How Captain Beefheart inspired PJ Harvey
Many of you will recall feeling slightly uneasy upon hearing Captain Beefheart for the first time. The epitome of an acquired taste, the music of Don Van Vliet has been frightening the children of musos for generations. I remember being handed a copy of Trout Mask Replica as a Christmas present aged eleven.
As had been the case with The Clash record I’d received the year before, I was simply too young to appreciate what I was hearing. To my ears, tracks like ‘Steal Softly Thru Snow’ just sounded like angry white noise. It was too chaotic and deliberately unappealing for a child who knew every word of Queen’s ‘Somebody To Love’, much to his father’s dismay.
Singer-songwriter PJ Harvey was also a little unsure of Captain Beefheart at first. Born to countercultural parents in 1969, Polly took up several instruments as a child, playing in various bands as a teenager before forming, at the age of 21, a group called PJ Harvey with bassist Steve Vaughn and drummer Robert Ellis. Their debut EP won them a contract with British indie label Too Pure, who released it officially in 1991 to huge critical acclaim. Throughout the 1990s, PJ Harvey released a string of highly successful albums, winning the coveted Mercury Prize in 2001.
Sitting down with the BBC around the time of her White Chalk, Uh Huh Her, and Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea demo albums, Harvey was asked to select her six biggest influences. A number of the artists on her list were introduced to her via her parent’s vast record collection. That was very much the case with Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band. A gift from her parents, Beefheart, didn’t make a very good impression on young Polly Jean Harvey. “I’d heard Beefheart when I was really young through my father and my mother, they had all of Beefheart’s work, but when I was a child, it just used to make me feel ill.”
It wasn’t until Harvey’s long-time collaborator John Parish reintroduced her to Don Van Vliet’s work that she began to warm to it. This newfound passion eventually led to a friendship with Van Vliet. “Captain Beefheart phoned up because he just wanted to say he liked what I was doing,” she explained. “And we just talked about everything for about two hours. I just sort of followed his dislocated line of conversation, and I learnt an enormous amount from him. He was just full of enthusiasm to tell me about things I should listen to, things that he thought I would like to see and wanted to know what artists I liked. We were talking a lot about voices and what makes a voice special because it’s nothing about singing ability or anything like that, and so we were talking about Elvis and John Lee Hooker.”
Interestingly, Harvey would even go on to play bass in former Magic Band member Morris Tepper’s Los Angeles band. You can revisit one of our favourite PJ Harvey live cuts below and read our classic review of Rid Of Me here.
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