Thursday 22 December 2011
Let England Shake: PJ Harvey's Ode To The History Of Conflict Grabs Brighton Magazine's Album Of The Year
This year most music critics have been coming down on the side of PJ Harvey's Let England Shake as their album of 2011. It's one of those all too rare collections that merges both meaning and importance.
Harvey began the writing process with the works of Harold Pinter and T.S. Eliot at the forefront of her creative process.
She has also spoken of researching the history of conflict, including the Gallipoli campaign, and reading modern-day testimonies from civilians and soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.
She speaks of hearing Stephen Wyatt's Memorials to the Missing, a Radio 4 afternoon play about Fabian Ware, founder of the Imperial War Graves Commission:
"What touched me the most is that he heard the voices of the dead talking to him and he couldn't rest.
'I'd always be following the news and there'd be so many firsthand accounts from soldiers and civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq.
'That's what I wanted to be heard' people who had been eyewitnesses through all different periods in history."
Harvey's initial plan of recording Let England Shake in Berlin was knocked on the head when she couldn't find the right setting to record her new songs:
'So I was still looking for places - and then, just coincidentally, the man who runs this church as an arts centre approached me and said if I ever wanted to use it for rehearsing I could, because he liked my music and knew I lived nearby.
'It wasn't predetermined, but it actually lent itself really well to this record' to the nature of the words and the music, it was perfect for it.'
What emerged was her least introspective work to date:
'I think that it's only now that I've been writing for this period of years that I have the confidence to feel that I can begin to tackle these things in language. I hadn't had that confidence before.'
A trio of the album's dozen tracks - All And Everyone, On Battleship Hill, The Colour Of The Earth - are infused with the notion of what Harvey deems 'death's anchorage.'
Let England Shake is a visual album, so much so that Harvey has re-released it this week with an accompanying DVD containing stand alone videos for each track created by Seamus Murphy.
The album of the year just got better!
by: Mike Cobley
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It really should be ridiculous, but it isn't. Somehow concocting a seemingly obnoxious stew that includes such tasty ingredients as incest, violence, mutilation, and nudity - at Theatre Royal Brighton, no less - all comes together in the mix to serve up one of the tastiest treats of Brighton Festival.
With tongues firmly in cheeks, Spymonkey brought Oedipussy onto the hallowed Brighton stage and unravelled the tale o...
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 The Temper Trap pic by Andy Sturmey
With the Festival and Festival Fringe already packing the streets, bars and venues of Brighton, it got pretty wild on the streets of the city when the annual Great Escape Festival was added to the throng over the weekend.
It was difficult to get a foot in many-a venue, let alone an eye on the performers, as vast queues snaked the...
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Mariella Frostrup is both the intellectual kingpin and host of The Book Show, on Sky Arts. Featuring an array of A-list authors and other big-name guests, it was great to see the channel's flagship programme leave its studio setting and head to the Brighton Festival for two special recordings.
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One of the hidden themes of Brighton Festival 2012 so far seems to be of a kind of theatre that is not theatre, at least not as you might expect it to be.
I have seen work enacted well out of any theatrical context in warehouses, theatre in a theatre but with a gla...
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I fell under the spell of poet Lemn Sissay at the Pavilion Theatre, on Tuesday night. I fell for his enthusiasm, warmth and unwavering passion for the topic in hand. Hell, when I pass on I reckon Sissay will even make me sound interesting!
With every seat taken, the house lights dipped and a screen came to life with the image of the recently depart...
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I have always had a curious fascination about what goes on other people's houses, have you? Are they like me, my family, or not? What do they think? How do they cope with things? How do they live?
Many times on a dark night I have walked home past the station and up over the Seven Dials and looked up or do...
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Ashley Varney from Leonards-on Sea accomplished an incredible 30-race running feat when he recently crossed the London Marathon finishing line.
The 42 year old Sussex swimming pool engineer took on 30 races, which he named &...
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Shakespeare's plays are best watched standing up. I watched his work like this as a youth paying a fiver for standing matinee places at the rear of the stalls at the old RSC in Stratford Upon Avon, in Warwickshire.
Once, all the standing-ups cheered loudly, like football fans, as Edmund the Bastard was finally killed off i...
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"What do you wear to a literary event?" my friend Rachel asked me in the school playground a couple of weeks ago after I had invited her to the Faber Social, at the Corn Exchange, on the opening night of Brighton Festival 2012.
“I don’t know, whatever you like I suppose”, I answered<...
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The Bee Detective must have looked, to the assembled band of worthies from the cultural Olympiad, to be just up their street. As they clutched their list of 'things we need from our attempt to show that sports people are intelligent too and that the Olympics is actually not a boring load of expensive shit, a fitness contest sponsored by McDonald's and Coca-Cola, a drug-fuelled cheats paradise with mind numbing events like rifle shooting and wrestling actually CHARGING money to get in' they must have thought like this.
It is about the death of bees, a modern issue with environment relevance… tick!
It is c...
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