continued as a solo artist.

Among the accolades she has received have been the 2001 Mercury Music Prize, seven BRIT Award nominations, five Grammy Award nominations and two further Mercury Music Prize nominations. Rolling Stone named her 1992's Best New Artist and Best Singer Songwriter and 1995's Artist of the Year, and placed two of her albums (Rid of Me, To Bring You My Love) on its 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. She was also rated the number one female rock artist by Q magazine in a 2002 reader poll. Harvey has said that she enjoys performing more than writing and recording because performing is when the music "makes more sense".

Biography

Early life

Harvey was born in Bridport, Dorset, brought up on her family's farm in Corscombe,, and attended school in nearby Beaminster. The daughter of a stonemason and a sculptor, Harvey grew up on a small sheep farm. 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 time listening to Soft Cell, Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet. In her teens she became a fan of American indie guitar bands like 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.

Automatic Dlamini

At the age of 17 she finished school and began writing her own songs. She contributed sax, guitar, and backing vocals to her earliest Somerset bands Bologna, the Polekats, and the Stoned Weaklings, but it was with Bristol's Automatic Dlamini where she gained extensive experience playing in a band. Formed by John Parish in 1983, Automatic Dlamini consisted of a rotating line-up that at various times included Rob Ellis and Ian Olliver (all three would go on to collaborate with Harvey on various projects). Parish and Harvey met through a mutual friend in 1987 and she joined the band a few months later. Providing guitars and background vocals, she travelled with the band when they toured Europe in June and July of 1989, and recorded one album with them (Here Catch, Shouted His Father, recorded in 1989-90 but never released). Harvey said that while in Automatic Dlamini, "I ended up not singing very much but I was just happy to learn how to play the guitar. I wrote a lot during the time I was with them but my first songs were crap. I was listening to a lot of Irish folk music at the time, so the songs were folky and full of penny whistles and stuff. It was ages before I felt ready to perform my own songs in front of other people." She also credits Parish for teaching her how to perform in front of an audience, saying "After the experience with John's band and seeing him perform I found it was enormously helpful to me as a performer to engage with people in the audience, and I probably did learn that from him, amongst other things."

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