newalbums
22 • UNCUT • jULY 2019
A
FTER two years spent
touring The Hope Six
Demolition Project,
PJ Harvey returned
home last November
to take stock of her
situation. “I’ve done
this half my life,” she told broadcaster
John Wilson in February. “Do I want to
continue this way, or maybe do I want to
try something different?”
Harvey has always been a theatrical
performer, of course. Even the Recording
In Progress project – where Harveyand her band worked on The Hope Six
Demolition Project behind one-way glass
in a soundproofed box beneath Somerset
House – was as much performance as
recording session. Increasingly, though,
she has augmented her core business
as a singer-songwriter with a parallel
career composing scores for film, theatre
and television. This, it seems, is where
Harvey now chooses to focus her gifts.
For an artist who has embraced such
a wide range of
approaches and
manifestations,
this latest
incarnation as
erudite soundtrack
composer
reinforces her
restless creativity,
evolving from the
visceral savagery
and raucous
swagger of her
early records to
the urgency andhistorical contextualising of her most
recent LPs and, now, somewhere beyond.
Her latest score is for a new adaptation
of All About Eve by the Belgian theatre
director Ivo van Hove. Van Hove has form
here: he directed David Bowie’s Lazarus
in 2015. For this story of a legendary
Broadway star who is eclipsed by a
manipulative aspiring actress, van Hove
gave Harvey an open brief which yielded
the 12 songs here, totalling 34 minutes
of music. Eight of the songs are under
two-and-a-half minutes; the shortest,
“Cadenza”, runs for just over a minute.
There are two vocal pieces – performed
by the production’s leads, Gillian
Anderson and Lily James. Clearly,
this is not a PJ Harvey album such as
we’re used to.
As it transpires, All About Eve partly
recalls Thom Yorke’s soundtrack for
Suspiria – another largely instrumental
project that amplified the artist’s gifts for
conjuring moods full of murky unease,
fragile beauty and wistful melancholia
with only the briefest sketches. TherePj HARVEY
All About Eve – Original
soundtrack
INVADA RECORDs/LAkEsHORE RECORDs7/1 0
Fragile beauty and new directions.
By Michael BonnerSeAMuS MuRPHy