FEATURE:
50ft Queenie
PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me at Thirty
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THERE is a lot…
IN THIS PHOTO: Rob Ellis, PJ Harvey and Steve Vaughan/PHOTO CREDIT: Steve Rapport/Getty Images
to cover here, as a monumental album turns thirty on 4th May. That would be PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me. The follow-up to her 1992 debut, Dry, many rank Rid of Me as her very best work. Released only as year after her excellent debut, Rid of Me is more raw and aggressive than its predecessor. Produced by Steve Albini – who produced, among other classics, Pixies’ Doolittle (1989) -, Rob Ellis on drums and background vocals, and Steve Vaughan on bass joined Harvey. The trio sadly parted ways late in 1993. Although Rid of Me is a genius album, it was one that had turbulence and emotional tension at its heart. Recorded in the U.S., the Dorset-born icon was a big fan of Albini’s work and his production methods. Someone who brought a new sound and vitality from PJ Harvey, she would work with other producers on future albums. This raw and primal sound that Albini brought from Harvey and her band. Before getting to some reviews, there are articles about Rid of Me that look at the backdrop to PJ Harvey’s second studio album, in addition to its impact and brilliance. The Quietus revisited the album in 2018 for its twenty-fifth anniversary. They highlighted its torridness and brilliance. It was a new start and next phase for a restless and hugely talented artist:
“However, the back story to Rid Of Me revealed an artist in a state of mental exhaustion. Much of the album was written in Harvey's home county of Dorset in October 1992. At the time, Polly was suffering from what she would describe as a "breakdown". Over the previous 18 months, Harvey's life had changed beyond recognition and she had fled her North London flat for the tranquility of the English coast.
Originally from the tiny village of Corscombe, the country girl had moved to the capital to further her music career. With the 'Dress' single immediately creating a huge impact, she was immediately thrown into a hectic touring schedule. While the first album had been released by the small Too Pure imprint, Harvey was further stressed by finding herself at the centre of a major label bidding war. Although nothing had been formally signed with Too Pure, she felt indebted to them, while sensing that a major deal would be the better long-term option (Rid Of Me would be released by Island Records).
On top of that, the singer-songwriter had just endured the painful ending of her first proper relationship – an experience that would inspire a number of the most jagged moments on Rid Of Me. By October, Harvey wasn't eating properly and could barely bathe or clean her teeth. Her mother drove her back to Dorset to recuperate and find solace in the countryside. Back home, Polly would write a new batch of songs. "It's going to get ugly," she would tell a friend at the time.
Compared with Dry, Rid Of Me gleaned its emotional power by sounding even more abrasive, claustrophobic and edgy, and thus echoing Harvey's fragile state of mind. The album was recorded during December 1992 over a two-week period at Steve Albini's Pachyderm Studios in the frozen backdrop of Cannon Falls, Minnesota. Inspired by her love of Howlin' Wolf and the Albini-produced Pixies' masterpiece Surfer Rosa, Polly was eager to utilise the renowned studio techician's ability to capture visceral soundscapes.
Using in the main only a single electric guitar, drums and bass, Harvey experimented with distortion effects – as on the vocals for 'Yuri-G' – while retaining Albini's trademark 'live' sound. And while it's fair to say that, like other Albini-produced albums at that time (The Breeders' Pod and The Wedding Present's Seamonsters spring to mind), Rid Of Me saw PJ Harvey undergo the standard Albinification treatment, the results were explosive”.
An album that went to number three in the U.K. upon its release and is frequently rated alongside the best ever, there is no doubting the fact that Rid of Me made a gigantic impact in 1993. Thirty years after its release, and this inventive, fresh, and potent album still stuns people. When it arrived on 4th May, 1993, it was unlike anything around it. This was a time when Britpop was just about starting. In fact, many credit Suede’s eponymous 1993 debut with starting the movement. Rid of Me lost out to that album at the 1993 Mercury Award ceremony. Guitar.com underlined the genius of Rid of Me for a feature last year:
“In making the record with Albini, Harvey further set herself apart from the rock cognoscenti. Ejecting any pretence of doling out traditional song structures or ostentatious solos, PJ instead used feedback, distortion (likely via the ProCo RAT and Boss DS-1, both staples of her pedalboard) and eerie dissonance to emphasise the record’s sunken depths. On the demented Legs, for example, unsettling feedback wafts into the mix in place of where you might typically expect a solo. Meanwhile, jagged tremolo-picked parts zig-zag through the murk.
Another of Rid of Me’s crucial tracks, the indignant gender-leveller Man-Size, is driven by a choppy, wave-like momentum, buffeting between G, F and A powerchords. This thrusting repetition builds tension, occasionally rising to overdriven highs before settling back into its groove, emphasising the circular monotony of its lyrical target.
Rid of Me sounded unlike anything else in 1993. Even today it remains a rollercoaster of often uncomfortable but always engaging sonics, perfect to house Harvey’s sketches of obsession, passion, sexuality, dejection and power. Its white-hot canvases were a major influence on Kurt Cobain. In the discussions that led to Nirvana’s In Utero, Albini presented Rid of Me as an example of a more raw-edged approach to recording guitar. Cobain was entranced. The dislocated sonics of Nirvana’s final LP were unmistakably informed by Rid of Me.
Trying to cause a riot
While Harvey’s later work may have brought her wider attention – and provided a less abrasive way-in for listeners – the savage thrill-ride of Rid of Me remains her most electrifying listen. Armed with just her guitar, a small ensemble and merciless determination, Rid of Me’s 14 tracks reconstituted Harvey’s hardships into resolute, growling proclamations.
“I had just come out of my teens and at that time you really want to make your mark on the world,” Harvey told Spin. “So I just wanted to say something that hadn’t been said in that way before. I was trying to cause a riot in one way or another”.
Before getting to reviews, there is one more article that is worth bringing in. Published in 2022, they note how there is this blend of the personal and almost theatrical. Something Gothic that, when mixed together, is visceral and utterly open. It is heartening and wonderful that is less accessible and commercial than many at the time was a big-selling success:
“A commercil and critical breakthrough
Rid Of Me was also her commercial breakthrough. In Britain, it reached No.3 in the chart and was shortlisted for the Mercury Music Prize, while Harvey was nominated for a Brit Award in the Best Female Solo Artist category (she lost to the more emollient Dina Carroll). It even produced her first U.K. Top 30 single in “50ft Queenie.”
On the other side of the Atlantic, where she was seen as a cool English indie-grrrl, Rid Of Me got considerable college-radio traction. In both countries, it appeared in end-of-year polls, and the consensus today is that it’s her masterpiece.
With the exception of a cover of Dylan’s “Highway 61 Revisited” that’s unrecognizable thanks to vocal distortion, the album generally reflects Harvey’s life at that point. She was a country girl who’d become the subject of enormous press interest, and the attention was wearing her down. It was aggravated by still living in the cold flat in Tottenham, North London, where she’d been miserable during the writing of Dry.
Feeling backed against a wall, the only way out was to return to Dorset, the rural county where she’d grown up. Renting a room above a restaurant in a seaside town and watching fishing boats enter and leave the harbor, she was lulled into serenity. She completed the Rid Of Me songs and the band went to a studio in Minnesota to record them, with Steve Albini producing.
Albini was chosen because Harvey loved his work with Pixies, and thought his “bare, very real sound” would gel with hers. She also appreciated his refusal to let her brood and overthink while recording; they were in and out of the studio in two weeks.
Sexual politics, relationships, and gender fluidity
As with Dry, the songs pack such a punch that Harvey’s emotional well-being became a music-press talking point. The effect was intentional according to Polly, who had just signed to Island Records and was worried that the major label would try to make her more saleable. Determined to “show Island what I’m about and what they’re dealing with,” she went out of her way “to make a very difficult record.”
Rid Of Me was a mix of autobiography and gothic play-acting, but it coalesced into an authentically visceral howl. The title track, which opened proceedings, was a warning to a departing lover: “You’re not rid of me… I’ll make you lick my injuries/I’m gonna twist your head off, see?” It was scary and intense, yet the chorus, “Doncha, doncha wish you’d never met her?,” was as catchy as a Ramones hookline.
From there, the album went careening into sexual politics, relationships, and gender fluidity. The last was tackled in the very funny “50ft Queenie,” which ridiculed the male obsession with genitalia by claiming that Polly’s own organ was “20 inches long.” For good measure, she roared, “I’m the king of the world… You can bend over, Casanova!”
However you measured it, this was compelling stuff. Delving further, the track “Dry” (written for the debut album, but not included on it for reasons unexplained) scathingly appraises a lover and finds him wanting. In the song, Harvey admits she has “wet sides from time to time,” but that mainly “you leave me dry.” It’s so neat and so vicious that it’s impossible not to feel a touch of sympathy for the man it’s addressed to.
Then there’s “Rub ‘til It Bleeds,” abrasive in both name and style. It starts as a bluesy amble, with Harvey inviting her man to rest while she rubs his head. But tension builds, the bassline stutters and she slips into a fourth dimension of anguish: “I’ll smooth it nicely/Rub it better ‘til it bleeds.” Later, the discordant string sextet on “Man-Size Sextet,” that saws away as Polly sings through gritted teeth, adds a horror-movie chill to the air”.
Although Entertainment Weekly and Rolling Stone did not give Rid of Me a great review, most others did. They are U.S. sites/publications, and I feel like many there did not get Harvey. Even though she did tour in the country, I think her music resonated more in other countries. In years since Rid of Me was released, the America media has definitely embraced a remarkable album. In 2018, Pitchfork awarded Rid of Me a perfect ten. They made some great observations about an album from one of the all-time best artists. A true genius:
“Many of these narratives are grounded in history, religion, or the arts: “Me-Jane” is, as the title suggests, a lament from Tarzan’s long-suffering civilized partner. Attack of the 50 Foot Woman inspired “50 Ft Queenie.” Mythology was an obsession of her mother’s, and Harvey’s language on Rid of Me subtly reflects that. “Yuri-G” is a sort of pagan love spell addressed to the moon goddess Luna. “I’ll make you lick my injuries/I’m going to twist your head off, see,” from the title track, is supposed to be one of the album’s most fearsome images. Yet that “see” changes everything, transforming a lurid threat into the goofy taunt of a movie gangster or a fairy-tale giant. Even as she was singing from her soul, Harvey was acting.
Of course, the part every person plays from childhood to death—whether we embrace it, subvert it, change it, or some combination of the three—is our gender role, which may not look quite the same in the city as it does on the farm. Women who inhabit non-traditional gender roles, as Harvey certainly has throughout her career, are often presumed to be speaking as feminists. But, as gratifying as it would have been to hear her proclaim allyship with fans who believed in the equality of the sexes, you can see why she tried to prevent Rid of Me from being viewed through that lens.
As a child, Harvey expressed her desire to be a boy by sitting backwards on toilet seats in an imitation of the way her older brother peed and demanding to be called Paul. When she drawls “Got my leather boots on/Got my girl and she’s a wow” on “Man-Size,” a song widely interpreted as an indictment of masculinity, you can hear her imagining what it would be like to inhabit a typical male body. It is as much a fantasy, and a dark joke, as the B-movie rampage of “50 Ft Queenie.”
Beyond their smattering of angry-woman signifiers, Harvey’s songs are literal performances of gender; they shed light on, poke fun at, and rail against the misery of being trapped by the expectations of femaleness or maleness for one’s entire life. “I never think of myself separately as ‘a woman’—I’m always a musician first,” she told The Guardian in 1993. This is what’s so frustrating about making art as a member of the second sex: You identify as an artist, and trace your lineage to Dylan or Willie Dixon, only to watch helplessly as you’re shunted into the role of “woman artist” the minute your work attracts any attention. If women identify most intensely with PJ Harvey’s music, maybe that has less to do with a set of body parts or political aims than with the unconscious sensitivity we’re forced to develop to the species-wide tragicomedy of gender.
The brilliance of Rid of Me is in the vividness and detail with which it captures that Boschian panorama using only blues rhythms, loud-quiet-loud dynamics, Harvey’s voice (and sometimes that of Ellis, whose falsetto and status as a backup singer constitute additional instances of gender subversion), and an arsenal of extreme characters and loaded allusions. It was that rich, strange, deliberately alienating picture that Harvey attempted to reproduce, not flawlessly but unforgettably, alone on Jay Leno’s stage with her dress and her guitar and her conspicuous lip liner and her startling second voice.
She would investigate feminine archetypes in greater detail on 1995’s To Bring You My Love, naming her sexy alter ego Vamp, clothing the character in a hot-pink catsuit, and slathering her face in gobs of blue eyeshadow and red lipstick. But even then she was exploring gender from the distant perspective of someone who realized that sex was a shared delusion, an arbitrary binary, a sick joke. The one constant in PJ Harvey’s long discography is the mosaic of voices. Listen only to the female ones on Rid of Me, and you’ll only hear one side of the conversation”.
Turning thirty on 4th May, the seismic and phenomenal Rid of Me is still marked alongside the all-time great albums. Quite right too! The Steve Albini-produced masterpiece is available on vinyl, but I am not sure whether there are any anniversary releases in the pipeline. Go and listen to Rid of Me. A thirty-year-old gem of an album, I know there will be celebration and new investigation closer to 4th May. Three decades after its release, and there has not really been anything else that quite sounds…
LIKE Rid of Me.