pj harvey / naked cousin / bio part 1 Video

Polly Jean Harvey was born in Bridport, Dorset, and was brought up in nearby Beaminster. The daughter of a stonemason and a sculptor, Harvey grew up on a small sheep farm. At an early age her parents introduced her to the blues, jazz and art-rock, which, she told Rolling Stone in 1995, would later influence her: "I was brought up listening to John Lee Hooker, to Howlin' Wolf, to Robert Johnson, and a lot of Jimi Hendrix and Captain Beefheart. So I was exposed to all these very compassionate musicians at a very young age, and that's always remained in me and seems to surface more as I get older. I think the way we are as we get older is a result of what we knew when we were children." She later spent time listening to Soft Cell, Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet. In her teens she became a fan of the US indie guitar bands Pixies, Television and Slint, though not, as many critics have suspected, Patti Smith (a frequent comparison that Harvey dismisses as "lazy journalism"). More recently she has claimed inspiration from Russian folk music, Italian soundtrack composer Ennio Morricone and classical composers like Arvo Pärt, Samuel Barber and Henryk Górecki.

She studied saxophone for about eight years, and contributed sax, guitar and backing vocals to her earliest Somerset bands Bologna, the Polekats, the Stoned Weaklings and Automatic Dlamini (John Parish's band). At the age of 17 she finished school and began writing her own songs. Harvey said that while in Automatic Dlamini, "I ended up not singing very much but I was just happy to learn how to play the guitar. I wrote a lot during the time I was with them but my first songs were crap. I was listening to a lot of Irish folk music at the time, so the songs were folky and full of penny whistles and stuff. It was ages before I felt ready to perform my own songs in front of other people." In January 1991, she formed the original PJ Harvey three-piece band, with herself on vocals and guitars, ex-Automatic Dlamini bandmate Rob Ellis on drums and Ian Olliver on bass (though Olliver was replaced by Steve Vaughan). The trio's debut gig at a skittle alley in Sherborne's Antelope Hotel was so disastrous that the proprietor begged the band to stop playing as nearly all his customers had fled the venue.

By that time Harvey had also completed a foundation art course at Yeovil Art College and had applied to study sculpture at Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design in London, still undecided as to her future career.

Harvey released her debut single "Dress" on the independent label Too Pure in October 1991. It was voted Single of the Week in Melody Maker by guest reviewer John Peel, who admired "the way Polly Jean seems crushed by the weight of her own songs and arrangements, as if the air is literally being sucked out of them ... admirable if not always enjoyable". The following spring she released an equally acclaimed second single, "Sheela Na Gig", and her first LP Dry in 1992, an album Kurt Cobain put in his top 20 favourite albums ever (from the book 'Journals'). At that time she also released a limited edition double LP containing both Dry and the demos for Dry, called Dry Demonstration. The trios raw, guitar-driven hard rock which mixed elements of punk, blues and grunge quickly won rave reviews and a strong cult following on both sides of the Atlantic, with Rolling Stone naming the then-22-year-old Harvey the year's Best Songwriter and Best New Female Singer.

She drew fire in April 1992 when she appeared topless on the cover of the British magazine New Musical Express. Harvey quickly avoided being adopted as a feminist spokesperson, telling Vox that "I wouldn't call myself a feminist because I don't understand the term or the baggage it takes along with it. I'd feel like I really have to go back and study its history to associate myself with it, and I don't feel the need to do that. I'd much rather just get on and do things the way I have been doing them... I think I'd find it quite patronising to be called a Riot Grrrl if I was one of them, but they obviously don't think so." More recently she told Bust: "I dont ever think about [feminism]. I mean, it doesn't cross my mind. I certainly dont think in terms of gender when I'm writing songs, and I never had any problems as the result of being female that I couldn't get over. Maybe I'm not thankful for the things that have gone before me, you know. But I don't see that there's any need to be aware of being a woman in this business. It just seems a waste of time." She added, "I don't offer [support] specifically to women; I offer it to people who write music. That's a lot of men."