The “disastrous” first gig PJ Harvey ever played
Playing your first show as a new band is always going to be a daunting task. From navigating the intimidating world of promoters and venues to translating practice room sessions into a sleek live performance, it comes with innumerable unknowns and anxieties – and then there’s the worry of whether anyone will even show up. But budding artists can take comfort in the knowledge that even the most successful artists have failed at first, including PJ Harvey.
Before the English singer-songwriter became the only artist to have won the Mercury Prize twice, she was struggling to find her musical feet in Dorset. After spending the late 1980s playing in a Bristol-based band called Automatic Dlamini, Harvey started the aptly named PJ Harvey trio in 1991. She commandeered vocals and guitar, while her long-standing collaborator Rob Ellis took up drums and backing vocals, and Steve Vaughan played bass.
If the future seven-time Grammy nominee did show any promise in those early days, it wasn’t recognised by the attendees of her live show. In April 1991, the trio played their first live performance at a skittle alley in Charmouth Village Hall. Harvey has since referred to their first live outing as “disastrous” due to poor audience responses.
“We started playing and I suppose there were about 50 people there,” she recalled to NPR. For a first-time gig, that number seems impressive – most bands in their infancy can only hope to amass a crowd that large. But the audience began to quickly dwindle when the trio started playing.
“In the first song we cleared the hall,” Harvey recalled, “There was about two people left.” The patrons of the skittle alley were so put off by their music that one lady even begged them to stop playing. “A woman came up to us, came up to my drummer – it was only a three-piece – while we were playing, and shouted at him, ‘Don’t you realise nobody likes you!’” Harvey explained.
According to the singer-songwriter, the woman even offered to still pay the band if they stopped playing. Expectedly, this initial reaction was disheartening for Harvey and her bandmates. “I pretty much wanted to give up at that point,” she stated. Luckily, she wasn’t deterred and decided to give music “one more chance”, releasing her debut studio album, Dry, the following year.
Over three decades later, Harvey has honed an unshakeable reputation as a talented multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, and an inimitable live performer. Whether delivering her spoken word poetry or picking up a guitar, Harvey has captivated audiences worldwide since her first disastrous live show.
