FEATURE:
Beautiful Feeling
PJ Harvey's Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea at Twenty-Five
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THERE is no doubt that…
PHOTO CREDIT: Tony Mott
PJ Harvey is one of our best artists. Her fifth studio album ranks alongside her very best. Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea was another major commercial success story, following her successful breakthrough To Bring You My Love (1995). Upon its release, the album received massive acclaim. Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea earned Harvey several accolades, including the 2001 Mercury Prize. Released on 23rd October, 2000, I am going to mark twenty-five years of this incredible album. I will introduce some features and finish with a review. Although it only got to twenty-three in the U.K., the album has since been certified Platinum. Let’s start out with some background to the album:
“I wanted everything to sound as beautiful as possible,” said Polly Harvey of her fifth studio LP, Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea, in an interview with Q magazine. “Having experimented with some dreadful sounds on Is This Desire? and To Bring You My Love – where I was really looking for dark, unsettling, nauseous-making sounds – Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea was the reaction. I thought, No, I want absolute beauty. I want this album to sing and fly and be full of reverb and lush layers of melody. I want it to be my beautiful, sumptuous, lovely piece of work.”
Two decades on, the sumptuous Stories is the latest in Harvey’s ongoing reissues project, accompanied by a collection of its demos. It has a towering reputation in the Harvey catalogue, having won the first of her two Mercury Music Prizes in 2001, and it has become something of a fixture in ‘best albums’ lists. Where Is This Desire? married unsettling atmospherics with disquieting experimentation (just take a listen to the suffocating misery of “My Beautiful Leah” and “Joy”) often to darkly beautiful effect, Stories is the sound of openness – strident vocals, chiming guitars, harmonies, layers of melody. But crucially, it never forgoes her customary inventiveness for banal commerciality.
The notion of Harvey trading artistic, creative ingenuity for commercial success is, especially with the hindsight of her now almost 30-year career, preposterous; Stories may have a reputation as Harvey’s most accessible record, but are such moody jewels as “Beautiful Feeling” and “Horses In My Dreams” commercial? Doesn’t “Kamikaze” have more in common with her brutal first two records, 1992’s Dry and 1993’s Rid of Me? If it’s pop, as she later said, it’s “pop according to PJ Harvey.”
New York City looms large in Stories, from its genesis in the city where she filmed The Book of Life with Hal Hartley, to its myriad lyrical references (“on a rooftop in Brooklyn,” “I’m in New York,” “when we walked through Little Italy”). But it’s curious that, in fact, much of it was also written and initially recorded at Harvey’s home in Dorset and then produced for real at Linford Manor in Milton Keynes in March and April 2000 – about as un-New York as you can get. Working with her long-time collaborators Mick Harvey and Rob Ellis as the core trio of musicians, the Stories demos are, as with the previous instalments in this reissue series, routinely fascinating. This time they’re captivating for just how ‘demo-y’, for want of a better word, they are – yet how comprehensive. That’s the story of these Harvey demo albums – they clearly indicate that the bulk of these songs, arrangements and all, were all there from the beginning.
But where Is This Desire? was built almost entirely on top of those original demo tracks, Stories’ demos are more often than not true alternates. You can certainly detect parts of the originals that were then loaded into the multi-tracks and built upon (the gorgeous chiming guitars of “Good Fortune” were all there from the start, with Harvey’s Patti Smith-meets-Chrissie Hynde vocal re-recorded to become a little sleeker), but then you get something completely leftfield like the charmingly rustic “A Place Called Home,” with its drum machine pattern and more rudimentary presentation.
Harvey told the LA Times upon the album’s release in October 2000 that “it kind of feels like a combination of every album I’ve made so far rolled into one.” And it’s true that there is the balance between ferocious rockers (“Kamikaze”), slow-burning blues (“Horses In My Dreams”), and murky atmospherics (“Beautiful Feeling”) – but there’s also a newly lush, panoramic melodic and production style. “We Float” shimmers and opens out beautifully, “Good Fortune” is pop perfection, and “You Said Something” finds Harvey in classic songwriter mode. She told Hilton Als in Interview magazine that “I wrote the songs in a different way. I went back to writing songs just with guitar and voice, and the songs had to be strong enough to work at that level. I wasn’t relying at all on equipment, I wasn’t writing in the studio, I was just purely writing in time, if you like. I think that’s quite a good basis for writing strong songs”.
Opening their 2021 feature with the words “Considered an atypically ‘pop’ experiment and even doubted by its own author, Polly Jean Harvey’s fourth album was nevertheless her biggest UK album. Isn’t it time it’s considered simply a great record?”, Guitar.com investigated the genius of Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea:
“Indeed, it’s actually a very simple record, with big bold melodies and minimal personnel – Polly Jean on guitar and vocals, Rob Ellis on keys and drums, and the Bad Seeds’ Mick Harvey on organ, bass, and drums. All three co-produced, and there’s a notable flash of superstar glitz in guest vocals by Radiohead’s Thom Yorke. And how ‘pop’, anyway, is a song like Kamikaze? Not very.
The title itself alluded to the songs’ creative birth: half written between Europe, London and her home in Dorset; the remainder were penned in New York, where Harvey lived for seven months prior to recording. With the cover picturing a gold-handbagged Harvey (sunglasses on: at night, natch) amid NYC’s neon streets, one might surmise big city glamour was reflected in the whole project, but that’s not strictly true either. Her time there may have informed a share of the songs (yet most of those songs are about escaping), and it was recorded in six weeks at the genteel English setting of the 17th-century Great Linford Manor recording studios, the nearest metropolis being the totally un-rock’n’roll Milton Keynes. At a push for hell-raisin’ cred, you can claim Marshall make amps down the road at Bletchley.
Of all PJ Harvey’s album’s Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea is perhaps the most instrumentally vivid. And her voice has rarely sounded more elastic. It kicks hard from the off. Opener Big Exit (“too many cops / too many guns!”) is clearly informed by life in the USA, and its clear-as-a-bell G-F-G-F riff grips like a choke-hold. It’s sparse, though. It’s only when the bass kicks in (defining a Dm) than any chordal identity really takes hold. The Whores Hustle And The Hustlers Whore is cut from similar rags, being a harsh-riffing disapproving stare onto the urban underbelly that seems to prompt flight not fight.
That ‘escape’ can be found in the overtly romantic A Place Called Home (“One day there’ll be a place for us / And the bells keep ringing… / and the girl keeps singing”). Meanwhile, This Is Love is downright dumb-sex lusty. Over a great deep fuzz riff, it doesn’t pretend to be anything more than a paean to happiness-in-sex. This, it should be said, is a good thing. Good Fortune is another “exit” song in which “I fantasize of our leaving / Like some modern-day gypsy landslide / Like some modern-day Bonnie and Clyde”. If all these songs were written in New York, it doesn’t sound like she much fancied anything more than a temporary visit.
Harvey’s guitar playing doesn’t often garner attention, but it’s to the fore on Stories… and not amid the grungeoid blast of her earlier records, bar the exception of hidden track This Wicked Tongue. A big part of Stories… was the bell-like tones of her 60s Gibson Firebird, though she still plugged into the 335-alike Gretsch Broadkaster used on her early records. She also used a rosewood board Fender Telecaster, like collaborator John Parish. Her amps are trusty classics: various Marshalls, Fenders, Mesa-Boogie, Vox AC-30s… Great Linford Manor would have had its own anyway.
It’s accessible, dare we say ‘commercial sounding’, but also highlights her own unique guitar playing and finely-honed sense of composition in a simple format. Not everyone likes it, of course. The credder-than-thou taste-makers of Pitchfork labelled it “tepid” and guilty of “style over substance” but that’s to miss the point of its position to Harvey’s overall career arc. If she spent her whole career writing songs about twisted relationships as on Dry, one would probably fear for her wellbeing. Stories… is thankfully happier than that”.
There are a couple of other features I want to get to before finishing off. In 2020, Albumism talked about a dramatic shift in terms of sounds and themes, PJ Harvey painted “vivid and sensual picture of life in New York City”. Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea won the Mercury Prize on 11th September, 2001. The event coincided with the 9/11 terror attacks in the U.S., with PJ Harvey learning of her award while in a Washington, D.C. hotel room and witnessing the Pentagon attack from her window:
“Harvey has shown vulnerability on her previous recordings, but on Stories From The City, there's a beauty and joy that radiates throughout the entire album. It's just one of the many reasons why it's in my list of 20 albums I can't live without. The next two songs, "One Line" and "Beautiful Feeling,” bring the mood to a more tranquil place, with the latter being one of the darker yet gorgeous songs on the album (“And when I watch you move / And I can't think straight / And I am silenced / And I can't think straight / And it's the best thing / It's the best thing / The best thing / Such a beautiful feeling”).
The one song that does not have an overt reference to the album's romantic theme is "The Whores Hustle and the Hustlers Whore," a song whose lyrical DNA reminds me of a Lou Reed song. The subject matter is definitely in his wheelhouse, as evoked through lines like “Speak to me of heroin and speed / Of genocide and suicide, of syphilis and greed / Speak to me the language of love / The language of violence, the language of the heart / This isn't the first time I've asked for money or love / Heaven and earth don't ever mean enough / Speak to me of heroin and speed / Just give me something I can believe.”
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"This Mess We're In," along with the previously mentioned "Good Fortune," ranks high on the list of Harvey's best songs in her career. When I first listened to the track twenty years ago, I did not expect it to be a duet with Radiohead's Thom Yorke singing its first lyrics. The pairing of Harvey and Yorke is sheer perfection, and "This Mess We're In" made me want to hear more from them. Yorke also did backing vocals on "One Line" and "Beautiful Feeling," but this one stands out amongst the three. The song is about two lovers whose affair is approaching its end and the conversation leading up to that point, with the duo echoing each other, “What were you wanting? (What was it you wanted?) / I just want to say (I just want to say) / Don't ever change now baby (Don't ever change) / And thank you / I don't think we will meet again / And you must leave now / Before the sun rises over the skyscrapers / And the city landscape comes into being / Sweat on my skin / Oh, this mess we’re in.”
Additional highlights include "Kamikaze," "This Is Love," and the album send-off "We Float," which, like the opening track "Big Exit" musically and lyrically takes the listener to an unexpected place (“We wanted to find love / We wanted success / Until nothing was enough / Until my middle name was excess / And somehow I lost touch / When you went out of sight / When you got lost into the city / Got lost into the night”).
Harvey has always incorporated sex within the thematic thrust of her albums, but with Stories From The City, it feels different from her previous output. Her inspiration had come from another place in her life. Harvey was living in Dorset, England at the time, but a couple of lengthy stays in New York influenced her writing. "New York certainly gave me a different kind of energy,” she explained in a 2000 Los Angeles Times interview. “I do think that has permeated to some of the music. I had long wanted to [live there]. I made a film with Hal Hartley in New York, and I realized at that time what an inspiring sort of place it felt to me. I can remember even when we were filming, I was writing songs, some of which ended up on this record. I just felt very inspired”.
I am going to finish off with an article from Stereogum. I wonder if there are going to be new features written about Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea ahead of its twenty-fifth anniversary on 23rd October. Stereogum write how “The general-consensus narrative around PJ Harvey’s Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea goes something like this: It’s PJ Harvey’s happy album”:
“Stories From The City wasn’t a hit in any conventional way, but it sold. Worldwide, the album moved about a million copies — roughly the same number that To Bring You My Love had done five years earlier. But To Bring You My Love had alt-rock radio airplay and 120 Minutes rotation working for it. That didn’t happen with Stories From The City, at least in the US. (In the UK, where the album went platinum, all three singles from Stories From The City just barely missed the top 40.)
Instead, Stories From The City found its audience through mainstream critical love, like Robert Christgau’s Rolling Stone rave. (Snotty young Pitchfork was more suspicious.) The album earned Harvey two Grammy nominations — in the rock category, not in the nebulous “alternative” zone. She lost to U2 and to Lucinda Williams, but that’s still pretty good company. (Stories From The City and Linkin Park’s Hybrid Theory, two albums that came out on the same day, both lost Best Rock Album to U2. These are the only things that Stories From The City and Hybrid Theory have in common.) More importantly, Stories From The City won the UK’s Mercury Prize, beating out huge albums from Radiohead and Basement Jaxx and Gorillaz. It was her first time winning that award. A decade later, she became the first artist in history to win it twice.
The day that Harvey won that first Mercury Prize happened to be September 11, 2001. Harvey had been gone from New York for more than a year at that point, but New York was still inscribed onto the album. After that day, it became impossible to hear Stories From The City the same way. When “You Said Something” plays, I think about the rooftop in Brooklyn, the lights flashing in Manhattan. I think about how the view changed, how many of those lights no longer exist. I’m guessing Harvey does, too. In the fall of 2001, Harvey was touring North America. The day she won the award, she was in Washington, DC, and she saw the wreckage of the Pentagon from her hotel room window. Harvey phoned into the Mercury Prize ceremony and sounded utterly shellshocked.
Harvey never even flirted with mass appeal after Stories From The City. Instead, she moved in more harsh and extreme directions, often brilliantly. This wasn’t a surprise. Harvey was always a restless artist. She always moved on. Stories From The City was a moment for her, and for me, and for everyone else who heard it. Shortly after the album’s release, worlds changed, in ways both normal and not. In the past 20 years, I haven’t returned to Stories From The City the way I have to Dry or Rid Of Me or To Bring You My Love. But that has less to do with the quality of the album itself, which rules, and more to do with the strange and uneasy and short-lived moment that it captured. When I think of it, I think of it fondly. I hope PJ Harvey does, too”.
I will finish off here. Perhaps PJ Harvey’s most remarkable album, I still think that it sounds revelatory and phenomenal twenty-five years later. If you have not heard the album before, then I would encourage you to do so. Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea earned Harvey PJ Harvey BRIT Award nominations as Best British Female Artist for two years running, as well as two GRAMMY Award nominations for Best Rock Album and Best Female Rock Performance for the single, This Is Love. Turning twenty-five on 23rd October, this masterpiece from PJ Harvey is…
ONE of the best albums ever.