PJ Harvey/Elbow

EDEN PROJECT, CORNWALL

Friday August 15, 2003

PJ Harvey

TATE MODERN, LONDON

Monday September 1, 2003

Polly harvey’s first uk appearance in almost two years?and her absence has established her as one of our few home-grown stars in possession of charisma and mystique?takes place at one of our most peculiar venues. Standing within the bowels of the Eden Project, you can’t help but imagine you’re on the set of a ’70s sci-fi movie in which they envisaged the future a little too enthusiastically. Huge bubble-shaped domes, strictly “biomes”, dominate the landscape around the stage, and as the sun sets everything turns a fluorescent green. The design’s intended as a homage to timeless nature, but you feel as if you’re in Dr Evil’s gigantic outdoor lab: possibly aliens are set to invade any minute. When PJ enters wearing something that’s half Aladdin Sane smock, half straight-outta-Essex micro-skirt (is she shooting for postmodern glam icon or ‘ironic’ lad-mag ‘stunna’?), the all-round gaucheness is bewildering, if entertaining.

Perversely, given this’d be a great venue for, say, Kraftwerk, she plays a stripped-down, harsh, retro-bluesy set as part of just a three-piece band, back to basics, ditching the slicker gloss adopted around the Stories From The City…album, and electing to show that she was doing raw and ravaged before The White Stripes were a twinkle in Ren

Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings

SHEPHERD’S BUSH EMPIRE

Wednesday September 3, 2003

When the heady drug-like spell cast by this captivating show began to fade, it got me thinking. Perhaps the greatest vindication of the music created by the dirt-poor founding fathers (and mothers) of country is the way their influence has reached out across the years and class barriers to a place where, to quote the late, great Sam Phillips, “the soul of man never dies”.

With just their acoustic guitars and the occasional banjo for accompaniment, David and Gillian are stripped down to the core essentials of melody and harmony, loss and wonder, longing and loveliness. They make The White Stripes seem overdressed, but the idea that these former Berklee Academy students are interlopers or revivalists is beneath contempt.

Hank Williams, Ralph Stanley and The Carter Family may have known privation, but the contributions made to the endless river of song by well-heeled lads like Townes, Gram and Kristofferson are just as lasting. Right now the “it’s not where you’re from but where you’re at” principle applies to no one as much as it does to Rawlings and Welch.

They play so softly that early on Gillian asks the photographers to leave the pit because they can hear the shutters better than they can hear themselves. This is indicative of the tender chemistry that binds their voices together as they describe the seductive wantonness of “Look At Miss Ohio” or revel in “Elvis Presley Blues”, which is even more open and allusive than the version they recorded for Time (The Revelator).

Amid their corny asides and bone-dry humour (“Thanks,” said Dave returning to the stage and his mic stand and quieting the rapturous applause for Gillian’s solo spot), it’s obvious this pair have found the key to a timeless, haunted realm. Their songs?for vagabonds of the heart and wounded soul searchers?inhabit an idealised jukebox of the type you might think only accessible in Dreamland.

“Make Me A Pallet On Your Floor” offers prayerful contemplation; “Wrecking Ball” follows a trail of destruction until it becomes a powerful statement of freedom and self-expression. Their “Manic Depression” eerily captures the highs and nagging futility of the condition and makes you think?Welch does Hendrix? I’d buy that. Then Dave’s ornery solo spot on cowboy ballad “Diamond Joe” suggests an album of Rawlings’ campfire classics would be a treat, too.

But signs are that such a parting is a long way off. One of best things they do all night is a new, untitled song that is a miraculous blend of wound-healing and Everlys Dreamland harmonies. Then came the epic finale “I Dream A Highway” in all its gilded wonder. You could see it stretching far beyond this west London night into the nether land of thrilling and foreboding American dreams and nightmares. Awesome.

From Melbourne via LA, Horse Stories’ frontman Toby Burke stands alone, and sends his lovely voice soaring up into the Union Chapel’s vaulted darkness. He’s essentially a singer-songwriter dressed in country raiment, but it fits him well. His is an elegant melancholy; peals of electric guitar lapping against his songs like a mournful tide. You feel he deserves an orchestra.

Grand Drive’s Julian and Danny Wilson were originally from Australia, but grew up in south London. They take the “alt” out of alt.country to make music reminiscent of Nashville at its commercial worst, music that belongs on the soundtrack to Dawson’s Creek. It reaches its nadir on the cornball fluff of “Harmony”, a song which conjures the unholy memory of Stevie Wonder and Paul McCartney as it offers the definition “when two people sing as one”, which isn’t even musically correct. Even the charm of an early song like “Wrong Notes” has soured into schmaltz. There is something oddly narcissistic about the Wilsons’ helium harmonies; they billow gassily rather in the manner of Clannad, which isn’t at all what the doctor ordered.

“You’ll be happy to know the [new] record is a meditation on mortality,” Robert Fisher deadpans as Willard Grant Conspiracy take the stage, “which is another word for death.” A perfectly timed comic pause. “You won’t be required to do much dancing.” “River In The Pines” sets the tone, a traditional song in which, quips Fisher, “boy meets girl, they fall in love, then they die tragically.” Uncut’s Album Of The Month for July, Regard The End, from which the bulk of tonight’s set is taken, is certainly sombre. But as the descending notes of “Ghost Of The Girl In The Well” swell its wordless chorus, it suggests transcendence. Fisher is blessed with a voice that has all the gravity of a Cash, a Cohen or a Cale. This isn’t simply a maudlin exercise in classicism, however. This is a tradition whose relevance couldn’t be more sharply felt. “People have called this our anti-war song,” says Fisher of “Another Man Is Gone”, “which is okay as there aren’t enough of those.” “Day Is Passed And Gone” is introduced as “a lullaby, and like many lullabies, it features death prominently.” Fisher tells us his mother thought” you should sing children to bed reminding them that they are mortal: they wake up grateful.” The majestic “Suffering Song” reminds us that what unites us is our painful humanity. We walk out grateful.