Let England Shake By PJ Harvey Is A Near Perfect Vision Of A Country That Lost Its Way
“Let’s Go To The Fountain Of Death And Splash About, And Laugh Out Loud”
Tristan Young @talltristan
Once in an interview PJ Harvey said she had looked to the films of Stanley Kubrick for inspiration and guidance when making Let England Shake. Of his work she observed, “there is so much space, so many things that are silent. And somehow within that silence everything becomes clear. With every film he seems to capture the essence of life itself”. In Let England Shake, released in 2011, Harvey captured the life of England. Like the lens that Kubrick applied to his own subject matter, it is a portrait that is messy, ruinous, tragic, and ultimately clarifying. England has shaped the destiny of the world several centuries over, and while with each iteration we may debate for better or worse, England always comes out battered. Like the decaying layers of infrastructure rotting in the subterranean innards of London, England is a country that has aggregated trauma and horror into is national character. It wears these scars with pride and guilt, but has often struggled to reconcile with why it needs to wear them at all. How did England come to be a nation lost in its own ominous shadow? Why has it been so hard to penetrate that heart of darkness?
The answers to these questions are at the center of Harvey’s mission with Let England Shake. For centuries nation states have had designated war artists. Poets, photographers, novelists and the like have documented the realties of conflict, as they existed throughout history. The visual horror and emotionally surreal contexts are preserved for posterity, for education, maybe even as a warning. Vital and iconic art in the forms of portraits and essays have come from these moments of human suffering and carnage. Why don’t we have something like this for musicians? Harvey elected to correct his oversight herself, even without an official mandate. Let England Shake would be a document on England’s role in the world of war. It’s despicable instigations, wasteful violence, triumphant victories, and indelible mark on its own culture would be explored in a collection of songs covering everything from World War 1 to the modern day conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. It would be ugly, harrowing, and demoralizing, but most importantly it would be something that people needed to hear. A reckoning not just for England and its sordid role in history, but for all of us. Let England Shake forces us to confront our blind nationalism, the manipulation of terms like ‘heroic’ or ‘sacrifice’, and the consequences of forging a national identity through the corpses left in its wake.
Let England Shake had been on Harvey’s mind for some time, long before she ever began work in earnest on writing it. During multiple accounts looking back on the album she recalled how reluctant she was to even attempt it initially. While the thematic impetus was always there, she felt she didn’t have the writing skills or technical prowess to accomplish her goals. Despite her implied criticisms in the album, Harvey holds a deep adoration of her home country and needed to ensure she could do it justice. Part of that growth would be experimenting with and discovering an appropriate voice. Harvey, with an aversion to coming off as a partisan or ideologue, wanted to use apolitical language whenever possible. Instead she opted to use and extrapolate from the language of those who were there. She wanted to be narrator. Researching not just modern and historic conflicts, but accounts on both sides of the trenches, she found that the language was always the same. The stories from 100 years ago and 10 years ago spoke to the same sense of dread, futility, and derision. This would not be protest music, but rather an experience focused on personal sorrow and resignation.
It quickly becomes apparent how little politicking is needed in Let England Shake, as Harvey’s writing captures the fidelity of conflict, and that palpable fear, proving her points far better than any kind of sloganeering ever could. In The Words That Maketh Murder she walks in the shoes of an allied infantry man, “I’ve seen and done things I want to forget/ I’ve seen soldiers fall like lumps of meat/ arms and feet were in the trees”. Harvey said she wanted you to see what you were hearing. Like a deranged take on synaesthesia, her writing is designed to break down the barriers built by the political abstractions of war; abstractions that the governments of England, America, and all who would aspire to be like them have created. Harvey does not rely on just shock horror though, rather she goes to great lengths to situate the listener in these environments, to carefully erode those inoculations we take comfort in. “The scent of thyme was carried on the wind”, she softly purrs in On Battleship Hill referencing the fields in Gallipoli, the site of a historic WW1 battle, where the herb grows wild. She goes on to channel her inner Bjork with the phrase “jagged mountains, jutting out”. This land was a place of natural splendour before its soil was the tinged with blood, as she recounts in The Color Of The Earth. We changed it. One does not need a political inclination or to speak in such terms to intimate this, nor can such things contest it.
Beyond finding a rhetorical voice, Harvey endeavoured to radically overhaul her vocals in a more physical sense as well. Harvey has been celebrated for her scathingly raw and almost brutish voice, tailor made for visceral rock and roll for many albums prior to Let England Shake. This was not the cadence she wanted to communicate in for this record. She opted instead for a ghostly, wispy vocal set, one comprised of ethereal, if haunting beauty, rather than cacophonous confrontation. She had previewed this style of singing in her previous album White Chalk, but here it is much more fully realized, and effectively purposed. She speaks with placid serenity as she recounts the tale of war enveloping civilian centers in Written On The Forehead, or as a spectral wraith in the harrowing trip of existential dread that is the opener Let England Shake. Harvey had the lyrics for the songs more or less in place long before she had any music written for them, practicing and shaping them through a capella renditions. In doing so the purity of her voice, weaving between therapeutic to anxiously ambiguous became paramount to the album’s ghostly feel.
Via Radio UTD
It’s everywhere on the album, that macabre, almost funeral like vibe. She recorded the songs over a period of 5 weeks in a cavernous church in Dorset, England, no doubt lending to those deathly intonations. The ancient, agonizing decay of England creates an atmosphere of centuries of rot observed over just a few minutes. Far from being off putting, it’s strikingly beautiful, but achingly sad. The rattling tangles of guitars in The Glorious Land recall mordant shackles ringing from beyond the grave. The sombre pianos of On Battleship Hill are an effective backdrop to Harvey essentially eulogizing the better angels of England. Her language in All And Everyone is literally death incarnate:
“Death was in the staring sun, fixing its eyes on everyone/ in the rattled bones of the light horseman, still lying out there in the opening”.
This again is a reference to the battle of Gallipoli, and an important one. She details the slaughter of the Australian and New Zealand regiments at the hands of the Ottomans with the advent of the machine gun. Something never before possible in previous wars.
World War 1 was the first conflict in history where the world was taken aback in collective horror at just how much destruction we had become capable of causing. It instigated a taking of stocks of sorts for countries like England, Germany, and France. What on earth had they just done? How could they have let this happen? That sense of disorientation and inescapable fear is captured at no better point than in the absolutely delirious Let England Shake. It’s perverse carnival like keyboard dalliances have an almost heretical playfulness to them. Her phrase, “Lets go to the fountain of death and splash about/ and laugh out loud” is frighteningly apt and the most potent body blow the album lands in its run time. Earlier on she chants with arcane hysteria, “The west’s asleep/ Let England Shake”. Is this a warning to America to not follow in England’s footsteps, or prophesising what is already too late?
Instrumentally, this album sounds ancient by design. Harvey’s thesis, the decline of England’s eminence, torn to pieces by needless jingoism, cannot exist merely in a modern day vacuum. If she is to document the plight of the soldier and the propaganda complex that so eagerly chews them up, it needs to stretch back deep into England’s history. As such, she crafted an instrumental atmosphere that does the same. Rusted brass organs create a sound of something being exhumed from a forgotten tomb; they rear their head inThe Last Living Rose and In The Dark Places, among others. It’s evocative of a foggy English Moore, perhaps a battered and bloodied one, marred by chaos. Imagery like, “the gray damp filthiness of ages”, in The Last Living Rose is wonderfully nostalgic in this regard. The Glorious Land sequences ornate battle horns from forgotten warzones and that’s not even the craziest sample. That honour goes to England and its integration of a Kurdish musician from the 1920s named Said El Kurdi and his song Kassam Miro. His dreamlike howls permeate the creaking fragility of the track, succumbing to the weight of mourning in Harvey’s voice.
One of the slickest moves the album plays in this regard is in The Words That Maketh Murder. As she reaches a despondent crescendo, an approximation of dusty reed instruments unmistakeably recalls an atmosphere akin to something like the Wild West. Notices how she deploys this sequence as she ironically rages, “what if I take my problems to the United Nations”, in a riff on the line by Eddie Cochran in his song Summertime Blues. Just as she discusses an institution of supposed modernity and civility she pairs it with a soundscape recalling a time of lawlessness, selfishness and the fundamental dangers of having no real government systems to protect you. It’s an excellent take down of the idea that we have evolved from our baser sensibilities over the course of history.
Harvey cultivates this sense of history from many angles. She explained that in recording she wanted songs that could be generational, passed down like folklore. That’s why she opted for more universal language of war in perpetuity rather than through the rhetoric of any one era. In this regard, many of the tracks on Let England Shake carry with them the a sense of cultural air, in the same way that folk music often speaks to the fundamentals of national identity. The Last Living Rose and On Battleship Hill both elicit a sense of true understanding on what it means to be a Brit, beyond the rise and fall of particular dynasties. The Color Of The Earth is the most potent and cathartic of the bunch to this end. It’s deeply evocative of a warmly lit rural pub, populated by salty but kind-hearted bastards, trading war stories. Headed up by guest vocals from Nick Harvey (no relation) it becomes a communal forum to mourn and celebrate the ghosts that war has made of us. Blissfully regaling us on the story of Louie, a boy clearly too pure to accommodate the exigencies of war, they blurt out, “Later in the dark I thought I heard Louie’s voice/ calling for his mother, then me/ but I couldn’t get to him”. It’s a song that surely could still be sung by the same people a century from now. “Nothing more than a pile of bones/ But I think of him still”.
PJ Harvey performing at Coachella 2011
Those moments of relative respite are much needed on Let England Shake; the album can be punishing in its language and tenor, rightly so. This is not an experience that is here to let any of us off the hook, for the dramatic fall from grace that is the story of England is a universal one. Early on Harvey ominously warns, “I fear our blood won’t rise again”, wondering that England has slipped so far from its once moral high horse, that there may be no going back; she ensures that we understand this is far from dramatization. This album can be stinging at certain points. Whereas tracks like Bitter Branches and The Words That Maketh Murder argue the deplorable extent to which the grinding wheels of militaristic industry weaponizes and discard us, she later explains that this is not some horrible aberration of self defence gone awry. “Cruel Nature has won again”, she laments in On Battleship Hill, indicating this was always going to happen. In All and Everyone she strips away the politicized language of heroes and victory, exposing the raw wound at the center of what war actually is: “Death hung in the air and clung to 400 miles of useless beachfront”. Futility, wastefulness, these are the defining traits of war in Let England Shake. These are the foundations that England has truly perched its flag upon. No wonder it is all sinking.
As she peels back these layers we see the sacrosanct virtues of patriotism collapsing under the pressure of morally onerous nationalism. She conveys these debilitating sentiments both in a historical context and in real time. She is at her most bitter and rousingly critical in the direct and climatic resolution to The Glorious Land. Alternating between an indoctrinated recreation of wartime propaganda and inconsolable rage she accuses the leaders of her country for squandering so much of what they should have held dear. “What is the glorious fruit of our land?” she screams, “Its fruit is deformed children! Its fruit is orphaned children!” Harvey spends much of Let England Shake in a distant and observational tone, but here she cannot help but engage in a fierce battle cry.
The tragedy that is so thoroughly brought to light in this album is her country’s apparent inability to learn from its own past. No matter how many soldier’s letters are paraphrased in the lyrics of her songs, England as a singular entity doesn’t really know what to do with them. In the end all they can do is take those horrible stories about needless death and suffering and celebrate them. That’s the grievous truth behind a song like Color Of The Earth. At the end of the line, their last recourse is to grab a pint of ale with some mates and sing a rousing tune, not to actually do anything about it. The details are horrible, but it all sounds surprisingly hospitable:
“If I was asked I’d tell/ the color of the earth that day/ it was dull and browny red/ the color of blood I’d say”
That final line of the album is one of the darkest yet also the most joyfully delivered. What else can they do? That’s why it seems to physically pain her to admit in England, “But people, they stagnate with time”.
And yet, England is not a writhing lamentation of a wayward nation, but rather a love letter; “Withered vine, reaching from the country that I love”. Harvey did not write this album as an admonition of a despicable land, but rather because she adores England, deeply and desperately. One cannot gather such vitriol and opprobrium on a subject they care nothing for. She spends so much time highlighting the ugliness because she knows first hand of the beauty being smothered by it. Harvey speaks of stinking alleys and drunken beatings in The Last Living Rose, still seething that the Thames has been treated like, “gold hastily sold for nothing. Nothing!” Yet she still wants nothing more than to return. As she concludes her thoughts on her country, all of the anger melts away. No longer suffocated by or choking on her own rage, her language breaths into something far more poetic:
“Let me watch night fall on the river/ the moon rise up and turn to silver/ the sky move, the ocean simmer, the last living rose quiver”
If there is only one point on the album where Harvey entirely drops the role of agnostic narrator, it’s here. Even with everything else, this is still how she truly feels about England.
With Let England Shake, Harvey became the only musician ever to win the coveted Mercury Prize twice. Harvey was already a treasured icon in British music; this album did not go by unnoticed, not in her homeland at least. People across the spectrum of history and ideology interacted with it. However, Harvey wasn’t speaking to the individual, but to the community. We are all different in our solipsistic desires from our communal hopes for each other. How a nation as a whole reconciles with something as traumatic as facing themselves in the mirror is too difficult to understand in a time span as short as a decade. For now, Harvey has done what she could. Every Brit- every person, really- can see some of their history, their people, and their culture in her work, whether they want to or not. We are all shaken by what we see.