Orlam

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Ira-Abel Rawles gives a child’s eye view of life on Hook Farm in the village of UNDERWHELEM. Nearby, the magic realist domain of Gore Woods transcends time and folklore prevails. Here Orlam, an all-seeing dead lamb’s eyeball and oracle of UNDERWHELEM, is Ira’s protector. Another dweller of Gore, Wyman-Elvis, a ghost warrior from the Ransham Rebellion, ricochets whispering ‘Love Me Tender’ echoes throughout the verses. Further song lyrics from bands such as Pink Floyd and The Moody Blues enter the stream of consciousness. Which, alongside peanut butter sandwiches and fizzy pop anchor Ira’s approaching adolescence in the late 20th Century zeitgeist. For Ira, Gore Woods are a place of liberation. Ill-fitting in life, she “yearns ... to un-gurrel”, and there she may do so. It is to the woods she escapes after her assault, and through the months that follow the trees are companions and protectors. In their care, she sheds her girlhood, its restrictions and dangers, and transforms into a freer, truer self, a “not-girl/ not-boy. Bride of his Word”. And what is that word, we wonder: tenderness, music, love, scratching (as the poem calls writing)? Ira’s world is a magical realist outpost of the West Country where PJ Harvey grew up. Conjured through tightly rhyming poems, often taking the form of songs or incantations, the village of Underwhelem appears: “Voul village in a hag-ridden hollow. / All ways to it winding, all roads to it narrow.” Like a more terrifying Llareggub, Underwhelem is populated by a large and peculiar cast of characters. There’s Ira and her family; their sinister neighbours, including the world’s worst babysitters, The Bowditches of Dogwell; ghostly civil war soldiers; and the many presiding spirits of woods and fields. Conjuring with imagery of her youth growing up on a farm, and of ancient West Country rituals, Orlam is written in Dorset dialect, the first book to use the language in a century.

I think on the first couple of albums, Dry and Rid of Me, I was just doing it naturally, but I wasn't really aware that I was doing it. For me, it was trying to inhabit the character of the song: Who's the narrator of this song, and how would they portray that song. As I've become more consciously aware of what I'm doing, probably from To Bring You My Love onwards, I would dive into that even more — like, really inhabit the character. A song like " Working for the Man," I think Flood had me singing underneath a blanket with a microphone taped to my throat, in the process of trying to find that claustrophobic, terrifying voice.Let England Shake” was the first time. I think prior to that I had been, as my younger self, very particular about wanting to keep things exactly as I’d written them. But, as I’ve got older, I’ve started to relax more. I began to realize that giving the players more freedom really enhanced the energy in the songs. On “The Hope Six Demolition Project,” there were sometimes up to ten players improvising with each other in a small space. The songs I bring in have their chord structure, they have their chord progression, they have their melody. But, on top of that, there’s a lot of room. I’ve really begun to enjoy that. You have to be extremely vulnerable, because you will offer ideas that aren’t good. “Should we try this?” “No, it’s terrible.” Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t, and no problem was insurmountable because somebody else would always have an idea.

All of which may possibly have been t But if I’d asked my grandmother this she would have felt like the world was probably always been frightening. I remember talking about when televisions and telephones first appeared and she was sort of terrified at what was happening. It’s all contextual, isn’t it?” I'm tempted to go the full 5, partly because it's so good in its own right, partly because this is a side of PJH we've only glimpsed before, especially on albums like White Chalk and Dance Hall at Louse Point; the writer who draws a line from goth to actual old things, who can capture the inner life of a girl in a world where - thanks in no small part to the dialect which I'm told is broad - it's the 1970s and the 1600s and the 600s all at once, where time moves like the growth of an oak or ash tree; glacially slow, but ever-shifting. A PJ Harvey who owes as much to CS Lewis and Fairport Convention as to Howlin' Wolf and Pixies. Well, in this world of all of these hand-hewn elements, the central one for me is the Dorset dialect. You were so diligent in learning this dialect, employing it within Orlam in remarkable ways. It's a nearly lost language, and you use it throughout your poetry, mixing it up with standard English and what I like to call "the PJ Harvey language," which also exists.

Don encouraged me to be as bold with poetry as I am in songwriting, and that was something I really remembered him giving me, because I think I was a timid poet,” she says. “I felt, ‘Oh, I’m not worthy. I’m not a poet’ and I didn’t approach it with the same bold confidence that I do with song. It was all wonderfully sort of homemade, you know? We were just feeding off each other in the moment. My vocals were done at the same time, so my voice has the drums and all the other sounds going down it, which leads to this beautiful sort of world that you enter. Everything was recorded in the same room together; all of the sounds are going down every single microphone.