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Record is <a href ="http://www.sendspace.com/file/v088s2"> here </a>.
Released June 30, 1992 on Too Pure Records.
UK Album Chart #11, 1992
Don't have then album... yet...
Update: Apparently she's originally from <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PJ_Harvey">Yeovil</a>, and Huzb knows one of her old classmates there. He said PJ was rarely at school - too busy with her music.
BTW, a hijack:
25 free songs from emusic.com (gotta give a credit card, and cancel within two weeks) at:
http://www.emusic.com/harpers
http://www.emusic.com/something-something-2 (this one is for 30, but I can't remember the link)
...so yeah, I'm a chump paying $10 a month for 30 songs. I've picked up:
Turing Machine - Zwei
Turing Machine - A New Machine for Living
Stereo Lab - Switched On
DK3 - Neutrons
The Dirtbombs - Ultraglide in Black (thanks for the reminder tommy)
Rocket From The Crypt - Circe Now! +4 - Hippy Dippy Do
http://www.emusic.com/netflix2
35 free ones.
Still haven't listened to it again.
Not recently, but I too have been known to frequent those guys.
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I graduated high school in 1992. My high school was small and back-wood and it wasn't until I had a couple of kids move into town that I was introduced to 'alternative music'. I suffered through a lot of static to tune in WFNX and that Brown college station, some of you know the one.
For me, alternative meant that I wore out my 'smells like teen spirit' cassette single driving my family's Dodge Caravan back and forth to rehearsals for a production of "Scrooged" done by a local community theater production company. I listened to NWA and Ice-T on my boyfriend's twin's girlfriend's walkman in the back of the bus on our way back from a Hershey Park, PA music competition, where I'm sure we sang a medley of songs from Phantom of the Opera. I listened to the Violent Femmes after Field Hockey games. To seal the deal, I bought myself the suburban 'alternative flag,' a pair of Doc Martin 8 hole oxbloods at Berk's. I went to the Garment District a few times. I discovered coffee kingdom in Worcester.
But what I listened to was the Indigo Girls. Mimarima's sister and I spent hours driving around in her car, harmonizing and shouting the angry parts. She and I sang "Hammer and a Nail" at our high school graduation. We speculated that they might be *whispers* 'lesbians'.
Glossing over the next couple of years: went to college, met and hung out with some hippies and some punks, was diagnosed with an incurable chronic disease, got myself a controlling boyfriend who didn't allow me to have my own friends.
When I broke up with him, I found myself virtually friendless, VERY VERY ANGRY, but somehow free in a way I'd never been before.
Can you guess what follows? Feminism.
And the Indigos, with their acoustic guitars, "help me live my life less seriously" and "closer I am to fine" just didn't cut it.
Insert PJ Harvey "Dry."
She sang a song about <a href= "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheela_na_Gig"> Sheela Na-Gig, </a> the Celtic figure carved into church walls with her hands between her legs, brazenly showing the viewer her cunt, an kind of Anti-Madonna.
The Character in the song displays her sexuality and her strength to man after man and is beaten back with words like "dirty pillows" and "exhibitionist," "put money in your idle hole!" In the end, she she "wash the man right out of her hair," "Heard it before, NO MORE"
This made perfect fucking sense to my lonely, angry soul, trying to find my way in a life that just was not so innocent anymore. I didn't want to fit myself into the 'girl' box after the ex boyfriend, and alternated between feeling betrayed and feeling directionless about the rest of my life. I wanted to display my angry cunt (or maybe to be one), to be hard (which I never was), to be confident.
In "Dress," She sang a song with the lyrics
"Must be a way that i can dress to please him
It's hard to walk in the dress, it's not easy
I'm spilling over like a heavy loaded fruit tree"
and how the dress ends up:
"Filthy tight, the dress is filthy
I'm falling flat and my arms are empty
Clear the way better get it out of this room
A falling woman in dancing costume"
I don't think I have to spell any more analogies out here, people.
To me, Polly Jean was my soundtrack to individuality, to feminism, for all of the early teen issues I was dealing with at the time. And the message was coming from a fucking awesome rock chick who screamed and wailed over a fuzzy bass and an awesome mix of cabaret and punk.
that's all I can come up with now.
Yep. That pretty much sums it up for me too!
(except it was a faux wood paneled Oldsmobile Station wagon that I promptly crashed into a parked ISUZU trooper at a Tae Kwan Do place in Nashua. Of course it was the first day of my license, and of course the Isuzu's owner was the sensei. My Dad, when phone called by me desparately, made me drive the car home to instill a sense of not giving up in me).
Nevermind was pretty much in there all the time as me and Glumac and Mike Vercelli drove back and forth to Boy Scout / Explorer wind ensemble every wednesday night. (Along with Amerikkka's Most Wanted, Straight Outta Compton, the occasional Voivod, and the occasional Black Flag)
How this ties into PJ Harvey I have no fucking clue, but the bad car memories and the static of WFNX from Manch Vegas conjured up some resonance...
My sibs wouldn't let me borrow their walkman unless I tuned it to the hard rock station. Guess that's why I knew all the words to all the Skynrd songs by age 9. Just goes to show what some of us will do to fit in.
Growing up, almost everything I listened to was by the Beatles, the Who, the Kinks, or the Rolling Stones. My Dad listened exclusively to blues and old school r&b, Mum was into classical music, and my brother listened to anything Top 40, so I'm not sure what happened to me. Of course I dug Duran Duran because I had hormones, like everybody else, and I first got into Madonna, Elvis Costello, and the Clash because of my gapped front teeth. I also had some confusing feelings about Joan Jett, but that's another story.
When I was 13 I met my first real friend (Big Gay Mark), who found me in desparate need of a musical education. He leant me Never Mind the Bollocks, and when I came into the school the next day, breathless with excitement, he looked at me completely seriously and said - "Now you're ready." He leant me The Top & Head on the Door that day, and the rest, as they say, is history.
For the most part I have to admit that I do subscribe to Courtney Love's credo that "rock's gotta have cock" - bad feminists that we are - but certain women do rock my socks off, and PJ is one of them. My favorite song of hers is actually on the next album (Mansize - which curls my toes like nobody's business - "Good lord, I'm BIG!"), but I loved her from the start.