CityLife

MIF: Polly ready for Bridgewater date

FERAL, visceral, blues-sodden vamp. John Peel's muse, Nick Cave's lover, Dorset icon. Polly Jean Harvey, now amazingly 37, is one of the most beguiling inclusions in the Festival pantheon.

The Yeovil-born West Country Girl who once topped a Q magazine readers' poll of the 100 greatest women in rock is playing her only gig in the UK this year at the Bridgewater Hall - and it's an exciting prospect. She will be solo, but whether this means acoustic or retrospective we just don't know.

Since her last album, the patchy Uh Huh Her, three years ago, her profile has been low. Contributing to Marianne Faithful and Mark Lanegan albums or jamming in the desert with Queens Of The Stone Age's Josh Homme has hardly raised it.

Passions

Perhaps she has been indulging in her other passions - sculpture and writing poetry. Reportedly, she's back in the studio with long-time collaborator John Parrish, recording an album that may appear before the year's end.

It seems a long time since she shocked that part of her fanbase who saw her as Sheela-na-Gig-summoning feminist shaman by touring in pink catsuits and garish smudged make-up. That was around the time of her greatest album, 1995's million-selling To Give You My Love, infused with all the blues influences inherited from her hippy Dorset parents and driven by her personal demons exposed in earlier, more daunting albums Dry and Rid Of Me and 1998's dark, disturbing, almost guitar-free Is This Desire.

Fewer banshees featured in 2000's melodic Mercury Prize-winning Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea, which saw her duet with Radiohead's Thom Yorke (and appear happier than of yore){hellip} but musically and lyrically she has never taken any prisoners.

At least, the Bridgewater won't see a repeat of her disastrous 1991 debut in the original band called PJ Harvey. The punky trio played the skittle alley of a Sherborne hotel. The proprietior begged them to desist as nearly all his customers had fled!

Bridgewater Hall, Saturday, July 7