PJ Harvey and Remembering England. In: Mad Dogs and Englishness: Popular Music and English Identities

This is a peer-reviewed, post-print (final draft post-refereeing) version of the following published document and is licensed under Creative Commons: Attribution 4.0 license: Gardner, Abigail S ORCID: 0000-0003-2994-741X (2017) PJ Harvey and Remembering England. In: Mad Dogs and Englishness: Popular Music and English Identities. Bloomsbury, New York. ISBN 9781501311253 EPrint URI: http://eprints.glos.ac.uk/id/eprint/4126 Disclaimer The University of Gloucestershire has obtained warranties from all depositors as to their title in the material deposited and as to their right to deposit such material. The University of Gloucestershire makes no representation or warranties of commercial utility, title, or fitness for a particular purpose or any other warranty, express or implied in respect of any material deposited. The University of Gloucestershire makes no representation that the use of the materials will not infringe any patent, copyright, trademark or other property or proprietary rights. The University of Gloucestershire accepts no liability for any infringement of intellectual property rights in any material deposited but will remove such material from public view pending investigation in the event of an allegation of any such infringement. PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR TEXT. PJ Harvey and Remembering England Introduction PJ Harvey is an English musician who has, to date, enjoyed a career spanning nearly a quarter of a century. She comes from Dorset, a rural county in the South West of England, where she still lives. This fact is important because it locates her in a particular rural and potentially ‘pastoral’ place, one that is far away from the metropolitan, from Thomas Hardy’s ‘madding crowd’. This chapter focuses on White Chalk (2007) and Let England Shake (2011) to argue that they are her ‘English’ albums, a claim that rests not only on their musical temperament, lyrical concerns or audio-visual representation, but also on the nature of how they remember England, especially when this collides with narratives of war and home. Remembering is often selective and selection is part of the archiving process. What we leave in and what we leave out of the archive dictates in turn, what is and is not remembered. In these two albums, Harvey presents a version of Englishness that adds to contemporary discourses on (memories of) national identity by foregrounding the forgotten, the rural, the disappointed; by narrating tales of love and war that are not those of victory or triumph but of longing and loss. For clarity of navigation, throughout the chapter a music video or short film will be written in small capitals (WHITE CHALK), the album titles will be in italics, White Chalk and a song track from an album will be within quotation marks, ‘White Chalk’. Harvey has been recording since the early 1990s, has won the UK Mercury prize twice and might be considered to be one of the country’s most longstanding and important musicians. Her 2011 work, Let England Shake, on land and nation cemented her musical and intellectual reputation. She has been awarded the MBE, an honorary degree from Goldsmiths, University of London, has conducted poetry readings at the British Museum and guest edited 1 Radio 4; she has been taken into the folds of the intellectual elite. It is even tempting to start thinking about her as a ‘national treasure’, whereby she is rehabilitated from the wilds of the independent music shores to take part in a shared cultural life. This chapter interrogates how and why this has happened and argues that it is, in part, due to her narration of Englishness and what aspects of it are remembered. To map this out, the discussion entails an analysis of the development over Harvey’s recent career (2007- 2011) of audio-visual aspects of her work that might be construed as ‘English’ particularly in relation to locality and land (Aughey, 2007). One of the questions posed here is to ask whether these aspects might be seen to culminate in her more recent work at a time when nation and identity may be considered to be pertinent political and cultural themes. In this sense, the chapter asks whether her albums are part of an archiving process that contributes to a reframing of Englishness. Harvey the archivist In other work (Gardner, 2015), I have argued that Harvey is an archivist, in that she collects, curates and presents alternative versions and visions of the past, predominantly those of past femininities. Sifting through what is presented to her from the past, she has re-inhabited them and reconfigured them, questioning their legacies with irony and camp humour. In a similar fashion she does the same in White Chalk and Let England Shake, the first of which is concerned with matrilineal histories and rural place, the second where she presents a tapestry of Englishness that has as its metanarrative, an idea of nation as configured through loss, war and remembrance. Harvey’s lyrical concerns in these two albums centre not only on land and belonging but also on how that land and allegiance to it are archived and remembered. In Let England Shake in particular, Englishness is defined in relation to land and war and, crucially 2 what is recorded (literally, through the audio archiving that is the record) becomes Harvey’s archive of Englishness. It is a radical re-imagining of England at a time when its mythology and status were under debate. What she does on this album, the process of setting down on record, the audio inscription, is in line with Derrida’s (1996) view in Archive Fever that the archive is not always about the past but can be about the future. It records what we are agreeing to remember of the past, specifically that of a mythologised pastoral England. Harvey’s stories people the land with voices that have been marginalised or under explored. We hear laments from wounded soldiers (2011), young women abandoned by their lovers (2007), we see, in Seamus Murphy’s films, young gamekeepers, elderly men and women. Harvey rescues these ordinary accounts and pastes them onto the received trope of Englishness that are the stock imagery of an old and pastoral England, across meadows, beaches, fields, oak trees and milestones. These two albums fit into a wider compulsion across contemporary British popular culture to retrieve from history the voices of those previously unheard and to focus on the emotional weight they have. The BBC’s 2016-2017 year of popular music memories (‘My Generation’) is one example of the mediation of musical memories and emotional attachment. Emotion has featured in academic work on media in general (Doveling, von Scheve and Kojin, 2010; Gorton, 2009; Garde-Hansen and Gorton, 2013) and is visible in recent additions to the popular music canon (Juslin and Slobodan, 2010; Hesmondhalgh, 2013). Harvey’s albums expresses a narrative of Englishness that articulates the emotional ties to family and land that are themselves emergent from older archives of Englishness; musical expressions, melodic structures, military archives, all of which Harvey has consulted and reinterpreted, producing in turn her own archive of Englishness. Harvey emerged onto the UK ‘independent’ or ‘indie’ music scene in the early 1990s, and has, to date produced nine solo studio albums. ‘Indie’ is a term whose ‘exact definition 3 and boundaries are open to dispute’ (Leonard, 2007a: 4). It has been, and continues to be, a topic of debate across popular music, both in academia and within industry discourses and Moore’s (2003) oft-cited paper positions it as a construct characterised by ‘rawness’ (Frith and Horne, 1988:88) and unmediated communication (Grossberg, 1992,1993). It has become allied to a white masculinity (Bannister, 2006b, Leach, 2001) despite its historical link to ‘difference’ (Bannister, 2006a:58) and counter-cultural possibilities, particularly with providing space for women to perform and produce (Kruse, 2003; Reddington, 2007; Schilt, 2004; Leonard, 2007a). A seam through all of these conversations is the notion of ‘authenticity’ (Shuker, 2013: 18). This term, itself much debated, arguably determines how punk and folk music have been discursively situated within a polarity, at the opposite end of which sits ‘pop’ (Dale, 2012: 43; Hesmondhalgh, 1999:56). Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, Harvey mined a seam of Gothic Blues and garage punk so that both her early output and later albums might be corralled into such generic parameters. However, keen to cross musical genres, Her Mercury Prize winning 2001 album Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea experimented with a fuller sound. Six years later, she released, White Chalk (2007), which was pared down, piano-led and arguably, more versed within a folk tradition. Let England Shake (2011) continued this line of creative direction. These two albums herald a shift towards a consideration of country (side) and belonging that work as audio-visual renditions of a radical pastoralism. That is, Harvey uses musical and visual tropes of rural and imagined England as material upon which to stage narratives that foreground the place of land and countryside within personal stories of gendered (2007) and national (2011) identity. In their work on popular music and place, Connell and Gibson articulate how the term ‘nation’ is a contested concept ‘that provides the basis for debates in society about cultural difference, uniqueness and attachments to territory’ 4 (Connell and Gibson, 2003: 123). Their last assertion that national identity is tied up with relationships to land plays the biggest role in Harvey’s two ‘English’ albums. Finding England The idea of ‘Englishness’ and England has become ripe for reconsideration within the academy as writers on popular culture trace out emerging imaginations of Englishness with respect to identity and place (Bunting, 2009), politics (Kenny, 2014) and popular culture (Featherstone, 2009).

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