Edinburgh International Festival review, PJ Harvey, Playhouse: 'A more or less perfect show'

As unlikely as it sounds, at first it’s difficult to spot PJ Harvey – not because she isn’t the only woman out of ten performers onstage, or that she isn’t an unmistakably charismatic figure, but because she seems wilfully disguised amid the doleful procession drumming themselves onto the stage. There’s no showbiz entrance for her; only when the instrumental introduction to “Chain of Keys” has finished does the woman modestly hanging around amid the other musicians, saxophone in hand, step forward.

This is all, as is fitting for a show at the Edinburgh International Festival, the purest theatre, and Harvey is a masterful lead actor. When her mouth opens she’s transformed into something more than just a musician among many other musicians, more a force of nature. In this huge and atmospheric old concert hall, the fact (probably unintentionally constructed) that she’s surrounded by mostly white, mostly older male players only elevates her. Her authority is tangible, like some priestess – dressed all in black, hair sculpted into small devil horns – of an obscure death cult.

For nearly two hours, her music treads its own space with sureness and precision. Drawing heavily from last year’s The Hope Six Demolition Project, a travelogue account of her travels to experience post-war Afghanistan and Kosovo, and the clearance of housing in Washington DC, the set is political without being preachy, personal without being self-obsessed, human but with no sense of desperation for acceptance.

This is music so powerful that it pulls you into its orbit, from the broken, two-saxophones-in-one-mouth oddity of “The Ministry of Defence”, thundering out as a modernist concrete wall rises into place behind the band, to the visceral evocation of a bloody battlefield on “The Words That Maketh Murder”. Let England Shake also shapes the political tone of the show, and the feeble rallying sound of a bugle on “This Glorious Land” speaks to a different kind of imagined solidarity than “The Community of Hope”, an airy, upbeat ode to people power.

The carefully-balanced observational power of these albums leaps into three-dimensional life on the live stage, mainly because Harvey creates dramatic, evocative music to hang her lyrics on, in the first instance. The key word here is “power”; at various stages, her band of multi-instrumentalists (including old collaborators Mick Harvey and John Parish) contains five guitarists, three saxophonists or three drummers, and the effect upon the driving, handclap-strewn “The Wheel”, the pounding garage rock of “50ft Queenie” and the dark, dense blues of “Down By the Water” is visceral. In intent and execution, a more or less perfect show.