Tonight PJ Harvey commands a sold-out crowd in the forecourt of the iconic Sydney Opera House. The scale of her legacy is undeniable. She’s the only artist to win the Mercury Prize twice, has eight Brit and Grammy nominations, plus an MBE for services to music. She’s penned two poetry books (The Hollow of the Hand and Orlam), composed theatre scores for Ivo Van Hove and Ian Rickson, and left her sonic mark on TV and film (Peaky Blinders, The Virtues, Dark River). Most recently, her haunting ‘Prayer at the Gate’ closed out Alan Wake 2.
Her collaborations span the who’s-who of genre-bending brilliance—Nick Cave, Thom Yorke, Tricky, Josh Homme, Sparklehorse, and Mark Lanegan, to name a few. A master of reinvention, Harvey has shaped alternative music for over three decades, crafting ten studio albums, the latest being 2023’s Grammy-nominated I Inside the Old Year Dying, which she is showcasing tonight.
A full moon hangs over Sydney, casting its glow on the Opera House sails—ghostly, monolithic against the night. The stage is sparse: a few wooden chairs, a table cluttered with glasses, a desk that suggests something contemplative, something ritualistic. PJ Harvey steps into this tableau, a spectral figure in white, her dress and cape making her look both delicate and unshakable, like something out of an old daguerreotype. She doesn’t speak. She doesn’t have to.
She begins with Prayer at the Gate, the opening incantation from I Inside the Old Year Dying, an album inspired by her poem, ‘Orlam.’ The performance is deliberate, meticulous, the kind where every movement feels charged. Playing the new album in its entirety, she flits across the stage, ghostlike, restless. At one point, she sits at the desk, scrawling something. Notes? A new poem forming in real-time? The audience barely breathes, watching her work. When they break into applause between songs, she looks slightly bewildered, as if she’s just returned from another plane and cannot fathom the adulation.
The band—John Parish, Jean-Marc Butty, Giovanni Ferrario, James Johnston—operate like a gravitational force, holding her in orbit, giving weight to the ether. They carry her into some tracks off Let England Shake, the album’s razor-sharp political hauntings still hitting like a gut punch. Then, as if breaking a spell, the first strum of 50ft Queenie shatters the reverence. The crowd erupts. The porcelain doll is gone; in her place, the rock and roll animal emerges. Man-Size follows, then Dress, the early, snarling cuts—feral, unrepentant, still unmatched. It’s here, deep in the sweat and catharsis, that she finally speaks: it’s been too long since she visited Australia, she tells us.
And then, Down by the Water. The kind of song that slinks, that seduces, that unsettles. My companion leans in, and whispers—”If she’d lived in Salem, they’d have burned her at the stake.” Because women like her—feral, ungovernable—have always been a threat. The kind that don’t just toe the line but redraw it. The ones who rewrite history in real time, not with force, but with presence, with talent sharpened to a blade. The ones who refuse to be anything less than exactly what they are. She closes with C’mon Billy, then White Chalk, the final echoes of a set that feels less like a concert and more like a séance.
Then, just as suddenly as she appeared, she’s gone.
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