That sounds like a miserable way to work, with your co-creators acting as a kind of bark collar, correcting you for defaulting to the notes that come most naturally from your throat. The way that he collapsed history and he collapsed the facts and reinvented them as his own, I feel like I was doing the same.

PJ Harvey on superstition, dialect and poetry - New Statesman PJ Harvey on superstition, dialect and poetry - New Statesman

An existence where lambs die and are pecked at by crows, where the dog is sly and untrustworthy and fathers are angry. A spiritual realm tugs at the boundaries of Harvey’s imagining of Dorset, with a cast that includes a supernatural oracle in the form of a dead lamb’s eye and a Christ-like figure named Wyman-Elvis and modeled after The King himself.I find it very moving, and that’s precisely why we put it at the end of the set shortly after 9/11, when everything everyone did had a completely different resonance. Orlam instead evokes the yearning of Patrick Kavanagh’s The Great Hunger – of a place that is loved and hated in equal measure, a place that inspires and imprisons, the lustful longing for a life partner.

PJ Harvey on ‘Orlam,’ Elvis, ‘Rid of Me’ and Her New Album

You could say the preference for privacy was evident from the moment, in 1991, that she opted to use initials for her band (P for Polly, J for Jean).But then as I was writing the book, I learned the dialect like you’d learn a foreign language, until I was almost thinking in it.