‘Let England Shake’: The deep connection between The Doors and PJ Harvey’s masterpiece
Despite being separated by just about everything – age, gender, country of origin, era, musical background and so on – there remains a strange sense of kinship between PJ Harvey and Jim Morrison.
It’s an unexpected one, and one that doesn’t make much sense on the surface – Morrison was born in the 1940s in the United States, he moved to California and became the king of countercultural rock and roll, burning bright and fast in a blaze of sex, drugs and chaos that led to his dying so young at only 27.
Harvey, on the complete flipside, was born in 1969 in the sleepy town of Bridport in Dorset, only two years before Morrison died. She was raised on folk, blues and country music, listening to Captain Beefheart and Frank Zappa, two famous Morrison haters, at home. She grew up playing in little traditional folk bands and was shy, small in stature, and introverted in spirit.
However, what fascinated Harvey, and seems to bubble under her surface, is the same as what existed in Morrison. Despite being well-spoken and seeming small when seen up on stage in delicate white gowns, Harvey is anything but fragile. As she launched her solo career, she launched herself as a roaring rockstar, booming to life on early hits like ‘Rid Of Me’, or singing directly about her inner boldness on ‘Man-size’, a song that basically states that the music world should be scared of her.
According to Nick Cave, who spent a period fatally in love with Harvey, while she might look like a waif, she was as bold and gutsy as the rest of them. In his insight, she is absolutely no different from the classic male frontmen who have become the stereotype of rock and roll. “Polly’s commitment to her own work was probably as narcissistic and egomaniacal as my own,” Cave wrote on his Red Hand Files, always awed by Harvey’s own tenacity and creative devotion.
That kind of hyper-focus on her own vision is exactly what connects her and Morrison, a man who burned himself down for the sake of his artistry. The Doors singer surely stands as the absolute pinnacle of a man so obsessed and all-consumed by the energy of creation, or the energy of performance, that it felt more akin to possession. Morrison embodied that energy so intensely that it forever teetered on the line of becoming outright riotous and dangerous, often falling across the boundary.
While none of Harvey’s gigs has descended into riots, it’s clear that she’s fascinated by the tightrope Morrison walked. Especially on Let England Shake, even if the songs aren’t big, loud rock songs, the album’s focus on war, and its spiralling world of literary and musical references, fizzes with the same chaotic yet artistic tension Morrison embodied.
“I listened to lots of The Doors because they had a certain indefinable quality to the music that was really intriguing, and I wanted to try to capture some of that,” Harvey said of the making of her 2011 album. She spent a lot of time listening to the band as she added, “For me, their music is associated with a particular era of great turbulence and change.”
Now writing her own record about the changing and volatile world, looking at the long history of conflicts, Morrison appeared to her as a reference she related to, but also could learn from.
