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Let England Shake

Record Details

Release
2011

“Take me back to England
& the grey, damp filthiness of ages
fog rolling down behind the mountains
& on the graveyards, and dead sea-captains.”
PJ Harvey, The Last Living Rose

PJ Harvey’s new album was recorded in a 19th Century church in Dorset, on a cliff-top overlooking the sea. It was created with a cast of musicians including such long-standing allies as Flood, John Parish, and Mick Harvey. It is the eighth PJ Harvey album, following 2007’s acclaimed White Chalk, and the Harvey/Parish collaboration A Woman A Man Walked By.

Such are the bare facts. But what is remarkable about Let England Shake is bound up with its music, its abiding atmosphere – and in particular, its words. If Harvey’s past work might seem to draw on direct emotional experience, this new album is rather different. Its songs centre on both her home country, and events further afield in which it has embroiled itself. The lyrics return, time and again, to the matter of war, the fate of the people who must do the fighting, and events separated by whole ages, from Afghanistan to Gallipoli. The album they make up is not a work of protest, nor of strait-laced social or political comment. It brims with the mystery and magnetism in which she excels. But her lyric-writing in particular has arrived at a new, breathtaking place, in which the human aspects of history are pushed to the foreground. Put simply, not many people make records like this.

“I was looking outwards a lot more,” she told the BBC’s Andrew Marr, when she appeared on his programme back in May. “I think a lot of my work has often been about the interior, the emotional, what happens inside oneself. And this time I’ve been just looking out, so it’s not only to do with taking a look at England but taking a look at the world and what happening in current world affairs. But always trying to come from the human point of view, because I don’t feel qualified to sing from a political standpoint… I sing as a human being affected by the politics, and that for me is a more successful way … because I so often feel that with a lot of protest music, I’m being preached to, and I don’t want that.”.

By way of an introduction, there is the title song: “The West’s asleep. Let England shake/weighted down with silent dead.” As with so much of the record, the arrangement and melody have echoes of vernacular music going back centuries, but also push somewhere new: certainly, identifying any prevailing influence on this music is almost impossible. The lyrics hint at England’s post-imperial delusions, and yet another hapless soldier marching off to the front – themes that recur in The Words That Maketh Murder, All And Everyone, and Hanging In The Wire. But there is something else here: a brilliantly poetic picture of England itself – an old country, now creaking with age and experience, whose history is etched into the hearts and minds of the people who live here. One of the songs here is simply called England, and makes the point explicit: “I live and die/through England./It leaves/sadness./It leaves a taste,/a bitter one.”

Let England Shake evokes the troubled spirit of 2010, but it also casts its mind back to times and places from our long collective memory. In keeping with such imaginative intentions, its music has a rare breadth and emotional power. Nearly two decades after she made her first records, it proves not just that its author refuses to stand still, but that her creative confidence may well be at an all-time high. It is safe to say that you will not have heard anything like it before.

John Harris, November 2010

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Record Links

Record Tracklist

  1. Let England Shake
    Let England Shake

    The West’s asleep. Let England shake,
    weighted down with silent dead.
    I fear our blood won’t rise again.

    England’s dancing days are done.
    Another day, Bobby, for you to come home
    and tell me indifference won.

    Smile, smile Bobby, with your lovely mouth.
    Pack up your troubles, let’s head out
    to the fountain of death
    and splash about, swim back & forth
    and laugh out loud,

    until the day is ending,
    and the birds are silent in the branches,
    and the insects are courting in the bushes,
    and by the shores of lovely lakes
    heavy stones are falling.

  2. The Last Living Rose
    The Last Living Rose

    Goddam’ Europeans! Take me back to England
    and the grey, damp filthiness of ages,
    fog rolling down behind the mountains,
    and on the graveyards, and dead sea-captains.

    Let me walk through the stinking alleys
    to the music of drunken beatings,
    past the Thames River, glistening like gold
    hastily sold for nothing.

    Let me watch night fall on the river,
    the moon rise up and turn to silver,
    the sky move, the ocean shimmer,
    the hedge shake, the last living rose quiver.

  3. The Glorious Land
    The Glorious Land

    How is our glorious country ploughed?
    Not by iron ploughs –
    our land is ploughed by tanks and feet marching.

    How is our glorious country sown?
    Not with wheat and corn –
    How is our glorious land bestowed?

    And what is the glorious fruit of our land?
    Its fruit is deformed children.
    What is the glorious fruit of our land?
    Its fruit is orphaned children.

  4. The Words That Maketh Murder
    The Words That Maketh Murder

    I have seen and done things I want to forget –
    soldiers fell like lumps of meat,
    blown and shot out beyond belief.
    arms and legs were in the trees.

    I have seen and done things I want to forget –
    coming from an unearthly place,
    longing to see a woman’s face
    or hear a piano’s grace,
    instead of the words that gather pace,
    the words that maketh murder.

    I have seen and done things I want to forget –
    a Corporal, who’s nerves were shot
    climbing behind a fierce, gone sun,
    flies swarming everyone,
    death lingering, stunk
    over the whole summit peak
    flesh quivering in the heat.
    This was something else again.
    I fear it cannot be explained.
    The words that maketh murder.

  5. All and Everyone
    All and Everyone

    Death was everywhere,
    in the air
    and in the sounds
    coming off the mounds
    of Bolton’s Ridge.
    Death’s anchorage.
    When you rolled a smoke
    or told a joke,
    it was in the laughter
    and drinking water,
    it approached the beach
    as strings of cutters,
    dropped into the sea and lay around us.

    Death was in the ancient fortress,
    shelled by a million bullets
    from gunners, waiting in the copses
    with hearts that threatened to pop their boxes,
    as we advanced into the sun
    death was all and everyone.

    Death hung in the smoke and clung
    to 400 acres of useless beachfront.
    A bank of red earth, dripping down
    death, now, and now, and now.
    Death was everywhere,
    in the air
    and in the sounds
    coming off the mounds
    of Bolton’s Ridge.
    Death’s anchorage.
    Death was in the staring sun,
    fixing its eyes on everyone.
    It rattled the bones of the Light Horsemen
    still lying out there in the open

    as we, advancing in the sun
    sing, Death to all and everyone.

  6. On Battleship Hill
    On Battleship Hill

    The scent of Thyme carried on the wind,
    stings your face into remembering
    that nature has won again.

    On Battleship Hill’s caved in trenches,
    a hateful feeling still lingers, even now, 80 years later.
    Cruel nature, cruel, cruel nature.

    The land returns to how it has always been.
    The scent of Thyme carried on the wind.
    Jagged mountains jutting out,
    cracked like teeth in a rotten mouth.
    On Battleship Hill I hear the wind,
    Say, Cruel nature has won again.

  7. England
    England

    I live and die
    through England.
    I live and die
    through England.
    It leaves sadness.
    It leaves a taste,
    a bitter one.

    Remedies
    never were,
    remedies,
    not within my reach.
    I cannot go on as I am.
    I cannot leave.

    A withered vine,
    a bitter one,
    reaching from
    the nations’ dirt.
    England,
    I have searched for your springs,
    but people stagnate with time
    like water or air.

    Undaunted,
    never-failing love for you,
    England,
    is all, to which I cling.

  8. In the Dark Places
    In the Dark Places

    We got up early, washed our faces,
    walked the fields and put up crosses,
    Passed through the damned mountains,
    went hellwards,
    and some of us returned,
    and some of us did not.

    In the fields and in the forests,
    under the moon and under the sun
    another summer has passed before us,
    and not one man has,
    not one woman has
    revealed the secrets
    of this world.

    So our young men
    hid with guns
    in the dirt
    and in in the dark places.

  9. Bitter Branches
    Bitter Branches

    Bitter branches spreading out.
    There is none more bitter than the wood.
    Into the white world it grows,
    twisting its roots, a swarm of bees,
    twisting under soldiers’ feet.
    Soldiers, standing in a line,
    the damp earth underneath,
    holding their rifles high.
    Holding their young wives
    with white hands.

    Hold up the clear glass to see.
    Hold up the clear glass and look through;
    soldiers standing in formation,
    the damp earth underneath,
    holding their rifles high.
    Their young wives,
    with white hands wave goodbye.
    Their arms as bitter branches
    spreading into the white world.

  10. Hanging In The Wire
    Hanging In The Wire

    Walker sees the mist rise
    over a no-man’s-land.
    He sees in front of him
    a smashed up waste-ground.
    There are no fields or trees.
    No blades of grass.
    Just unburied ghosts
    hanging in the wire.

    Walker’s in the wire,
    limbs pointing upwards.
    There are no birds singing
    The White Cliffs of Dover.
    There are no trees to sing from.
    He cannot hear the wind.
    Far off, a symphony.
    Do you hear the guns beginning?

    James Walker’s in the mist rising
    over no-man’s-land,
    in the battered waste-ground,
    the big guns firing.

  11. Written on the Forehead
    Written on the Forehead

    People throwing dinars
    at the belly-dancers,
    in a sad circus
    beside a trench of burning oil.

    People throw belongings,
    a life-time’s earnings,
    amongst the scattered rubbish
    and suitcase on the sidewalk.

    Date palms, orange
    and tangerine trees,
    and eyes are crying
    for everything.

    I talked to an old man
    by the generator,
    standing on the gravel
    by the fetid river.

    He turned to me,
    then surveyed the scene,
    said, war is here
    in our beloved city.

    Some dove in the river
    and tried to swim away
    through 10,000 tonnes of sewage,
    fate written on their foreheads,

    date palms, orange
    and tangerine trees,
    and eyes were crying
    for everything.

  12. The Colour Of The Earth
    The Colour Of The Earth

    Louis was my dearest friend
    fighting in the Anzac trench.
    Louis ran forward from the line
    and I never saw him again.

    Later in the dark
    I thought I heard Louis’ voice
    calling for his mother then me,
    but I couldn’t get to him.

    He’s still up on that hill.
    Twenty years on that hill.
    Nothing more than a pile of bones,
    but I think of him still.

    If I was asked I’d tell
    the colour of the earth that day –
    it was dull, and browny-red,
    The colour of blood I’d say.