I’m getting the guided tour from an enthusiastic member of the conservation team. This is the first time the 32-year-old — once part of the Free Association, a ramshackle funk-rap collective masterminded by the DJ David Holmes — has seen her handiwork since the restorations were largely finished. “Wow,” marvels Phillipson, whose forthcoming debut album, Notes on Love, is a haunting tower of noir folk songs, built over eight years, on and off. “It’s amazing to be back here. I love it. This place totally saved me, you know.”
Last night, she opened for Turin Brakes at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire. Had she worn white, and not forgotten the bleeding-heart-red ribbon she usually pins on her front, casual observers might have assumed Meg White had begun a side project with Calexico while Jack was gadding round Hollywood. In Phillipson’s nonfictional line-up, her producer, Simon Tong, stand-in guitarist with Blur and the Verve, and the drummer Paul May play the imaginary Joey Burns and John Convertino.
Sharing more than a middle name and two initials with Polly Harvey, the high priestess of British alt-rock, Phillipson is used to obvious comparisons, but isn’t prepared to be pigeonholed: “I read a review in Esquire magazine saying that I was perfectly PJ Harvey, Martina Topley-Bird and Billie Holiday all rolled into one, and I thought, ‘Yeah, possibly.’ But that’s what it says on the biog — and nobody ever mentions Sarah Vaughan or Cat Power or Karen Dalton, an amazing soul singer who played the banjo with Bob Dylan in Greenwich Village.”
Mostly coincidental, the Harvey connections are spooky nonetheless. Early, abortive sessions for Notes on Love were recorded with Rob Ellis, a former PJ Harvey drummer, and Phillipson was then staying in her near- namesake’s flat. “It’s very, very, very odd, because we’re similar types of people in a lot of ways, which is quite frightening,” Phillipson reflects. “I think she’s obviously aware. She wrote me a birthday card (giggling): ‘To Petra Jean, from Polly Jean.’”
Phillipson has a gentler sound, but the two are inevitably yoked together because Harvey is an exemplar for forceful women with guitars. “She’s the only one who’s been that dedicated or that strong. She’s a very powerful tiny thing.”
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Before and after the Free Association, the distinctive power of Phillipson’s voice — a coaxing purr that hides a wildcat yowl — was prevailed upon by A&R men keen to mould her style. In both London and New York, where she lived for much of her twenties, producers encouraged her to sing over hip-hop beats, yet the results were disappointing: “I thought it was my fault, but they (her would- be svengalis) were rubbish, giving me a loop and saying, ‘Write a song’ — when it hasn’t got any guitar, hasn’t got any chord changes, hasn’t got anything. It took me a long time to have the courage to do it how I wanted.”
London clubbing, then art college in Bath, had originally been Phillipson’s escape from growing up in proto-chav Ashford. “It was horrible, just really awful,” she recalls. “A lot of violence and crazy stuff happened down there.” In 2002, Holmes — the “funny old Belfast bastard” who now makes a mint scoring Steven Soderbergh movies — brought her “fast fame”, though not significant sales, as the Free Association played Later... with Jools Holland and stadium gigs in Europe. Phillipson enjoyed it, but “the mayhem was a shock to the system”.
Emotionally jarred, she got the job at St Paul’s. The nine-to-five and the less arty contractors (“Oi, love, where d’you think you are? On a f***ing stage?”) were “really grounding”, while other aspects — such as hearing the choir sing John Tavener — provided creative uplift. The work also revived her unconventional spirituality. Motioning towards a statue below an engraving that reads “Through the Gate of Death We Pass to Our Joyful Resurrection”, Phillipson says St Michael is her favourite (“He’s a warrior — I’ve got a picture of him above my bed”), then adds that she visits a healer whom she jokingly calls “Voodoo”.
With most of the lyrics written during the previous seven years, Phillipson went into the studio again last autumn. “I wanted to make a record in an old-fashioned way — on tape, in single takes — with a really raw, intimate feel.” A particularly intense relationship, now over, spurred that need for honesty. “Part of being strong is being vulnerable,” she says. “Before, I thought I could handle anything, yet the whole point is to open up. This album is a philo-sophical study on love — and to do that properly, you need to feel it all the way through to your soul.”
Her latest heroine is pretty soul deep, too: Hildegard of Bingen, the 12th-century abbess, composer and mystic. Should Phillipson’s album win the following it deserves, Petra Jean of Kent may be founding a devotional order all her own.
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Notes on Love is released on July 11 by Gronland; Petra Jean Phillipson supports KT Tunstall in Regent’s Park on August 14