PJ Harvey

Uh Huh Her is the seventh album from PJ Harvey and the follow-up to the hugely successful Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea which won the 2001 Mercury Music Prize. After a summer of live dates - including appearances at the V Festival, the Eden Project and the first rock concert at Tate Modern - Harvey finished work on the new record in the autumn of 2003. The album was written, performed, recorded, mixed & produced by Harvey, who chose Head to assist in additional recording and mixing and Rob Ellis, long time collaborator, to play drums and percussion on the album. Multi-instrumentalist, Harvey, played everything else.

From the outset, PJ Harvey has commanded attention. Polly Jean Harvey formed the bass / drums / guitar trio in 1991 in Dorset and by autumn had released the debut single, 'Dress', on indie label Too Pure. With a second single, 'Sheela-Na-Gig', in February 1992, Harvey had begun an impressive critical climb, which set the stage for a highly anticipated album release the following month. 'Dry' was hailed as an astonishing debut, not just in the UK but worldwide and especially in the United States, where Rolling Stone named Harvey Best Songwriter and Best New Female Singer.

In 1993, PJ Harvey signed to Island Records and began work on a follow-up album. The band went into the studio with Steve Albini in Minneapolis and the resulting album, 'Rid Of Me', was released in early '93. The album was supported by a lengthy world tour, drawing increasingly wide audiences and Harvey's first Mercury Prize nomination. However, by the end of the tour, Polly made the decision to dissolve the original trio and explore working with other musicians. The album '4-Track Demos' was released in the autumn of 1993, which comprised of 14 songs, a mixture of unreleased material and Harvey's own demos for 'Rid Of Me'.

'To Bring You My Love' followed in 1995, an eclectic and starkly original album. She enlisted a variety of musicians to play on the album, including John Parish (who co-produced along with Flood and Harvey), keyboardist Eric Drew Feldman and guitarist Joe Gore. The tour which followed saw Harvey explore a theatrical edge to her live performance. She received her second nomination for the Mercury Music Prize and was nominated for two Grammies, received '1995 Artist Of The Year' awards from Rolling Stone and Spin and gained album of the year acknowledgements across the board.

Recording her fifth album, 'Is This Desire?' in London and Dorset, Harvey once again co-produced the album with Flood and once again worked with Rob Ellis from the original P J Harvey line-up. It was released in September '98 and featured 12 new tracks. It attracted plaudits on both sides of the Atlantic and gained nominations for The Brits and The Grammy Awards.

'Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea', the much anticipated follow-up to 'Is This Desire?' was released in October 2000. The album, produced and performed by P J Harvey, Rob Ellis and Mick Harvey, picked up the Mercury Music Prize in 2001, the first album by a female artist to win the award. Described by the NME as "a magnificent, life-affirming opus" 'Stories...' was supported by a lengthy world-wide sellout tour.

Extra-curricular projects include soundtrack work on 'Basquiat', 'Stella Does Tricks', 'The Cradle Will Rock' & 'Six Feet Under' and an appearance as Mary Magdalene in Hal Hartley movie 'The Book Of Life'. In 1996 she worked with John Parish on the album 'Dance Hall At Louse Point' where her words accompanied the music of John Parish for both the album and a live accompaniment to the Mark Bruce Dance Company production of the same name. She has collaborated with an extraordinary range of musicians, duetting with Nick Cave, Tricky, How Gelb of Giant Sand, Pascal Comelade, Gordon Gano of Violent Femmes and appearing on Sparklehorse album 'It's A Wonderful Life'. Most recently, she joined Queen's of the Stoneage's Josh Homme on his critically acclaimed 'Desert Sessions' project - released last year - and worked with Mark Lanegan (also of QOSTA) on his forthcoming solo album. Harvey produced the debut album by American artist Tiffany Anders and has most recently written, recorded & produced material for Marianne Faithfull's next album, due for release later this year. In addition to her musical career Harvey has exhibited sculpture in galleries across the country and has had poetry published.

During the early-'90s alternative rock explosion, several female singer/songwriters rose to prominence, but few were as distinctive or as widely praised as Polly Jean Harvey. Over the course of three albums, Harvey established herself as one of the most individual and influential songwriters of the '90s, exploring themes of sex, love, and religion with unnerving honesty, dark humor, and a twisted theatricality. At the outset of her career, she led the trio PJ Harvey, which delivered her stark songs with bruisingly powerful, punkish abandon, as typified by the 1992 debut effort Dry. Following the noisy, uncompromising follow-up, Rid of Me, the trio fell apart, and PJ Harvey became the sole property of Polly Harvey. Her next record, 1995's To Bring You My Love, became her mainstream critical breakthrough, confirming her status as one of the cornerstone figures of '90s alternative rock.

Harvey grew up on a sheep farm in Yeovil, England, where she was raised by her quarryman father and her artist mother. As a child, she learned how to play guitar and saxophone, and when she was a teenager, she played in a variety of bands as a sideman. She formed PJ Harvey in 1991 with bassist Steve Vaughan and drummer Robert Ellis, and the trio recorded its debut record for under $5,000. The band signed with the British indie label Too Pure and released "Dress" that fall. "Dress" became a indie rock sensation, as did its follow-up, "Sheela-Na-Gig," with both singles receiving lavish praise in the U.K. music press. Although Harvey was a reluctant interviewee, she cannily used the press to her advantage, whether it was through her candid interviews or startling, occasionally disturbingly sexy photo sessions, which subverted traditional concepts of female sexuality.

PJ Harvey's debut, Dry, was released in spring 1992 to considerable praise; it was distributed in America by Island Records. The trio followed it with an extensive tour, culminating with an appearance at that summer's Reading Festival. Shortly after the tour, Harvey moved to London, where she nearly suffered a nervous breakdown due to the extraordinary pressure and expectation surrounding her second album. The group hired former Big Black frontman Steve Albini (Pixies, Breeders) as the producer of their second album, Rid of Me. Albini imposed his trademark noisy, guitar-heavy sound on the record, which mirrored its harder-edged themes. Rid of Me was a major critical success and expanded Harvey's cult greatly. She supported the album with a tour featuring herself in a fake leopard-skin coat and a feather boa, signaling her developing interest in theatricality. At the end of the year, Harvey released 4-Track Demos, a collection of her original versions of the songs on Rid of Me.

Following the Rid of Me tour, Ellis and Vaughan parted ways with Harvey, and she recorded her third album as a solo artist, augmented by producer Flood, bassist Mick Harvey, and guitarists John Parish and Joe Gore. Harvey developed a richer, bluesier sound with the expanded band, and the resulting record, To Bring You My Love, was hailed as a masterpiece by many critics upon its February 1995 release. Thanks to considerable press attention, as well as strong support from MTV and modern rock radio for the single "Down by the Water," To Bring You My Love became a moderate hit, entering the U.S. charts at number 40. Harvey spent all of 1995 touring the album, and spent the following year in relative seclusion. During 1996 she was relatively quiet, only appearing twice on record: once in a duet with Nick Cave on his Murder Ballads album -- the pair were reportedly romantically involved -- and later on Dance Hall at Louse Point, a collaborative album that found her teaming up with John Parish. Is This Desire? followed in 1998. Two years later, Harvey reunited with Ellis and Mick Harvey for Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea, which returned to her earlier, more aggressive style and was inspired by her six-month stay in New York City in 1999.

The album won the 2001 Mercury Prize, making Harvey the first female winner of that award. After extensive touring in support of the album, Harvey split her time over the next two years working on new material and collaborating with likeminded friends and contemporaries. She appeared on Gordon Gano's Hitting the Ground, Giant Sand's Cover Magazine, and John Parish's How Animals Move, but Harvey's most prominent collaboration was with the Queens of the Stone Age side project the Desert Sessions. She performed on more than half of 2003's Desert Sessions, Vols. 9-10, including the single Crawl Home. That summer, she also performed at the V Festival, previewing tracks from her new album, which she claimed was close to being finished. The album, Uh Huh Her, appeared in summer 2004, coinciding with another string of tour dates, including British and European festival appearances at Glastonbury, T in the Park, the Montreux Jazz Festival, and Spain's La Primavera festival. Stateside, Harvey was scheduled to join the revived Lollapalooza festival for select dates, joining Morrissey and Sonic Youth on the main stage. Upon the cancellation of that festival, however, she mounted a solo tour of the States with select opening acts. Three years later the ever-evolving musician released White Chalk, her first piano-based album. She then resumed her partnership with John Parish for another collaborative project, A Woman a Man Walked By, which arrived in 2009. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine, All Music Guide