In this time of political uncertainty, I feel as if my parents were going through a nasty divorce...
Music, as you know, is my strength and source of consolation.
Here is one of my favourite voices and writers.
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Review from The Guardian, after her show in Glastonbury yesterday:
link: https://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2016/jun/27/lcd-soundsystem-pj-harvey-and-more-reviewed-sundays-music-at-glastonbury-2016
LCD Soundsystem, PJ Harvey and more reviewed – Sunday's music at Glastonbury 2016
PJ Harvey – Other stage
Flying through all the variously stumbled and rushed Brexit responses on stage this weekend was PJ Harvey’s perfectly weighted dart. Introducing The Glorious Land, she read John Donne’s poem No Man Is an Island, written in 1624, with its assertion that “every man is a piece of the continent”. But her entire set was a reflection on the priggishness of alpha-male politics that wreaks havoc from Syria to Essex.
Using martial drums and drill-sergeant strictness is on one level sarcastic, an arch version of chest-beating masculinity. But it also acknowledges just how infectious such rousing military music can be. Opening with Chain of Keys, she marches out playing a saxophone with the burly middle-aged blokes in her band, dressed in leather gloves and midnight folds of fabric. Moving to the mic, she holds the sax out like a totem, starting up a blood ritual. She holds poses amid the Guernica-like imagery of The Ministry of Defence, then marvels like a child at the “insects courting” in Let England Shake – all of it hypnotically authoritative stagecraft.
It would be nothing, of course, without great music, and aside from Dollar, Dollar’s overly spartan passages, it’s beautiful – like a New Orleans blues band commissioned for a dance in an Elizabethan court. Phrases are repeated again and again with almost techno-like levels of fixation; perhaps in these troubled times, words become buoys to cling to, sure things to focus on. To Bring You My Love, meanwhile, becomes a study in psychotic eroticism, backed by scorched desert blues.
You get the feeling that the chaos and pathos of Brexit will provide fresh grist for this immensely fertile period of her career – it’s almost worth living in shit to get pearls like this from it. BBT
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Here is the poem PJ quoted on stage, in full - so relevant:
No Man Is An Island - Poem by John Donne
No man is an island,
Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thy friend's
Or of thine own were:
Any man's death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind,
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.
Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thy friend's
Or of thine own were:
Any man's death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind,
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.
