Polly Harvey played her first show of 2007 at the Manchester International Festival on Saturday. In a rare solo performance she switched between guitar, piano, drum machine and an array of exotic instruments.
Resplendent in a spectacular Southern belle ballgown, she also tempered her signature brand of West Country gothic blues with a smattering of new songs and lush, woozy ballads.
Harvey, a slight figure with a Mona Lisa smile, possesses an elusive yet potent charisma that can fill a cavernous space like the Bridgewater Hall with ease. She confessed to being terrified several times during the evening, and perhaps it was this high-wire intensity that made her performance so magnetic. Between numbers, her comments were nervous and almost apologetically humble. But her more aggressive songs turned her from Jekyll to Hyde, baring her fangs on the feral growl of Man Size and the vengeful Garden of Eden melodrama Snake.
In a softer mood, Harvey tingled spines with Nina in Ecstasy, an obscure B-side with a hushed, hymnal feel. It takes a rare talent to appropriate the “where’s your mama gone?” refrain from Middle of the Road’s 1971 novelty hit Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep and turn it into an elegy for lost childhood.
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Similarly impressive was the four-song preview of her forthcoming album White Chalk, on which piano takes precedence over guitar for the first time in her career. The Devil, The Mountain and White Chalk itself were emotionally charged affairs, partly sung in a piercing falsetto over baroque, cascading melodies. Silence proved more reflective, with an opaque lyric that hovered between desolation and defiance. Kate Bush is probably the reference point for Harvey’s latest digression into avant-garde chamber music, although her sometime collaborators Bj?rk and Thom Yorke have left imprints too.
Strumming an acoustic guitar and apparently channelling the ghost of Johnny Cash, she ended on a gentle note with The Desperate Kingdom of Love from her 2004 album, Uh huh Her. At just over an hour, this was a short set, but rich and spellbinding. By putting down her electric guitar, Harvey sounds liberated and revitalised.