PJ Harvey

BELFAST – Belfast wakes up early and, by the first shadows of evening, turns into a ghost town. Hardly anyone is out on the streets, even in the heart of downtown, in that quadrilateral ideally linking St. Anne's Cathedral, the Albert Memorial Clock, St. George's Market and the elegant City Hall. Just a handful of pubs making noise, and an uncanny silence. An almost metaphorical calm. After the restless, terrible years of the Troubles – the period, lasting until 1998, of guerrilla warfare between the British army, Protestant loyalist paramilitaries and the IRA – a desire for peace seems to have finally united all the inhabitants of the Northern Irish capital, with, seemingly, only the murals of Falls Road and Derry's Bogside (Catholic) and Shankill Road and Sandy Row (Protestant) left to recall the scars of the past. It's no coincidence that the UN has named it the second safest city in the world for tourists, after Tokyo. Tonight, though, there's a buzz in the streets leading to the clock tower, facing Custom House Square. Because, after a full twenty years, PJ Harvey is returning to the city of Van Morrison and George Best – the true standout of UK-made female singer-songwriting over the last three and a half decades. And there's also someone who, like yours truly, travelling through the Emerald Isle, simply couldn't miss the occasion.

Having reached the small Custom House Square with way too much time to spare, all that's left to do is seek shelter from the rain under the only canopy available, waiting for the opening act, courtesy of Mica Levi, the British multi-instrumentalist who often works under the moniker Micachu & The Shapes, as well as being a producer and acclaimed composer of film scores for titles such as "Under The Skin" (2013), "Jackie" (2016), "Zola" (2020) and "The Zone of Interest" (2023). Her set offers a varied mix of punk, lo-fi, electronics and noise. Alone on stage, Micachu wields a battered guitar and trades skilfully with the backing tracks, earning applause from the audience in the front rows – still sparse at this point, partly due to the persistent drizzle that will accompany us for the whole evening. As soon as Mica Levi leaves the stage, an obsessively meticulous soundcheck begins, dragging on for a good half hour, as we wait for the long-awaited arrival of Polly Jean.

It's a distant sound of bells that signals the start of the show. Everyone walks on stage except her, PJ, who takes a few moments to claim the centre of the scene, staring out at the crowd, which has grown considerably in the meantime – though, oddly enough, not quite to that predictable sold-out status that would have been a given at our latitudes. Perhaps it's down to those 20 years of absence from Belfast?

As we mull that over, Polly Jean, wrapped in her long white tunic, has already launched into "Prayer At The Gate", the ancestral prayer that opens "Orlam", her novel in verse written in Dorset dialect. "Wyman, am I worthy? Speak your wordle to me", she whispers, carrying the song almost single-handedly, a reflection on the thin line between life and death. It's also the opening track of her latest album, "I Inside The Old Year Dying" (2023), to which the first part of the set is devoted. Next comes the ritual dance of the autumn equinox in "Autumn Term", with Polly Jean prowling the stage with witch-like movements, amid sparse percussion and dissonance, singing in falsetto: "Salgo tre gradini verso l'inferno, lo scuolabus si arrampica sulla collina" ['I climb three steps toward hell, the school bus climbs the hill']; then the frail ballad "Lwonesome Tonight", centred on the Christ-like figure of Wyman-Elvis: "Sei Elvis? Sei Dio? Gesù inviato per conquistare la mia fiducia? His words are: 'Love Me Tender', as I have loved you, so you must love…" ["Are you Elvis? Are you God? Jesus sent to win my trust? His words are: 'Love Me Tender', as I have loved you, so you must…'], quoting Presley and paraphrasing the Gospel of John. After the esoteric "The Nether-Edge" and the ghostly lullaby of the title track "I Inside The Old Year Dying", a sense of redemption pervades the new folk nursery rhyme of "A Child's Question, August", with its chorus as simple and catchy as it is elegant, and the even more elusive, hazier "I Inside The Old I Dying", while the slowcore guitar hints of the atmospheric "August" set the stage for the Luciferian liturgy of "A Child's Question, July", in which PJ duets with John Parish, her lifelong collaborator, who now also stands beside her on stage. The chapter devoted to her latest album closes with the harsh guitar distortions of "A Noiseless Noise", a song inspired by a poem by John Keats, which unexpectedly veers toward industrial territory.

Polly Jean leaves the stage, letting her band perform "The Colour Of The Earth", the traditional-toned ballad that closes "Let England Shake". It's precisely the 2011 album (her absolute peak of the last 25 years, in this writer's opinion) that gets two more songs: first the grief-stricken solemnity of the gorgeous "The Glorious Land", with its sampled trumpet sounding the call to arms and PJ's flawless delivery, then the eccentric folk fanfare of "The Words That Maketh Murder", with her picking up the autoharp and the repeated closing line "What if I take my problem to the United Nations?" getting a front-row spectator a little too fired up, his pint-fuelled exuberance promptly quelled by a neighbour's biting rebuke.

It's a strange, mixed crowd – and a notably female one – that has turned out at Custom House Square: punk and goth girls, couples of every sort, seasoned British ladies, red-bearded rock pirates, passing tourists. It almost seems there isn't a real fanbase for Polly Jean on Northern Irish soil, although affection is certainly not lacking, as shown by the ovations and the declarations of love shouted toward the stage.

She, the heroine of Dorset, watches them all, fixing them with her piercing gaze whenever she ends a song, remaining theatrically frozen and silent. "Thank you for coming out on this cold, rainy evening" will be practically her only words of the entire night, aside from the customary band introductions (besides Parish, there's also our own Giovanni Ferrario on bass, Jean-Marc Butty and James F Johnston). Indeed, it's starting to get genuinely cold: around ten degrees, which is still 25 degrees less than what we're enduring in this stifling Italian summer. But it's above all the rain, now heavier and more relentless, that gives no quarter. We, however, are too absorbed by Polly Jean to care. Her set is a miracle of restraint and technical perfection: not a single detail out of place, including the excellent band backing her and the elegant branch-strewn stage set. Over time, the former punkette of "Dry" has become a truly refined and eclectic performer, able to range from the gloomiest registers of her early work to the high, ethereal tones of her latest records. A vocal versatility matched by that of her output: no one else has been able to range across such disparate sounds, from punk-rock to blues, from electro-trip-hop to industrial-noise, from folk to the poetic, reflective songwriting of the 2000s. On stage, she adds her usual magnetism as a seasoned performer, even if the provocative outfits and aggressive make-up have long since given way to more austere, restrained looks.

The 90's rocker, however, has certainly not dissolved: here she is reappearing on stage with all her energy over the clattering guitars of "50ft Queenie", the first single from her second album, "Rid Of Me" (1993), produced by the late Steve Albini – to whom a touching, voice-and-guitar-only "The Desperate Kingdom Of Love" will later be dedicated – followed by an abrasive "Man-Size", delivered with blazing conviction, or over the driving cadences of the indie anthem "Black Hearted Love", from her 2009 album with John Parish ("A Woman A Man Walked By"), and over the tumultuous vertigo of "Dress", her very first single, dated 1991: a condensed burst of pure rage, dark and lysergic, voted single of the week on Melody Maker at the time by John Peel, who admired "the way Polly Jean seems weighed down by her own songs and arrangements, as if the air were literally being sucked out of them". Also present is the intriguing dark priestess of the electronic "Is This Desire?" (another feat, dated 1999), ready to recite the sickly litany of "The Garden" almost on her knees, amid the funereal tolling of keyboards.

Before the encore, it's time for the classics, with the one-two of "Down By The Water"-"To Bring You My Love", celebrating her milestone 1995 album, in which PJ crowned her transformation into a sophisticated femme fatale, possessed by the demons of a blues with biblical, gothic accents, not far removed from that of her friend Nick Cave. Back on stage, it's the other evergreen "C'mon Billy" that picks up the thread of that desperate rosary of death and redemption, before a closing just as solemn, entrusted to "White Chalk", the title track of the album that sealed her shift toward a stark, confessional folk, with a gothic aftertaste worthy of Emily Brontë. A record that pushed her voice to the forefront, never so pained and intense. And so PJ Harvey bids us farewell: amid the frail vocal threads of this poignant elegy to the cliffs of her native Dorset, where white chalk cuts into the sea and land strewn with gorse scratches the palms of the hand until they bleed.

The lights come up and it perhaps even stops raining. Right now, just as the concert has ended. Looking back, the square now seems truly packed. As we trudge, soaked from head to toe, toward Royal Avenue, we cast a glance at the view of the Titanic Quarter docks, where 113 years ago, in the largest dry dock in the world, the infamous ocean liner was built. Yet another ill-fated symbol of this city, which has found the strength to be reborn from its wounds and its demons. Just like Polly Jean.

P.S. The full video of PJ Harvey's concert at Primavera Sound in Porto is available on YouTube, a show very similar to the one we've tried to recount in this live report.

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