PJ Harvey’s favourite Captain Beefheart song
Bursting onto the alternative rock scene in the 1990s, PJ Harvey became a symbol of feminine power and strength, imbuing many of her songs with themes of sexuality, violence and womanhood. Tracks like ‘Sheela na gig’ from Dry or ‘50Ft Queenie’ from Rid of Me encapsulate Harvey’s often confrontational lyrical style, evolving as a tremendous source of inspiration for many artists, especially women, in the coming years.
Her music has always moves between genres, refusing to remain stagnant. While Rid of Me sees Harvey at her most punk, predominantly fuelled by the influence of abrasion, noise, rock and blues, other albums allow her love for folk to take centre stage, such as Let England Shake.
Harvey cites various artists as seminal influences on her sound, including Nina Simone, Bob Dylan and Captain Beefheart. Don Van Vliet, better known by his stage name Captain Beefheart, has remained a constant source of inspiration for Harvey since the moment her musical collaborator John Parish played her the experimental artist’s work.
She had previously heard his music as a child, but she couldn’t figure out what the fuss was all about. “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,” she once told the BBC.
After becoming familiar with other unconventional artists as she got older, she gave Beefheart another go, and her life was forever changed. Harvey once selected some of her favourite songs for Jehnny Beth’s Beats 1 show, ‘Start Making Sense’, which included her favourite Beefheart tune, ‘Dropout Boogie’.
Taken from his debut album, Safe as Milk, released in 1967, the song sits alongside cuts such as ‘I’m Glad’ and ‘Electricity’. At the time, Ry Cooder was a member of Beefheart’s Magic Band, performing guitar on the record. Traces of the song’s bluesy, rough, around-the-edge sound can definitely be heard in some of Harvey’s work, most specifically, Rid of Me.
The singer even struck up a friendship with Beefheart before he died, once revealing that he “phoned up because he just wanted to say he liked what I was doing.” She added, “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.”
Listen to the song below.
