![]() Sometimes, you can stumble onto prohibited terrain and not even know you're there. A pair of tightly pursed lips is all you'll get for your trouble. And don't bother even trying to coax her into explaining what this or that song is about or from where the inspiration sprang. Her feelings about religion are a Fort Knox of impenetrability. Her opinions on sex, feminism, gender roles and much else are cloistered behind concrete walls of evasion. There are dodgy continents, great expanses of secluded territory onto which journalistic trespass is not permitted. In interview terms, there aren't simply a few dodgy areas that are completely out of bounds for discussion with PJ Harvey. The moment she speaks though, you hear steel sliding from a scabbard. She has the uncomfortable demeanour of a person not naturally inclined towards being in a room with someone else. As she sits tensely sipping tea on the edge of a leather couch, she looks petite, wary and impossibly coy. We meet in the oak-panelled Green Room of The Gore Hotel, near London's Kensington High Street. I can even sense it in the defiant way she wears a denim jacket over her ankle-length, black lace dress. ![]() There is a discernible iciness midst the amiability, however, a hoar-frost beneath the gleam of Polly Harvey's sunny personality. "Exactly," she assents, a smile the size of a billboard invading her face. There are no ball-breakers, just breakable balls? I find this stuff about me being the ultimate ball-breaker quite funny now, quite amusing." ![]() At the start, I was surprised that people were taking things very seriously that I'd been singing with my tongue in my cheek. It's at the point that it goes on sale in the shops that you have to relinquish control, and I'm quite happy to do that now. I learnt very quickly that you cannot control how people take what you give them. "It certainly made me learn a lot about how people interpret things. "All of that stuff surprised me," admits the real Polly Harvey softly. What happened to all the profanity, lust and bloody vengeance? Where's the screeching psychotic who wanted to 'Rub It 'Til It Bleeds'? Or the snickering B-movie monster of '50-Ft Queenie'? Or the voodoo vamp of 'Down By The Water'? Or, to use PJ's own description of the alter ego with which she's been saddled: the axe-wielding bitch cow from hell? What's all this then? Surely, this polite, wistful, shire-voiced young lady talking about dreams and her child side is not the PJ Harvey. It's all part of keeping your imagination going." I think of the most incredulous things in my dreams and that's a very healthy thing to do if you're in a creative mode like I am. It might be my subconscious trying to tell me something about myself or about other people. I love dreaming because that's my child side just running rampant every night. You can make people happen, just conjure them out of thin air if you want someone to play with. "When you're a child, you can make anything happen. "I always think it's so sad that when we get older we tend to stop playing with our imagination like we do when we're young," she says. They are, she explains, fuel for her imagination. They're recorded purely for her own personal use. Hardly any of these reveries end up in songs. When she awakes from her mini-slumbers, she writes down what she remembers of her dreams, which is usually quite a lot. Perhaps fortunately for her sanity, PJ Harvey doesn't sleep that much. Is this my day life or my night life? I don't always know." Sometimes they seem so real that I'm not really sure which is my real life. "I have massive dreams, dream extravaganzas every night," announces Polly Jean Harvey. Originally published in Hot Press in 1995.
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