Last month, PJ Harvey’s 2000 album Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea
turned 25. The vinyl reissue, snatched up by me at Bruntsfield’s Thorne Records, is
like a painting: a cover so deeply iconic it would make any well-informed listener
spend £25. Although Harvey has in recent years branched out into poetry and
dabbled in (surprisingly good) TV and theatre soundtracks, I keep coming back to
Stories. My soft spot for the album could simply be our friend nostalgia: my teenage
self absolutely inhaled it. But I’d say it’s more than that.
Stories, which earned Harvey the first of two Mercury Prize wins, is her magnum
opus. Sandwiched between 1998’s more experimental Is This Desire? and 2004’s
Uh Huh Her, the more accessible Stories bridges a gap in a discography that
occasionally requires some good old acquired taste. Perhaps naturally, then,
Harvey’s foray into the mainstream struck the wrong chord for some. In their original review of the album, Pitchfork described her change in direction as a move towards “the central category,” claiming “her music gets duller as the time passes.” Ouch. Interestingly, Harvey herself was not too keen, later confessing to Mojo: “I felt like I got lost around that record. […] Pop music isn’t where my heart is at.”
Yet, Stories is Harvey’s most successful record, selling over 445,000 copies (and
counting). Although daring, Harvey’s new direction was clearly a risk worth taking.
Artists must progress, and sometimes that happens to be in the direction of the
mainstream. However, I’ve never quite bought the claim that the mainstream or pop
automatically constitutes bad music. Stories is not the radio-amenable trash I am far
too often subjected to today. Its lyrics are a slow and mellow reflection on what it
means to be about town and, as Kylie Jenner once said, “like, realising things”. Stories speaks to the soul-searcher attempting to become something bigger. Whether Harvey liked the album ultimately doesn’t matter; like any good album, Stories is, well, a story.
On the opening track, ‘Big Exit’, Harvey recounts the ultimate dilemma for us fiercely independent romantics. She struggles to find her place, bathing in romance yet craving power: “Baby, baby ain’t it true / I’m immortal when I’m with you / But I want a pistol in my hand / I want to go to a different land.” As the record progresses, though, Harvey begins to embrace the double-edged sword of urban freedom and
spontaneity whilst respecting the power of the city (New York, for those wondering).
In ‘This Mess We’re In’, an almost duet with Thom Yorke, the city comes alive and
cuts their rendezvous short, dragging Harvey back to reality: “And thank you / I don’t think we will meet again / And you must leave now / Before the sun rises over the skyscrapers / And the city landscape comes into being.” But on the final track, ‘We Float’, Harvey becomes a hopeful, measured observer of her experiences: “This is kind of about you / This is kind of about me / We just kind of lost our way / We were looking to be free.”
À la Lily Allen’s recent West End Girl, Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea
is, rather like Harvey herself felt, an album to get lost in. It captures the elusive and
turbulent journey of self-discovery, and with its tender lyrics and edgy 2000s sound, it is hard to imagine that it will ever not be listened to. 25 years on, it’s still incredibly good. Long live PJ.
“PJ Harvey” by Dave Mitchell (Plastic Jesus) is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.