Review: PJ Harvey at Kings Park and Botanic Garden

PJ Harvey at Kings Park and Botanic Garden
w/ Mick Turner, Mindy Meng Wang
Tuesday, March 4, 2025

PJ Harvey enjoys challenging listeners.

Instead of greatest hits, her Perth Festival set featured new album I Inside the Old Year Dying played (not quite) in full. Instead of the popular songs you might expect, she leant heavily on deep cuts.

Impressively, only five songs from this show and her memorable Fremantle Arts Centre headline eight years ago overlapped.

So when it came to support acts, Polly Jean wasn’t about to go easy on us. If The Dirty Three themselves are quite challenging, removing the showy lead violin and improvised drumming heartbeat to leave just Mick Turner solo and strumming his way through rhythmic builds probably counted as ‘difficult listening’ for many on the hill, sitting as they were with their picnics. For fans, however, the sound was very Dirty Three, with looped post-rock and soulful sounds to dream away to.

Even more out there was Mindy Meng Wang on her Guzheng (essentially a plucked Chinese zither) opening the night. An impressive-looking instrument, Wang provided a combination of improvised, traditional, and compositional pieces, adding vocals to some, including ancient languages from her ancestors, much like the new PJ record. Not exactly stadium-riveting in the expansive venue, but the virtuoso performance was clear to those close up.

Did we mention PJ Harvey sings parts of her latest album in Old English? Of the Dorset variety, in particular? You might call it lit-rock, but not in the wordy fashion popularised by acts like The Decemberists or Okkervil River. Based on her own epic book-poem Orlam, she’s created a mythology that’s part folk, part Otherworld, and all PJ Harvey. And live, it translated magnificently.

Whilst not upbeat, this was an ethereal, mystical, and spiritual presentation for PJ, and she’d dressed to impress in a flowing priestess gown, her performative dance moves evoking some introspective, witchy theatre.

Only nine tracks were played from the album, in comparison to the full record plus ‘hits’ that had been played overseas till now. A full half hour less of music, one wondered if she wasn’t paid up for the complete show.

But it mattered little with the Goddess in the house, and we got the point even if the album portion did seem to end prematurely.

PJ spent the next hour exploring the far corners of her discography in a style not unlike Taylor Swift’s Eras format, largely one album at a time. First was Let England Shake, PJ taking a break from the stage as her band (led by John Parish) stepped forward to sing The Colour of the Earth together.

Returning to the stage, The Glorious Land and The Words That Maketh Murder were highlights, but it was 50ft Queenie and Man-Size, dating back to 1993’s Rid of Me, that really had the crowd up and about. A riot grrrl original still ahead of her time, the rawness and the rock really lit up Kings Park’s misty surrounds.

Dialling things back for one song each from Is This Desire?, Uh Huh Her, and White Chalk, the remaining standouts were all lifted from 1995’s To Bring You My Love, and they straddled either side of the encore as if to illustrate PJ’s own confidence in that record.

If the title track was met with the most rapturous reception of the night closing the main set, Down By the Water and C’mon Billy were no less impressive, and the closest we got to crowd singalongs all night.

Another highly original tour on the back of yet another fiercely unique album, 33 years in, and PJ Harvey is still yet to put a foot wrong. Challenging she may be, but for fans, she’s the gift that keeps giving.

HARVEY RAE

Photos by Duncan Barnes