PJ Harvey的艺人档案

PJ Harvey的艺人档案

她的全名是Polly Jean Harvey，出生于英格兰Somerset裙的Yeovil镇，并在英格兰西南部的Dorset群长大。自小居住在一个牧羊农场（整个小镇只有600人），父亲是个石匠，而母亲则是位雕刻家。在她成年以前，她最渴望的就是成为一个男孩。由于父母对布鲁斯和爵士音乐的痴迷，她深受影响，并从11岁起渐渐熟练地演奏起了萨克斯、大提琴、小提琴、鼓和吉他。而Harvey真正的导师是多乐器演奏家John Parish，17岁时，Harvey被带到Parish 的乐队，并潜心学习了真正的吉他演奏技巧。

    P.J.Harvey在伦敦的一间公寓里用自己的声音证明了这个时代还有真正的激 情的存在， 并因为非主流音乐指明了最终归宿----我指的是她的那张“4-track Demo”。她的音乐几乎是粗糙得晦涩。但是，挟杂着自己内心深处的所有激情，P.J. Harvey用一把吉它，一副非正统意义的好嗓子，把自己的名字雕刻在了90年代摇 滚乐大杂剧的长长的演出者名单之中，从而成为这出大杂剧中的最为冷峻的一道布景。
                                              
    P.J.Harvey的音乐形态的粗糙与直接喻示着她率真的性情与悲戚而愤怒的心态。作为一位女性，她延续着Janis Joplin、Patti Smith的思想轨迹，在90年代适宜地站在了流行音乐的前沿。她的出现进一步证明了80年代以来的主流商业 摇滚的软弱，也使摇滚乐在真正意义成为最严肃的通俗音乐成为可能。如果具体 分析起来，P.J.Harvey的音乐的具体框架是非常简单的（一般都为短小的单一，单二曲式），但她的可贵之处是并没有按照一般意义上的“歌曲”的概念对它进行某种圆润与修饰，这样她就把形式与自己想要表达的完全结合起来了。（P.J.Harvey的情绪之直率与愤怒在形式上可以说是显然易见的：诸多乐曲的进行由低 沉缓慢进而高亢激昂甚至嘶吼，这是她在对现实的简单的感应后的一次情感的拒斥。

很多歌曲P.J.Harvey是喊叫出来的。喊叫，在这里作为心情的直接表现是旋律的一次本质还原----当人的情绪已积累到了无法不喷的时候，他还能有耐心去诉诸旋律吗？自然，这种喊叫与已成为模式的Rap的区别是显而易见的。）当然，这种在形式中直接强烈喷发的情感是最原始也是最感人的。它不需要过多的形式的承载而引起你的共鸣，使你也进行一次情绪的释放。 在这个意义上， P. J. Harvey已完全验证了“最个人的也是最大众”的原则。                  
    
这种成功其实必然源于歌者对自身生存状态的深切的体悟。历史、社会、文 化、政治，当种种外因骤然聚于一身，成为一个人的具体重负时，他（她）不得不思考， 不得不去寻求解脱，这是人类由来的共通之处。P.J.Harvey也是这样。在面对重负的时候，她选择了音乐，无疑她是严肃的。她已经排除了所有为外在的一切而存在的可能，仅仅为自己的生命而歌唱。在歌声中，自己的生命从种种重负下释然飞升，回到了“本然”的状态。这时，对一切外在于人的东西以及关系的鄙夷与抨击都在这战栗的飞升中完成，人因而也成为纯粹的人。P.J.Harvey 做到了这一点，从她的音乐里，我们听到了她的挣扎、愤怒，而这就是她对现实的态度。当然，这种态度是非常率真的----P.J.Harvey足以让绝大多数的不论何种形式的矫揉造作的音乐制作者无地自容。在这种态度的倾听与体认中，我们与 P.J.Harvey共同达到了纯粹，从而对我们身处其中的时代也有了更深的认识。

对于我们的时代，我们的体悟实在太多，种种情绪在我们每个人心中形成座座的潜在的火山， 随时都有可能喷发， 不是在喷发中死亡就是在喷发中释然，（我们已经远离了一些美好的事物，黑暗的恐怖始终布于我们眼前，我们是化为 恐怖强化世界的黑暗，还是在对时代的审视中同时审视自己呢？）P.J.Harvey无疑在向释然的喷发靠拢，而不是死亡的喷发。在她的音乐中始终贯穿着一种紧张的背景，有时还很尖利，与此相应的她的嗓音在多数时候从低沉（黑暗？）跳跃到了高亢、尖利（抗拒？光明？）这样，众多的具体的抒情构成了P.J.Harvey对时代的基本态度以及她的基本心理倾向。

Polly Jean Harvey (born 9 October 1969) is an English musician and songwriter. Raised in Corscombe, Dorset, England, Harvey formed an eponymous band 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 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, England, and was brought up in nearby Beaminster, Dorset. The daughter of a stonemason and a sculptor, Harvey grew up on a small sheep farm.[2] 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."[citation needed] She later spent time listening to Soft Cell, Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet. In her teens she became a fan of the 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.

She studied saxophone for about eight years, and contributed sax, guitar and backing vocals to her earliest Somerset bands Bologna, the Polekats, the Stoned Weaklings and Automatic Dlamini (John Parish's band).[2] At the age of 17 she finished school and began writing her own songs. 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."[3] In January 1991, she formed the original PJ Harvey three-piece band, with herself on vocals and guitars, ex-Automatic Dlamini bandmate Rob Ellis on drums and Ian Olliver on bass (though Olliver was replaced by Steve Vaughan). The trio's debut gig – at a skittle alley in Sherborne's Antelope Hotel – was so disastrous that the proprietor begged the band to stop playing as nearly all his customers had fled the venue.

By that time Harvey had also completed a foundation art course at Yeovil Art College and had applied to study sculpture at Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design in London, still undecided as to her future career.

 Early career
"Water"

from Dry (1992)

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"To Bring You My Love"

from To Bring You My Love (1995)

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"Good Fortune"

from Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea (2000)

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"The Slow Drug"

from Uh Huh Her (2004)


Problems listening to these files? See media help.
Harvey released her debut single "Dress" on the independent label Too Pure in October 1991. It was voted Single of the Week in Melody Maker by guest reviewer John Peel, who admired "the way Polly Jean seems crushed by the weight of her own songs and arrangements, as if the air is literally being sucked out of them ... admirable if not always enjoyable". The following spring she released an equally acclaimed second single, "Sheela Na Gig", and her first LP Dry in 1992, an album Kurt Cobain put in his top 20 favourite albums ever (from the book 'Journals'). At that time she also released a limited edition double LP containing both Dry and the demos for Dry, called Dry Demonstration. The trio’s raw, guitar-driven hard rock – which mixed elements of punk, blues and grunge – quickly won rave reviews and a strong cult following on both sides of the Atlantic, with Rolling Stone naming the then-22-year-old Harvey the year's Best Songwriter and Best New Female Singer.

She drew fire in April 1992 when she appeared topless on the cover of the British magazine New Musical Express. Harvey quickly avoided being adopted as a feminist spokesperson, telling Vox that "I wouldn't call myself a feminist because I don't understand the term or the baggage it takes along with it. I'd feel like I really have to go back and study its history to associate myself with it, and I don't feel the need to do that. I'd much rather just get on and do things the way I have been doing them", adding that "I think I'd find it quite patronising to be called a Riot Grrrl if I was one of them, but they obviously don't think so."[4] More recently she told Bust: "I don’t ever think about [feminism]. I mean, it doesn't cross my mind. I certainly don’t think in terms of gender when I'm writing songs, and I never had any problems as the result of being female that I couldn't get over. Maybe I'm not thankful for the things that have gone before me, you know. But I don't see that there's any need to be aware of being a woman in this business. It just seems a waste of time." She added, "I don't offer [support] specifically to women; I offer it to people who write music. That's a lot of men."[5]

Harvey then signed to Island Records amid a major-label bidding war. In 1993, she released two albums in quick succession: Rid of Me (engineered by Steve Albini at Pachyderm Recording Studio) with the original trio; and, later in the year, the solo release 4-Track Demos, which contained eight of the homemade 4-track demos for Rid of Me alongside six previously unreleased tracks.

Solo works
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 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.[6] Her album was ranked third in Spin's Top 90 Albums of the '90s, behind Nirvana and Public Enemy.

Around this time, Harvey began experimenting with her image and adopting an elaborate, theatrical, almost cabaret edge to her live shows. Where she once performed on stage in simple black leggings, turtleneck sweaters and Doc Martens, she now began performing in ballgowns, pink catsuits, wigs and garish, vampish make-up (including false eyelashes and fingernails), and using stage props like a broomstick and a Ziggy Stardust-style flashlight microphone. She denied the influence of drag, Kabuki or performance art on her new image, a look she affectionately dubbed "Joan Crawford on acid" in a 1996 Spin interview, but admitted that "it's that combination of being quite elegant and funny and revolting, all at the same time, that appeals to me. I actually find wearing make-up like that, sort of smeared around, as extremely beautiful. Maybe that’s just my twisted sense of beauty."[7] However, she later told Dazed & Confused magazine, "That was kind of a mask. It was much more of a mask than I’ve ever had. I was very lost as a person, at that point. I had no sense of self left at all", and has never again repeated the overt theatricality of the To Bring You My Love tour. She also sang the theme song from Philip Ridley's adult fairy tale, "The Passion Of Darkly Noon" (released in 1996).

Harvey wrote much of her fourth album in 1996 during what she referred to as "an incredibly low patch."[8] 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.

She reunited with her old bandmate Rob Ellis and multi-instrumentalist Mick Harvey (no relation) for her 2000 album Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea. Written in Dorset, Paris and New York, the album was a critical and commercial success, selling over one million copies worldwide and taking the Mercury Music Prize in the following year. It mixed uncharacteristically lush, melodic pop rock sounds with the gritty, thrashing, guitar-driven punk energy of her earlier records. Radiohead singer Thom Yorke was featured on three of the album's songs; he took lead vocal duties on "This Mess We're In", and provided backing vocals for two others.

In 2001 she topped a readers' poll conducted by Q magazine of the 100 Greatest Women in Rock Music. Her seventh album, Uh Huh Her, was released 31 May 2004. For the first time since 4-Track Demos, Harvey produced it alone and played every instrument but the drums. The album, which was a sparser, more intimate, lo-fi and low-key affair than its predecessor, met with a generally positive response from critics and fans. She told Rolling Stone "when I'm working on a new record, the most important thing is to not repeat myself ... that's always my aim: to try and cover new ground and really to challenge myself. Because I'm in this for learning."[9]

In May 2006, Harvey played her first UK gig of the year, revealing that her new album would be almost entirely piano-based. Later in 2006, she released her first concert DVD, Please Leave Quietly, directed by Maria Mochnacz, which contained songs from her entire career as well as behind-the-scene video clips between performances. On 23 October 2006 she released The Peel Sessions 1991–2004. 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 24 September 2007, and in the United States on 2 October. The album marked a radical departure from her usual style, consisting mainly of piano ballads.[10] Of this album Harvey said: "When I listen to the record I feel in a different universe, really, and I’m not sure whether it’s in the past or in the future," she says, laughing quietly. "The record confuses me, that’s what I like - it doesn’t feel of this time right now, but I’m not sure whether it’s 100 years ago or 100 years in the future. It just sounds really weird." [11]

Collaborations
Besides her own work, she contributed to eight tracks on Vol. 9 & 10 of Josh Homme's The Desert Sessions and appeared on Nick Cave's Murder Ballads (on the song "Henry Lee" and the Bob Dylan cover "Death Is Not the End") and Tricky's Angels with Dirty Faces (on the song "Broken Homes"). She lent guitar, bass and background vocals to Sparklehorse's album It's a Wonderful Life (on the songs "Eyepennies" and "Piano Fire"). In 1996 she recorded a collaborative album Dance Hall at Louse Point with Parish under the name Polly Jean Harvey. Parish wrote all the music, and Harvey the lyrics, with the exception of the song "Is That All There Is?", which was written by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller and made famous by Peggy Lee in 1969. Harvey has since gone on to produce Tiffany Anders' Funny Cry Happy Gift. Harvey produced, performed on and wrote five songs for Marianne Faithfull's 2004 album Before the Poison. Harvey sang vocals on two tracks of Mark Lanegan's 2004 album Bubblegum. The follow-up to Dance Hall is titled A Woman A Man Walked By and is scheduled for 30 March 2009 release according to www.pjharvey.net.

In January 2009, a new stage production of Henrik Ibsen's "Hedda Gabler" opened on Broadway, directed by Ian Rickson and starring Mary-Louise Parker in the title role, featuring an original score of incidental music written by Harvey. While the production was poorly received, little to no mention was made of Harvey's contribution.