Polly Jean Harvey (born 9 October 1969) is an English musician and singer-songwriter. Raised in Corscombe, Dorset, England, Harvey formed an eponymous band as a teenager with drummer Rob Ellis and bassist Ian Olliver, who was replaced with Steve Vaughan.
The trio released their first album Dry in 1992. Ellis and Vaughan left the band after the release of Rid of Me (1993), and Harvey continued as a solo artist. Among the accolades she has received have been the 2001 Mercury Music Prize, seven BRIT Award nominations, five Grammy Award nominations and two further Mercury Music Prize nominations. Rolling Stone named her 1992's Best New Artist and Best Singer Songwriter and 1995's Artist of the Year, and placed two of her albums on its 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. She was also rated the number one female rock artist by Q magazine in a 2002 reader poll. Harvey has said that she enjoys performing more than writing and recording because performing is when the music makes more sense.
Early life
Harvey was born in Bridport, Dorset, England, and was brought up in nearby Beaminster, Dorset. 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 & 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.
Discography
* Dry (1992)
* Rid of Me (1993)
* 4-Track Demos (1993)
* To Bring You My Love (1995)
* Dance Hall at Louse Point (with John Parish) (1996)
* Is This Desire? (1998)
* Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea (2000)
* Uh Huh Her (2004)
* The Peel Sessions 1991-2004 (2006)
* White Chalk (2007)
* A Woman A Man Walked By (with John Parish) (2009)
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