The Brag

Uncanny gig tonight; the ostentatious formality of the State Theatre dwarfed in significance before the slight, imperious presence left of stage. Cloaked in a black dress somewhere between Miss Haversham and an amorphous swirl of raven feathers, black leather corset buckling the lot down like a latter-day Boadicea, PJ Harvey conjured a maelstrom deep and reverberating, filling a packed hall with a musical invocation at once compassionate, unrelenting and pitiless.

Part of the weirdness was the bizarre clash between the effort that went into maintaining a stark presentation of the material – which included an almost complete recitation of last year’s behemoth Let England Shake as well as songs from 2007’s White Chalk – and the needlessly atmosphere-shredding punctuations provided by people calling out “We love you” between songs. In any case, the woman on stage nurtured a careful ambience – the austere spotlights cutting through the pitch black to catch her ghostly upturned face; the sober vests sported like 19th century miners by John Parish, Mick Harvey and drummer Jean-Marc Butty; the sound equipment arrayed behind them like furniture lifted from Wuthering Heights; the almost total lack of audience interaction, which was frighteningly effective in establishing the necessary seriousness.

Indeed, if the raw violence of her work has sometimes been obscured by her current profile, this evening was a timely reminder of the unflinching dispassion with which she catalogues dismemberment (‘The Words That Maketh Murder’), deformity (‘The Glorious Land’) and disenfranchisement (take your pick) in her recent work, and her heart-rending contempt for what England has done to itself over the last decade or two.

At times trading the jangling wrath of the autoharp for her familiar electric, tonight she shrilled and shrieked (as on the pounding ‘Bitter Branches’), crooned (‘Last Living Rose’), warbled (a welcome inclusion of ‘Pocketknife’ from 2004’s Uh Huh Her) and wailed (the encore this evening, an overwhelming rendition of White Chalk’s ‘Silence’), embodying an oracular fury while dispensing wisdom as required as it is unsavoury.

Oliver Downes