Orlam

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When she hasn’t been working on poetry, she has been recording a new album, due out next summer. “I’m very pleased with it,” she says of the music. “It took a long time to write to get right, but at last I feel very happy with it.” Here, in a rare interview, Harvey explains how Orlam originated and reflects on her music career. Far from the pastoral madding crowds of Thomas Hardy’s Dorset, PJ Harvey contours an altogether more gritty and at times ominous exposé of rustic traditions, woven through a tableau of natural world simplicities and charms. Ira’s world is a magical realist outpost of the West Country where PJ Harvey grew up. Conjured through tightly rhyming poems, often taking the form of songs or incantations, the village of Underwhelem appears: “Voul village in a hag-ridden hollow. / All ways to it winding, all roads to it narrow.” Like a more terrifying Llareggub, Underwhelem is populated by a large and peculiar cast of characters. There’s Ira and her family; their sinister neighbours, including the world’s worst babysitters, The Bowditches of Dogwell; ghostly civil war soldiers; and the many presiding spirits of woods and fields. Harvey was awarded an MBE for services to music as well as an Honorary Degree in Music from Goldsmiths University. She has received numerous Grammy Award nominations, has scored music for several tv, film and theatrical productions, and is the only artist to have won the Mercury Prize twice with her albumsStories from the City, Stories from the SeaandLet England Shake. And a lot of the [characters] have two names, so it’s like a dual personality. I was very interested in that blurring of reality and fiction, imagination and inventing things or actually using real sources. It’s all mixed up. And in fact, I think that as a creative artist, no matter what media you work in, we sort of absorb everything one’s ever seen, felt, dreamt, read, or seen. It goes into your being and is absorbed and swishes around and mixes with your real memories and your real experience and gets churned up. And it’s sort of remade and comes out of you in a new form. So I don’t really distinguish between the fact and the imagination because they’re all as real to me.

PJ Harvey Poetry – PJ Harvey

I'm tempted to go the full 5, partly because it's so good in its own right, partly because this is a side of PJH we've only glimpsed before, especially on albums like White Chalk and Dance Hall at Louse Point; the writer who draws a line from goth to actual old things, who can capture the inner life of a girl in a world where - thanks in no small part to the dialect which I'm told is broad - it's the 1970s and the 1600s and the 600s all at once, where time moves like the growth of an oak or ash tree; glacially slow, but ever-shifting. A PJ Harvey who owes as much to CS Lewis and Fairport Convention as to Howlin' Wolf and Pixies. Where do you see Orlam reflecting your own childhood in Dorset? There are lots of references to things in the Seventies. If all this sounds a little abstruse, the language is even more so, since it's all written in Dorset dialect. And sometimes, admittedly, this can look a little alarming: Orlam follows Ira and the inhabitants of Underwhelem month by month through the last year of her childhood innocence. The result is a poem-sequence of light and shadow – suffused with hints of violence, sexual confusion and perversion, the oppression of family, but also ecstatic moments in sunlit clearings, song and bawdy humour. The broad theme is ultimately one of love – carried by Ira’s personal Christ, the constantly bleeding soldier- ghost Wyman-Elvis, who bears ‘The Word’: Love Me Tender.Orlamfollows Ira and the inhabitants of Underwhelem month-by-month through the last year of her childhood innocence. The result is a poem-sequence of light and shadow – suffused with hints of violence, sexual confusion and perversion, the oppression of family, but also ecstatic moments in sunlit clearings, song and bawdy humour. The broad theme is ultimately one of love – carried by Ira’s personal Christ, the constantly bleeding soldier-ghost Wyman-Elvis, who bears ‘The Word’:Love Me Tender. PJ Harvey was born in Dorset in 1969. Her debut poetry collection,The Hollow of the Hand,was created in collaboration with photographer Seamus Murphy. He said, ‘no, I really did want to see some of your poems’,” adds Harvey. “and I said, ‘oh gosh yeah’.

PJ Harvey interview: People think I live in a cave and eat PJ Harvey interview: People think I live in a cave and eat

I was in my late teens, early twenties when I’d written some of those songs. At that time, it was a type of expression I needed. And things change. You get older and you don’t need to express yourself in that same way and you need to find other ways of expression. Whatever the technical merit, whatever the story telling, whoever the author is, the most important feeling at the close of a piece of writing is grief – grief at leaving the company of the characters, grief at the sudden absence of the narrator’s voice, grief at the end of the protagonist’s challenge to our own settled pleasant valley Sunday view of the world. There are some graphic scenes in Orlam of assault and bestiality, which were surprising. But at the same time, it’s not too different from reading a Flannery O’Connor story, looking at the darkness through a different lens. Orlam follows Ira and the inhabitants of UNDERWHELEM month-by-month through the last year of her childhood innocence. The result is a poem-sequence of light and shadow – suffused with hints of violence, sexual confusion, and perversion, the oppression of family, but also ecstatic moments in sunlit clearings, song, and bawdy humor,” reads the book’s official description. “The broad theme is ultimately one of love – carried by Ira’s personal Christ, the constantly bleeding soldier-ghost Wyman-Elvis, who bears ‘The Word’: Love Me Tender.”If there were cade lambs — a cade lamb is an orphan lamb — you would then hand-rear them. If it was that situation, it was difficult to not become attached to them. Although we try not to because ultimately a farm is a working business, and at some point those lambs, when they’re older, are going to have to go for meat. Nine-year-old Ira-Abel Rawles lives on Hook Farm in the village of UNDERWHELEM. Next to the farm is Gore Woods, Ira’s sanctuary, overseen by Orlam, the all-seeing lamb’s eyeball who is Ira-Abel’s guardian and protector. Here, drawing on the rituals, children’s songs, chants and superstitions of the rural West Country of England, Ira-Abel creates the twin realm through which she can make sense of an increasingly confusing and frightening world. Well, I loved Elvis, as a lot of children of my era did, and I still love Elvis. I love everything about him. I could lose myself in that voice, but not only that, the way he looked as well. He is almost a godlike figure in Orlam.

Orlam – PJ Harvey Orlam – PJ Harvey

To some extent, I'm a little bothered by the bilinguality of the book; I understand the wish to write in pure dialect, but other authors have done that without having to spell it out in RP and footnotes and glossary, and it feels a tiny bit hand-holdy. At the same time, there's something to the way she occasionally needs to change the story just a tiny bit to say the same in English that Ira can think so easily in Dorzet - the rhymes need to change, the animals and plants need to lose some of their magic. It's part of the dying of childhood. Orlam follows Ira and the inhabitants of UNDERWHELEM month by month through the last year of her childhood innocence. The result is a poemsequence of light and shadow – suffused with hints of violence, sexual confusion and perversion, the oppression of family, but also ecstatic moments in sunlit clearings, song and bawdy humour. The broad theme is ultimately one of love – carried by Ira’s personal Christ, the constantly bleeding soldier-ghost Wyman-Elvis, who bears ‘The Word’: Love Me Tender. Ira-Abel Rawles gives a child’s eye view of life on Hook Farm in the village of UNDERWHELEM. Nearby, the magic realist domain of Gore Woods transcends time and folklore prevails. Here Orlam, an all-seeing dead lamb’s eyeball and oracle of UNDERWHELEM, is Ira’s protector. Another dweller of Gore, Wyman-Elvis, a ghost warrior from the Ransham Rebellion, ricochets whispering ‘Love Me Tender’ echoes throughout the verses. Further song lyrics from bands such as Pink Floyd and The Moody Blues enter the stream of consciousness. Which, alongside peanut butter sandwiches and fizzy pop anchor Ira’s approaching adolescence in the late 20th Century zeitgeist.Orlam follows Ira and the inhabitants of UNDERWHELEM month by month through the last year of her childhood innocence. The result is a poem-sequence of light and shadow - suffused with hints of violence, sexual confusion and perversion, the oppression of family, but also ecstatic moments in sunlit clearings, song and bawdy humour. The broad theme is ultimately one of love - carried by Ira's personal Christ, the constantly bleeding soldier-ghost Wyman-Elvis, who bears 'The Word': Love Me Tender. I very much thought I was going to go to art college, because that was what I was supposed to do. I had a place to study fine art as a degree at Saint Martin’s [School of Art] in London. I really wanted to do that. I’ve always painted and drawn. I still do. And I was set to do that course, but then I deferred it when I got offered a record deal for Dry. And then even at the time of Rid of Me, I thought, “Oh, well I’m allowed to make one more album.” But then I was able to just continue doing this. She does not finish the sentence but it leads me to ask about her image. What is it like to make her peace with middle age – having been such a siren? “It’s hard. It’s a process of acceptance. In your late 40s, you realise you have to start letting go of the way you used to be, the way your body used to be, the way your face used to look. It’s a humbling experience. But you need to embrace it. And I have to say I’m enjoying getting older – for the letting go. When you’re young, you worry so much about appearance and what people will think. You’re full of anxiety but, as you get older, you can let go of that and it is incredibly freeing.” She sounds content. And she starts to talk about a future dream in which, one day, she will live on a Dorset smallholding again – and will come full circle. But perhaps that kind of thing might be expected from a songwriter producing a book of poetry. What's more surprising is just how good her individual word choices are and how brilliantly she wields language in general, without the comfort of any musical support. A beautiful and profound narrative poem set in a magic realist version of the West Country by musician and writer PJ Harvey.

Orlam by PJ Harvey - Pan Macmillan

You do so much of the artistic process, whether writing or making art, alone. Do you consider yourself an introvert? Do you feel introversion has its advantages? But if I’d asked my grandmother this she would have felt like the world was probably always been frightening. I remember talking about when televisions and telephones first appeared and she was sort of terrified at what was happening. It’s all contextual, isn’t it?” I really hope it does develop in something,” she adds. “I would be so happy if someone wanted to turn it into a film or theatre play or something like that, because I think it does lend itself to something, visually, so strongly. I see a whole world being created out of it. I don’t have plans to at this stage but I’d be so open to that. Hopefully in my lifetime.” Nine-year-old Ira-Abel Rawles lives on Hook Farm in the village of Underwhelem. Next to the farm is Gore Woods, Ira’s sanctuary, overseen by Orlam, the all-seeing lamb’s eyeball who is Ira-Abel’s guardian and protector. Here, drawing on the rituals, children’s songs, chants and superstitions of the rural West Country of England, Ira-Abel creates the twin realm through which she can make sense of an increasingly confusing and frightening world. A natural question, given PJ Harvey’s considerable musical output, is whether she intends to perform her poetry in song? She has in fact indicated ambitions to develop Orlam into a stage or film dramatisation. The stirring powers of nature, vicarious childhood misadventures and trappings of popular culture certainly make for a rich subject matter.Orlam evokes existential dread, that the ‘hag -ridden hollow’ of Underwhelem of ‘Jeyes Fluid, slurry, zweat and pus, anus grease, squitters, jizz and blood,’ is what defines life. The sense of despair of the human soul caught in the no-time of a sentient landscape reminds me of Alan Garner’s Cheshire dialect books… Thursbitch, in particular. First five-star read of the year! I have a lot of thoughts about this that I'll try and make sense of: