Watch PJ Harvey deliver a rousing cover of Bob Dylan’s ‘Shot of Love’
When Bob Dylan was asked what his favourite Bob Dylan album was, he earnestly replied Shot of Love. Now, it certainly wouldn’t top the charts on Family Fortunes, but with this rousing cover of the titular track, PJ Harvey helps to illuminate why he thought it was unfairly glossed over. As ever, she proves spellbinding and gives Dylan’s track the hearing it deserved if only critics weren’t caught up in condemning his Born-Again stuff, albeit, a lot of it was undoubtedly subpar.
As Dylan said himself regarding the record: For me, I think it’s the most explosive album I’ve ever done.” In 1983, two years after its release, he was asked if he enjoyed listening back to his old stuff, to which he perhaps naturally replied, “No, no. It’s unbearable to hear some of them, for me. I hear them, and I want to shut them off. […] It’s not like I sit around and listen to Bob Dylan stuff. I like Freewheelin’, and I like my first album. Shot of Love is my favourite, actually.”
At the time, this might have raised eyebrows, but when Harvey crashes through the titular anthem in her typically unbridled and brash fashion, explosive really does seem like a very fitting adjective. There is a great deal of power to the song which paces itself like a Muhammad Ali bout, floating along on a melody and stinging with a knockout chorus.
As Dylan said in defence of the album: “People didn’t listen to [Shot of Love] in a realistic way. […] The critics wouldn’t allow the people to make up their own minds. All they talked about was Jesus this and Jesus that, like it was some kind of Methodist record. I don’t know what was happening, maybe Boy George or something, but Shot of Love didn’t fit into the current formula,” Dylan laments with evident disdain.
He added with a hint of chagrin shining through his apathetic demeanour: “Anyway, people were always looking for some excuse to write me off and this was as good as any. I can’t say if being ‘non-commercial’ is a put-down or a compliment.” Well, Bob, there are some, like Rod Serling, who would say that commerciality and art are mutually exclusive, it’s just being able to be proud of your work that counts, and Shot of Love is certainly a record he stands by.
Thus, he would’ve been more than happy, no doubt, that PJ Harvey chose the defining tune from it to perform in 1999 after choosing Dylan as her “musician of the millennium”. She once said: “I am an enormous Bob Dylan fan. I once said that Desire was my favourite album, but it changes all the time. He has been a big influence on my work. I grew up on a diet of Dylan – my mum was a big fan – and now when I’m feeling lost or lacking in inspiration I listen to him.”
Concluding: “It’s not just his wonderful lyrics, it’s the mixture of everything, the words, the music, and his voice. If you have a voice without soul, it doesn’t move you. All the ingredients have to work together. But Dylan is beyond music and lyrics, he has something else. It’s that indefinable something else that makes him special.” She offers him a fitting tribute here.
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