PJ Harvey Biography

The big labels soon waded in to sign her, and Island Records snapped her up after a bidding war. The three piece band went to Minneapolis to record second album 'Rid of Me' (1993) with producer Steve Albini, and later that year she followed up with a solo effort, '4-Track Demos', having dissolved the trio in August. 'Rid of Me' in particular consolidated on her earlier success, and the anguished emotion of its songs reportedly led Elvis Costello to remark that all her lyrics seemed to be about 'blood and f*cking'.

Still, it appeared that 'blood and f*cking' were exactly what the buying public was after - the album was a huge success, reaching number three in the UK charts.

'To Bring You My Love' (1995) was co-produced by Harvey herself, alongside John Parish and Flood (known for producing work by U2, Nine Inch Nails and Depeche Mode). This album marked something of a watershed for Harvey - not only was it her first full album since the trio had gone their separate ways, she played guitar, keyboards, vibes and bells, and was dabbling for the first time in production. The tone and lyrical content of the album was as dark and dramatic as ever, with 'Down by the Water', a macabre tale of a mother drowning her daughter, proving a huge success - albeit a somewhat unlikely one! Team this up with a cheerful little ditty about a serial killer, 'Working For the Man', and you have the nucleus of a top 20 album.

That Harvey should appear the following year on the Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds album, 'Murder Ballads', therefore appears entirely fitting, given her love of the morbid lyric - and for a brief time she was also romantically involved with Cave. Harvey then teamed up with John Parish to record 'Dance Hall at Louse Point'. Whilst Harvey provided the lyrics for the album, and several of the lead vocals, Parish (who had not had a solo release up to that point) played the instruments, and wrote the music. It was a partnership that seemed to gel well, and has not been Harvey's only collaborative work - to date she has also teamed up with Josh Homme of the Queens of the Stone Age (for his Desert Sessions collective), Tricky (for a track on 1998's 'Angels with Dirty Faces'), and has chipped in vocals and instruments on a couple of tracks for Sparklehorse.

'Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea' (2000) was so named because of where it had been written and recorded - largely, in her home on the Dorset coast and in the bustling city of New York. However, when she became the first female to be awarded the esteemed Mercury Music Prize the following year for the album, she was unable to collect the prize, having been trapped in Washington DC - the ceremony was on the unforgettable day of September 11th 2001. Although for some unscrupulous people in Whitehall this was deigned a good day to bury bad news, for Harvey the very good news of winning this award was mostly buried by the events that had unfolded in her temporarily adopted home of Manhattan. In a phone call to the ceremony that night she summed up the emotions: 'The whole city is in a state of shock. It has been a very surreal day. All I can say is thank you very much, I am absolutely stunned.'

Harvey stripped it down and made it simple again for 2004's 'Uh Huh Her', and for the first time since the 4-Track demos album over a decade before, she performed all the music and production herself. Although it was well received, Harvey has later stated that she was not entirely satisfied with the album. With her most recent album release, 2007's 'White Chalk', she is again looking to keep ringing the changes, and continue in her explicit goal of learning and growing with every new endeavour - as she told 'Rolling Stone', '...that's always my aim: to try and cover new ground and really to challenge myself.'

The process of writing the new album is almost as intriguing as the heavily piano-based set of ballads itself. Her method involved devoting at least an hour each day to using just a blackboard and some chalk (hence the album's title, of course) for sketching out ideas, or even just drawings for songs, and in doing so imagining sounds to put to the words. Not your average three-chord-wonders, then. And although Harvey maintains that this latest body of work, honed and whittled down from the dozens of songs she wrote using this process, is her most uplifting yet, her die-hard fans will no doubt be pleased to note that it still contains such themes as murder, abortion and madness - just to ensure that the listener doesn't think Harvey may be pulling any punches now she is nearing the age of forty.

• PJ Harvey Discography