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Polly Jean Harvey, born October 9, 1969 in Yeovil and raised in nearby Corscombe (Dorset), is a British singer and songwriter. She has recorded as a solo artist under the name PJ Harvey, but she began her career as part of a trio (with Rob Ellis and Steve Vaughn) also named PJ Harvey. She has cultivated a reputation for eccentricity to match her music. (She purportedly lives on a diet of potatoes.)
Harvey studied sculpture at Yeovil Art College. She studied saxophone for about eight years, and played sax in her earliest bands Bologna and Automatic Dlamini.
Harvey released her debut single, "Dress" in 1991; she released her first LP Dry in 1992. (A limited edition double LP containing both Dry and the demos for Dry, called Dryer/Demonstration, was also released at this time.) She drew fire in 1991/1992 when she appeared topless on the cover of the British magazine New Musical Express; until then she had been considered unambiguously feminist.
1993 saw the release of two further albums in quick succession, Rid of Me (produced by Steve Albini) with the original trio and, later in the year, a solo-release 4-Track Demos, the 4-track demos that would become Rid of Me.
After the departure of drummer Rob Ellis, Harvey refused to sign to any of the bidding major labels, and embarked upon a solo career exploring collaborations with other musicians. To Bring You My Love (1995; produced by Mark Ellis a.k.a Flood) quickly became a staple of alternative rock. After Is This Desire? (an album that was poorly received critically and commercially) was released in 1998, Harvey reunited with her old bandmates for Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea. The album, recorded in Dorset and New York, was a big success and took the Mercury Music Prize that year. It also signified a change in mood for Polly as she sang about a seemingly new-found happiness in her life. In 2001 she topped a readers' poll conducted by Q magazine of the 100 Greatest Women in Rock Music. Her latest album, Uh Huh Her, was released May 31, 2004.
She contributed to Josh Homme's The Desert Sessions and appeared on Nick Cave's Murder Ballads (on the song "Henry Lee") and Tricky's Angels with Dirty Faces. She recorded an album Dance Hall at Louse Point with John Parish under the name Polly Jean Harvey, and has since gone on to to produce Tiffany Anders' Funny Cry Happy Gift. Harvey also performed on and wrote songs for Marianne Faithfull's 2004 album Before the Poison.
Outside of the better-known musical career, Polly Jean Harvey appeared as Mary Magdalene in Hal Hartley's The Book of Life, and in the Sarah Miles-directed A Bunny Girl's Tale, and is an accomplished sculptor as well as a published poet.
On December 17, 2004, on stage in Paris, she announced that she was quitting playing live with the comment, "This is the last show I will ever play", to the audience of 350 who were attending as part of a competition.
This perhaps misheard statement was later understood to be a reference to the end of PJ Harvey's line up for that tour, and not of her career itself. PJ Harvey gigs and appearances continue.
P. J. Harvey Discography
Album
2004 Uh Huh Her
2000 Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea
1998 Is This Desire?
1995 To Bring You My Love
1993 Rid of Me
1993 4-Track Demos
1992 Dry
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