Skip to main content

PJ Harvey: The Hope Six Demolition Project

The Playhouse, Edinburgh

Distant drums usher in the first of two special Edinburgh International Festival shows by PJ Harvey and a nine piece band performing Harvey's 2016 album, The Hope Six Demolition Project. Conceived during trips to Kosovo, Afghanistan and Washington DC with film maker and photographer Seamus Murphy, the result was a record as much journalese as work of art. It tapped into global concerns of poverty and the effects of war by way of a swathe of musical influences fleshed out with a driving percussive edge.

The title itself was drawn from a project in Washington where rundown housing was demolished to make way for new dwellings. The result was that the original residents were priced out of the neighbourhood. Such is the universal curse of gentrification and social cleansing.
 
Perhaps this is why Harvey and her black clad nine piece band march onstage like they're leading a funeral parade, martial drums to the fore. Harvey herself walks barely noticeable at the procession's centre, the only woman of the party looking like a Lorca heroine in mourning, clutching a saxophone as she goes.

As Harvey lines up as part of the three piece horn section, the pounding introduction gives way to Chain of Keys, as Harvey finally steps up to the microphone. When she does, it’s with a controlled power that sees her wield her saxophone like a weapon while she sings. The jaunty The Community of Hope is a people-powered anthem set to a rousing chorus decrying how the 'hood is being messed up by Walmart’ in a way that got her in trouble with Washington's local council. Live, the song has fresh resonance, as though Harvey and her own community onstage are willing the audience to rise up.

At times Harvey's voice sounds close to vintage Patti Smith by way of Grace Slick. While she barely says a word outside of the songs, once she puts down her sax and releases the microphone from its stand, she vamps it up for all she's worth, throwing shapes as if at a Balkan wedding.

The band is a well-drilled ensemble weaving reinventions of arcane blues and folk idioms into stunning arrangements. Made up of much of the album's alumni, including Harvey's long term collaborator John Parish, former Bad Seed Mick Harvey and Gallon Drunk violinist and guitarist James Johnston, they bolster Harvey with an intricate set of hand-clap pulsed chorales. When Terry Edwards plays two saxes at once or simply blares out his solos on Ministry of Affairs, it’s doubly thrilling.

Beyond The Hope Six Demolition Project, the set is peppered throughout with a pick and mix selection culled from Harvey's back catalogue. Hearing 50 Foot Queenie and To Bring You My Love would be a treat anytime. Fleshed out with horn led arrangements that still keep their raw heart intact, songs open out into eerier waters. The twin saxes on To Bring You My Love are intense enough to suggest a hitherto undiscovered form of mediaeval classicism.

Where songs such as White Chalk and Dear Darkness are intimate short stories in which Harvey inhabits passing characters for fleeting moments of intensity, The Hope Six Demolition Project is a widescreen epic. It's just as intense, but with each episodic narrative linked across continents by action and consequence.

As River Anacostia's ending segues into a massed a cappella finale, it sounds like a redemptive chain gang unleashing their collective spirit on high. After a standing ovation, Harvey and co return, first for a rip-roaring reinvention of Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited, before the rolling thunder that has driven the night finally gives way to a raging calm.

Product, August 2017

ends


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Ron Butlin - The Sound of My Voice

When Ron Butlin saw a man who’d just asked him the time throw himself under a train on the Paris Metro, it was a turning point in how his 1987 novel, The Sound Of My Voice, would turn out. Twenty years on, Butlin’s tale of suburban family man Morris Magellan’s existential crisis and his subsequent slide into alcoholism is regarded as a lost classic. Prime material, then, for the very intimate stage adaptation which opens in the Citizens Theatre’s tiny Stalls Studio tonight. “I had this friend in London who was an alcoholic,” Butlin recalls. “He would go off to work in the civil service in the morning looking absolutely immaculate. Then at night we’d meet, and he’s get mega-blootered, then go home and continue drinking and end up in a really bad state. I remember staying over one night, and he’d emerge from his room looking immaculate again. There was this huge contrast between what was going on outside and what was going on inside.” We’re sitting in a café on Edinburgh’s south sid

Losing Touch With My Mind - Psychedelia in Britain 1986-1990

DISC 1 1. THE STONE ROSES   -  Don’t Stop 2. SPACEMEN 3   -  Losing Touch With My Mind (Demo) 3. THE MODERN ART   -  Mind Train 4. 14 ICED BEARS   -  Mother Sleep 5. RED CHAIR FADEAWAY  -  Myra 6. BIFF BANG POW!   -  Five Minutes In The Life Of Greenwood Goulding 7. THE STAIRS  -  I Remember A Day 8. THE PRISONERS  -  In From The Cold 9. THE TELESCOPES   -  Everso 10. THE SEERS   -  Psych Out 11. MAGIC MUSHROOM BAND  -  You Can Be My L-S-D 12. THE HONEY SMUGGLERS  - Smokey Ice-Cream 13. THE MOONFLOWERS  -  We Dig Your Earth 14. THE SUGAR BATTLE   -  Colliding Minds 15. GOL GAPPAS   -  Albert Parker 16. PAUL ROLAND  -  In The Opium Den 17. THE THANES  -  Days Go Slowly By 18. THEE HYPNOTICS   -  Justice In Freedom (12" Version) 1. THE STONE ROSES    Don’t Stop ( Silvertone   ORE   1989) The trip didn’t quite start here for what sounds like Waterfall played backwards on The Stone Roses’ era-defining eponymous debut album, but it sounds

Big Gold Dreams – A Story of Scottish Independent Music 1977-1989

Disc 1 1. THE REZILLOS (My Baby Does) Good Sculptures (12/77)  2. THE EXILE Hooked On You (8/77) 3. DRIVE Jerkin’ (8/77) 4. VALVES Robot Love (9/77) 5. P.V.C. 2 Put You In The Picture (10/77) 6. JOHNNY & THE SELF ABUSERS Dead Vandals (11/77) 7. BEE BEE CEE You Gotta Know Girl (11/77) 8. SUBS Gimme Your Heart (2/78) 9. SKIDS Reasons (No Bad NB 1, 4/78) 10. FINGERPRINTZ Dancing With Myself (1/79)  11. THE ZIPS Take Me Down (4/79) 12. ANOTHER PRETTY FACE All The Boys Love Carrie (5/79)  13. VISITORS Electric Heat (5/79) 14. JOLT See Saw (6/79) 15. SIMPLE MINDS Chelsea Girl (6/79) 16. SHAKE Culture Shock (7/79) 17. HEADBOYS The Shape Of Things To Come (7/79) 18. FIRE EXIT Time Wall (8/79) 19. FREEZE Paranoia (9/79) 20. FAKES Sylvia Clarke (9/79) 21. TPI She’s Too Clever For Me (10/79) 22. FUN 4 Singing In The Showers (11/79) 23. FLOWERS Confessions (12/79) 24. TV21 Playing With Fire (4/80) 25. ALEX FERGUSSON Stay With Me Tonight (1980) 1. THE REZILL