Just like Alice Cooper once was the title of a band that featured a singer with the same name, PJ Harvey was once the name of a musical trio. Polly Jean Harvey met drummer Rob Ellis and bassist Ian Oliver while performing in John Parish’s rock ensemble Automatic Dlamini, and they joined forces under the PJ Harvey moniker. Oliver ended up returning to Automatic Dlamini and was replaced by Steve Vaughan. (Polly later brought in yet another Automatic Dlamini alumni, John Parish, to co-produce the third PJ Harvey studio album To Bring You My Love, her first bona fide solo album.)
PJ Harvey remained a trio through two acclaimed albums, Dry and Rid of Me, until the pressures of fame and touring drove them apart. Polly Jean continued to record as a solo act using the name PJ Harvey.
Their second album Rid of Me was released in on 4 May 1993. Harvey was the principal songwriter, and it marked a departure from her previous works with the material being rawer and more aggressive than before.
The recording sessions took place over a two-week period with Steve Albini producing. According to Harvey the bulk of the recording was done in three days. The album was mostly recorded live in the studio, with the band bashing out song after song.
The title track was influenced by one of Harvey’s relationships coming to an end. When told by an interviewer that Rid of Me sounded psychotic, she replied that she wrote the song “at my illest” and added “I was almost psychotic at the time.” But, she made it clear that not all of the lyrics were to be read autobiographically, saying “I would have to be 40 and very work out to have lived through everything I write about.” She was 23 at the time.
She was not overstating her condition at the point of writing the song. The band had toured almost non-stop behind their first album Dry. The song was born with Harvey still exhausted from that gruelling tour and trying to get over a recent breakup. Adding to that, the song started appearing during a miserable stay in a shared flat in Tottenham, London. She recalled: “We were living in a very damp flat with gas heaters, and I had a poky little room at the front of the house. In order to access any of the rest of the house you had to walk through my room. We were on the lower floor, so the people up above us would make noise. I remember starting to write Rid of Me sitting on my bed in my damp front room by the gas heater.”
For the sake of her mental health, Harvey retreated to a seaside apartment above a restaurant on Dorset’s Jurassic Coast, where she continued to work on songs while taking in the beautiful scenery. “I think the view from your window when you’re writing really does inform what you’re writing about quite a lot. I need to stare out of a window whilst I’m writing. That helps me find where I’m going. I was by the harbour, so I could see people coming and going in boats, and I could look out at the sea. There was a fun fair that would pitch up in a field to the right of the restaurant every June, so for a while, I had a fun fair outside my window. I’m sure that contributed in some way to Rid of Me.”
The beautiful scenery was not enough to quieten down the intensity of the track. Everybody quickly noted it as a bitter slice of rage, designed to shock listeners with its raw energy. The singer alternates between quietly begging her unfaithful lover to stay and threatening to twist his head off.
“When I wrote Rid of Me, I shocked myself,” Harvey explained to Spin magazine. “I thought, ‘Well, if I’m shocked, other people might be shocked.’ The sound of the words was powerful, and the rhythm felt clean and simple to roll off the tongue. I knew that this was the type of song I was trying to write.”
One Melody Maker writer was so startled when the quietly seething tune exploded into a screaming ball of fury, she crashed her car while listening to it.
The performance of the lyrics are very much part of how they should be taken – as intense expressions of feelings rather than eloquent, rational poetry. The song is a mixture of whimpering in pain, primal screaming, and intense pleading. This will shape how the lyrics are written, but also how they should be experienced. We are not talking about perfectly coherent expressions of rational thought. This is a whirlwind of emotional turmoil, and nobody can deny the emotional impact of the performance.
I’ll tie your legs
Keep you against my chest
Oh, you’re not rid of me
Yeah, you’re not rid of me
I’ll make you lick my injuries
I’m gonna twist your head off, see
Till you say don’t you wish you never never met her?
Don’t you don’t you wish you never never met her?
Harvey rarely shares the meaning behind her songs. She explained in a 2004 interview: “I don’t explain lyrics, and choose not to. The beauty of it for me is that everyone can interpret it in their own way. I don’t choose to psychoanalyze my own lyrics either. Sometimes words come together because they sound really beautiful together.”
Drummer Rob Ellis told Spin of Rid of Me: “It’s ugly music, but ugly in a good way. It makes me squirm in places but the reason it makes me squirm is because it is quite close to the bone. Some of the vocals are literally hysterical, mad, crazy. It’s a difficult listen because you’re not sure whether it’s embarrassing or funny or scary or what. But you can’t ignore it. It’s a pretty un-ignorable record. I’m proud of that.”
The band toured extensively behind the Rid of Me album. During the American leg of the tour, internal friction started to form between the members of the trio. Their final tour was to support U2 in August 1993, after which the trio officially disbanded. The final appearance of the Rid of Me tour and era, Harvey appeared alone on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno in September 1993. She performed – of course – a solo version of Rid of Me. This performance has become symbolic with signalling the end of PJ Harvey the band. In early 1994, it was announced that U2’s manager Paul McGuinness had become her manager. That was the start of the next phase of her career.
Those early, raw albums are fondly remembered by many. A song like Rid of Me is hardly is the kind of stuff you will find played at a lot of weddings, but it was played for at least one special ceremony. “I actually played at my brother’s wedding,” Harvey told GQ. “And the song that they requested for me to play was Rid of Me. That’s a true story. My own brother.”
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