“And after about two weeks, they drop off.” The crowd roared as though she’d made a joke. “For the male lambs that you don’t want to become rams, you have to ring their testicles with a rubber band,” Harvey explained, as frank as any lifelong farmer would be. She responded with a list of tasks that included castrating sheep. “So you still go back and do the chores?” Leno wanted to know. In the short interview that followed, he raised what must have seemed like an innocuous topic: Harvey’s rural roots on a sheep farm in Dorset. Leno pronounced her performance “very nice,” with all the forced enthusiasm of a high-school English teacher who’d asked the quiet girl to read her poem aloud. She closed by taking her hand off the strings, repeating the “Lick my legs” chant a cappella smiling more to herself than to the audience. Her falsetto sounded involuntary and unnaturally girlish, a genderless being’s impression of women, as though the song of violent obsession had awakened some histrionic alternate personality within Harvey. On the album and in concert, Ellis had taken over the haunting falsetto backing vocals: “Lick my legs, I’m on fire/Lick my legs of desire.” Even the demo was mixed to layer Harvey’s throaty, menacing leads over her high-pitched chant.īut on Leno’s stage, she played both overlapping parts at once, and the effect was hair-raising. From a technical standpoint, it wasn’t a stellar performance. So Polly appeared on Jay Leno’s “Tonight Show” accompanied only by her guitar. Harvey incorporates elements of jazz and electronic music into cues such as the otherworldly "Descending," the hypnotic "Lieben" and the aptly named "Shimmer." A thoughtful, complex score, on All About Eve Harvey makes the most of the chance to experiment as well as reinterpret an existing work.After the tense summer tour that had followed Rid of Me’s spring release, she had split with her bandmates, drummer Rob Ellis and bassist Steve Vaughan, in the trio they’d called PJ Harvey. Though All About Eve's songs may be its most familiar-sounding moments, some of the most striking ones are the least expected. This is particularly true of the songs she wrote for Anderson and James to sing "The Sandman" and "The Moth" have a plaintive, fairy tale-like quality that evokes both of those albums. Harvey's melodic signature is all over the score as well, at times recalling the icy clarity of White Chalk and the ghostly remembrances of Let England Shake. "Waltz" adds an eerie edge to its refinement, while "Becoming" lives up to its name, swirling together uneasy strings that slowly take shape while a piano emerges from its mist. Elsewhere, the score alludes to Liszt's work more subtly. The fluttering "Cadenza" is one of the most faithful homages to Liebesträume, as is "Change in C," where heroic doses of reverb heighten the dreaminess of its piano melody. Working with longtime collaborator James Johnston and drummer Kenrick Rowe, Harvey abstracts Liszt's music into graceful, restless cues that offer layered meanings within their small shifts. Just as van Hove's interpretation of Joseph Mankiewicz's 1950 film trades some of its satire for a more psychological approach that puts ageism, sexism, and feminism at the fore, Harvey's music borrows from and updates Franz Liszt's Liebesträume, one of the movie's musical touchstones. Along with casting Gillian Anderson as Margo Channing and Lily James as Eve Harrington, he brought on PJ Harvey to compose a moody score and songs that reflect the production's darker tone. For his 2019 stage adaptation of the classic story All About Eve, director Ivo van Hove worked with an A-list creative team.
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