4. PJ HarveyIs This Desire?

Up until I was 15 I was writing a lot, but I didn’t really know what to write about – my lyrics were about the Japanese garden in Holland Park, or butterflies. I didn’t really have an identity at that age, if something had happened to me emotionally, I would just say it as I felt it. I hadn’t really grasped the concept of metaphor. I was a huge Björk fan, she was my first songwriter, so I was basically copying her homework at that age, but really depressed that I was in Wandsworth, and not somewhere like Iceland. Like, I didn’t have volcanoes, so I was trying to make my life as magical as possible, but it just wasn’t working in Wandsworth. I got thrown out of the school, and put it into one in the countryside, started reading Return Of The Native and saw a review of Is This Desire? in a Sunday paper. In the book Hardy is describing the hills, and Egdon Heath, the way the shadows fall, and my English teacher said, ‘now read that again, are we actually psychoanalysing the female protagonist, and we’re actually talking about Eustacia?’ Something just fell into place with my Englishness in that year, and I looked around the landscape, and I heard somebody be very English on an album for the first time. Here is a Dorset writer, she’s not up in Iceland. When I heard ‘Angelene’, I thought ‘this could be a Thomas Hardy character’; we have English literature, we have English music, and it really helped me find a sense of identity as a writer, and gave me a grounding on this island, in this country.