PJ Harvey, one of rock's most influential figures, reflects on 35 years of making noise and never standing still

Before PJ Harvey released Dry — her volcanic 1992 debut album of molten folk blues that launched an artistic career defined only by constant renewal — she studied sculpture in London.

"I can remember my tutors scratching their heads a bit," she tells Double J's Karen Leng, speaking mid-way through her Australian tour, "because every time I made something, I wanted the next thing to be almost the opposite, using the opposite materials, describing the opposite thing."

Curiosity has guided Harvey through the past three decades of exhilarating artistic shifts, 10 solo albums, two poetry collections and countless collaborations.

She is among England's most celebrated contemporary acts and is the only artist to win the Mercury Prize twice. First, for 2000's invigorating, wistful rock of Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea, then again for 2011's Let England Shake — an autoharp-led anti-war folk album interrogating Harvey's home country's bloodied past and present, all sung in a high, fey register completely at odds with the gravel and yelps of the previous two decades.

"I've just got an insatiable curiosity about things I don't know about," she says. "I want to learn. I want to see. I want to do things I don't know if I can do, and that's just in me. I'm not sure why it is, but it's been like that ever since I was a kid.

Now 55, Harvey says she has a "more encompassing perspective" than she did as a younger artist, which has allowed her to be more connected on-stage, as those spellbound during her Australian shows can attest.

"In general, as you get older, you accept yourself more," she says.

"You see that you're just one tiny part of a whole and you're not an enormous whole with everything revolving around you, as you can feel when you're younger.

"I feel these days, much more able to almost be a vessel through which music passes, because there's no self-importance getting in the way."

'The medication I needed'

Her latest renewal — and the reason behind Harvey's first Australian tour in eight years this March — is 2023's I Inside The Old Year Dying, a hallucinatory folk album based on Orlam, Harvey's epic poem published the year prior.

While the specifics of I Inside… — following a nine-year-old girl living under an oracle in the form of a dead lamb's eye mistaken for Elvis — will wash over all but the most studious of listeners, it's a powerful, impressionistic listen where rural beauty and innocence are intertwined with violence and decay, themes echoing across Harvey's work right from debut single 'Dress'.

Written in Dorset, a dialect named after the Southwest English county where Harvey grew up and now lives, Orlam required nearly a decade of research into the local language, mythology and ecology — a process that has reconnected Harvey to her home and nature, more broadly.

"[It was] a humbling discovery, that I was a tiny part of a very large patchwork, and I was the most recent addition to what has been going on for hundreds of thousands of years," she says.

"It's connected me much more to nature, even though I'm a country girl. I grew up in a tiny village, it was farming land: sheep, cattle, crop farming. That was my life.

"I studied the seasons. I meticulously documented what was happening on a day-by-day basis through each season, as I walked through the country and the woods. I feel it did inform me, and that now will never be unlearned."

Harvey didn't begin her research with Orlam or an album in mind, but rather from a need to "take a break" from the warfare and violence of Let England Shake and 2016's The Hope Six Demolition Project, a politically minded album that drew from travels to Afghanistan and Kosovo.

"I almost needed to become quite introverted again, and diving deeply into this tiny corner of the world of Dorset, spending eight years writing a book in Dorset dialect, was exactly the medication I needed.

"I didn't set out intending to produce work from it. I did it for myself, to heal myself, but also tried to try to find my way back to where I might need to go next as a person, not necessarily as a working artist, just as a person."

But Orlam and I Inside… formed as Harvey felt the importance of bringing Dorset's culture and dialect, which remains alive but has diminished in popularity, "back to the forefront".

"We're losing our local dialect, like most places — I'm particularly aware of it here [Australia], with the Aboriginal languages that went across the whole of this country," she says.

"I think there's something beautiful about trying to keep them alive. We can learn so much about ourselves now through the ancient languages that were used."

Harvey says she was intimidated by the scope of Orlam and I Inside… but pushed through.

"On the one hand, I felt I am not worthy. On the other, I felt, 'Well, someone needs to try and do this.' And I often feel that way about my work. So many times you feel like, 'Oh, how could I possibly think I could do this? You're terrible! You're a hopeless writer-performer.' And then, other times, you just [think], 'Well, you've got to try.'"