It has never been music to potter around the house to, or to sip cocktails to, or to wake up to on a bright Sunday morning: Polly Jean Harvey's music has always been reserved for those long, dark nights of the soul - guaranteed to make us feel much worse, but somehow better at the same time. It has been her job to "Feel Our Pain". Her songs have been bleak, angry, ghoulish. And Harvey herself, all paper-doll fragility, has always been the incarnation of angst, yowling her scary, disconcerting lyrics about unsettling things (voodoo, drowning, coffins, guns). She may never have possessed the distinctive grandeur of her most obvious predecessor, Patti Smith, but she blazed a trail of slow burning sensuality, fury and eccentricity that helped bring women's rock out of the margins and into the charts in the late 1990s. She was always a cut above the maudlin Morissettes and Phairs of this world. The only trouble was that, after a while, Harvey seemed to have so much more pain to feel than the rest of us could muster.
Until recently, that is. There were signs of a slight breeziness on her last album, and there are tracks on the latest one that even have an optimism and lightness of touch previously unheard of from the supposed cauldron-stirring lady of darkness. In the flesh, though not exactly serene looking, Harvey looks tanned and fit, as opposed to pallid and unwell, formerly her salient characteristics. She's tiny, but not spectrally thin, as she has been in the past, and she has strikingly large, long-lashed, hazel eyes and a wide, full mouth that goes slightly wonky when she speaks in her soft, West Country lilt. She has an intense, measured way about her.
She says that her new album, Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea, is so named not so much because of the locations in which it was written (New York and Dorset), but because she has always liked the Jungian notion of "the sea being the subconscious and the land the conscious". The creative process draws from reality, she says, but also from the imagination. "It seems to me that we spend a lot of our lives trying to get back to that simplicity, the vibrant imagination, we had as kids."
She's not nostalgic about her childhood, though - "I don't dwell too much on things that have gone. I try and live on a day-to-day basis". Her mother, a sculptor, and her father, a stonemason, brought up their daughter to the sounds of Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, John Lee Hooker.
The Harveys lived near a remote village with a population of 600, and their house, along with a few others, was set apart. There was no shop, just a post office and a telephone box. Polly used to hang around with a group of local boys. "We had a gang in our offshoot village, and there were just boys. No girls to play with." Harvey began playing piano, violin and saxophone at the age of 11, and then taught herself to play the guitar at 18.
Now 30, Harvey still lives for most of the time in Dorset, in a house by the sea. She's very close to her parents, and always plays them early demo tapes of her albums. Having bohemian parents, her teenage rebellion took a rather different form than most. "My rebellious stage was probably when I started buying Duran Duran records instead of listening to Captain Beefheart," she laughs, "and my mum was, like, `What on earth are you listening to?' "
She was 20 years old when she moved to London, and decided to defer a place to study sculpture at St Martin's art school in favour of signing a record deal. But the transfer from the countryside - and from the bosom of such a tight-knit family - was a shock. In 1992, she released Dry. It was a jagged, raw album, drawing on swampy blues, with hints of Patti Smith, Captain Beefheart and grunge thrown in - the songs were angry and intense, the vocal style was a distinctive, banshee-like roar. Everything started happening at once, she says, and what should have been an exciting time, full of hope, turned into a nightmare - and the first of two nervous breakdowns.
For a start, she was unprepared for press interviews, she says. "I'd had quite a sheltered upbringing, and was very open and honest, and so went to interviews totally unprotected." Of course, that candour did her public profile absolutely no harm - she was an interviewer's dream, but she believes it harmed her. "I was just wide open, and got damaged because of it, and ended up feeling very invaded." At the time, she was struggling with money, negotiating with solicitors, managers (she went through two of them) and agents. "It was quite frightening, and all too much. Then my personal life was in tatters at the same time [she had split from photographer Joe Dilworth]. I don't know what the definition of a nervous breakdown is. I just know that I stopped functioning properly, and I was unable to look after myself, and everything kind of fell apart." She went back home to Dorset and "shut off for a while".
The follow-up album, Rid Of Me, was no less harrowing or dark, and still full of fury and naked emotion - on the title track, she toyed with male fears of the Fatal Attraction-style bunny-boiling woman. It was her most relentless, hit-free album. The third, To Bring You My Love, was less emotionally direct but intense nonetheless, earning her a place on the Mercury Prize shortlist and a clutch of Grammy nominations. Until then, her appearance had been austere - scraped-back hair, no make-up - but with the release in 1995 of To Bring You My Love, she underwent a Ziggy Stardust-style transformation, appearing at Glastonbury in a smoulderingly glamorous ensemble of pink catsuit and exaggerated false eyelashes. There was a dark, theatrical edge to her performances, and her distorted wailing told of drowned daughters and voodoo rituals. The glam image had to do with something else as well, she says: "There was confusion with myself at that time as to who or what I was, and it was a way of looking for answers."
Another breakdown ensued. The period from the end of 1995 until 1997 was a "very dark time", she says. By the tail end of 1995 she had been on tour for a year and was "very worn and very disillusioned. Emotionally, mentally or physically, it wasn't a healthy time. I was running on empty. I really hit the bottom of the barrel and thought about stopping it all and not even continuing with music. Even through to Dance Hall At Louse Point [a dance collaboration with John Parish and choreographer Mark Bruce], it was a very difficult time in my life, probably the hardest time I've ever had." She says she's not sure why it happened a second time around. She was also, of course, painfully thin. It was generally assumed she was anorexic; it's not something she has talked about publicly, or admitted to. "That's a conscious decision," she says firmly. "And I'm not going to talk about it now." She went to stay with friends in Bristol. "I had a lot of support around me." She went into psychotherapy. Is This Desire?, a rather more upbeat album, followed in 1998.
But it is the new album that really shows Polly Jean Harvey in a different light. There are still the angry moments of visceral guitar rock, and the hallmark blues and orchestral balladry are there, too, albeit more finely honed. But there's a new mood that is less claustrophobic, less sinister and more positive, both lyrically and musically. She produced and performed all the tracks, along with Rob Ellis and Mick Harvey. It's a beautiful, seductive album, and probably her most commercial and accessible to date. The country-inflected ballad, You Said Something, for instance, and the elegiac, piano-filled We Float, with its soaring vocals, are gorgeous, and there are Bjorkish touches in the love song, Beauti- ful Feeling. Then there's This Mess We're In, a soft duet with the haunting voice of Thom Yorke of Radiohead. It has been said that Polly Harvey is the female version of Radiohead and that, just as the music of Thom Yorke mythologises male confusion and dysfunction, so hers represents the female equivalent. She doesn't see it that way, however: "They're just songs about living, not about one sex or another."
Not that her songs are about sex. "They're about emotions that go with love in any form, love of a cat, God, a person, the world, the countryside, anything. Some of that is sexual love. I think all songs are love songs - they're all about love or lack of love."
However, she doesn't like to talk about her lyrics in detail. The trouble with such reticence, however, is that you will often be caricatured in terms of your more extreme lyrical moments. From the time of her first album, Harvey was perceived as an angry, macabre eccentric, a witchy "Dark Lady", and that image has stuck.
Perhaps in an attempt to escape the confines of the Polly Jean Harvey persona, she has in the past few years experimented with acting, appearing in a few short films, including a musical cameo (as a bunny girl) in Sarah Miles's A Bunny Girl's Tale. She also acted in New York director Hal Hartley's The Book Of Life, a millennial satire.
In The Book Of Life, she plays the role of a modern-day Mary Magdalene. The Harveys were not a church-going family - "Quite the opposite: very rarely did we go" - but while researching the part she became fascinated by Christianity and the Bible . So much so that today she wears a crucifix around her neck. Does she have a religious faith? "I don't know if I could answer that really yet," she says cautiously. "I have my own beliefs, which I probably won't talk about. It's a very important part of my interest, and I'm aware of religion and its impact on everyone and everything."
Her music, she says, is "a place where I can try and give something to others that might help in some way. I make the songs, and I hand them over and then people can make them their own. Music can say a lot of things that words can't express."
Of course, there's more to it than saintly duty and altruism - there's a steely, ambitious side to Harvey as well. There's the Polly Harvey who disbanded the group, known collectively as PJ Harvey, after the first two albums, with the name, of course, reverting to her - they're her songs, it's her career, and that, it seems, is the way she likes it. And with the shrewd and powerful Paul McGuinness (also U2's manager) now in charge of her business, she is well placed for a long and fruitful career. Her main ambition, though, is not, she insists, to sell more records and become more famous, but to improve her writing - both her songwriting and her poetry and prose, with which she has been experimenting lately. She likes the discipline required to write poetry. "There are a lot more records in me yet, and it takes hard work and dedication. I want to keep doing that as I want to do it, and not be swayed by outside influences."
Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea was released this autumn