The daughter of a stonemason and a sculptress, 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 music which would later influence her the most strongly: “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 told Rolling Stone in 1995. She also went through a brief adolescent rebellion where she listened to poppier fare like U2, The Police, Soft Cell, Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet, and later 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.)

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. At the age of 18 she began writing her own songs and in January 1991 she formed the original PJ Harvey three-piece band (herself on vocals and guitars, ex-Automatic Dlamini bandmate Rob Ellis on drums and Ian Olliver on bass, though Olliver was swiftly 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 this stage Harvey had also completed a foundation art course at Yeovil Art College and was now studying sculpture at Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design in London, still undecided as to her future career.

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. (A limited edition double LP containing both Dry and the demos for Dry, called Dryer/Demonstration, was also released at this time.) 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 magazine 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; until then she had been assumed to be unambiguously feminist. Harvey was quick to avoid being adopted as a feminist spokesperson, telling Vox magazine 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.” More recently she told Bust magazine: “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.”

Harvey then signed to Island Records amid a major-label bidding war. 1993 saw the release of two further albums in quick succession, the noisy, intense and fiercely uncompromising Rid of Me (engineered by Steve Albini) with the original trio and, later in the year, a solo release 4-Track Demos, which contained eight of the homemade 4-track demos that would become Rid of Me alongside six previously unreleased tracks.

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; produced by Mark Ellis a.k.a Flood) quickly became a staple of alternative rock. To Bring You My Love was a major success worldwide 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 electronic sound effects. It also generated a surprise modern-rock radio hit with the single “Down by the Water”. It received a glowing critical response and ended up being voted Album of the Year by The Village Voice, Rolling Stone, USA Today, People, New York Times and Los Angeles Times; Harvey was also voted Artist of the Year by Rolling Stone and SPIN. Around this time she also began experimenting with her image and adopting an elaborate, theatrical, almost cabaret edge to her live shows: where she once performed onstage in simple black leggings, turtleneck sweaters and Doc Martens, with no make-up and her hair scraped into a bun, 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” – but admitted to SPIN magazine, “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.” 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.

In 1998 she released Is This Desire?, a challenging and experimental record that met a mixed critical reception but which Harvey herself cites 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 huge critical and commercial success, selling over a 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, and also seemed to signify a change in mood for Polly as she sang about a seemingly new-found happiness in her life. In 2001 she topped a readers' poll conducted by Q magazine of the 100 Greatest Women in Rock Music. Her latest album, Uh Huh Her, was released May 31, 2004. For the first time since 4-Track Demos, Harvey produced it alone and played every instrument bar 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.

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 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 low-key collaborative album entitled Dance Hall at Louse Point with John Parish under the name Polly Jean Harvey, and has since gone on to to produce Tiffany Anders' Funny Cry Happy Gift. Harvey also produced, performed on and wrote five songs for Marianne Faithfull's 2004 album Before the Poison.

Outside of the better-known musical career, Polly Jean 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.

On December 17, 2004, on stage in Paris, she announced that she was quitting playing live with the comment, “This is the last show I will ever play,” to the audience of 350 who were attending as part of a competition. However, this perhaps misheard statement was later understood to be a reference to the end of PJ Harvey's line up for that tour, and not of her career itself. PJ Harvey gigs and appearances continue.

Offstage, Harvey claims to be “an extremely quiet person, who doesn’t go out much, doesn’t talk to people”, but 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-practicing devil from hell, that I have to be twisted and dark to do what I am doing. It’s a load of rubbish,” adding to SPIN magazine, “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.”

For one still so young – she recently turned 36 – she has received an unusual number of accolades for her work. As well as winning the 2001 Mercury Music Prize, she has received six Brit award nominations, five Grammy nominations and two further Mercury Music Prize nominations. In a recent issue, Hot Press magazine praised her for crafting “some of the most erotic, powerful and positive love songs ever written”.

Albums:
1992 - Dry
1993 - Rid of Me
1993 - 4-Track Demos
1995 - To Bring You My Love
1996 - Dance Hall at Louse Point (with John Parish)
1998 - Is This Desire?
2000 - Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea
2004 - Uh Huh Her

links: official website