Buy this at…well, it’s complicated. Read below.
By a short head, I make Naked Cousin the best of the tracks. My theory about it is that it is another of Harvey’s songs in which she plays a relation of a figure from the Bible. In Missed, she sang as Mary, mother of Jesus and desperate to find out why her dead son’s body was missing from his tomb. In Naked Cousin, I think that Polly is singing as a cousin of Moses, and what’s more, she’s not a fan. The Moses link suggests itself most obviously through the line, He run from burning bushes…he runs from everything that upsets his masterplan. In this case, leading the Israelites from slavery in Egypt to find The Promised Land.
Polly is clearly unconvinced for reasons both familial - you can almost picture her telling people, “Moses will never pull this off, trust me, I’ve known him since he was a baby, he never sticks at anything”, though in the song she restricts herself to telling us that I hate his smell and/I hate his company but most of all/I hate that he looks just like me - and out of self preservation for what Moses’s uprising could mean for both the Israelites and herself, as a relation of his. It’s enough to have her wondering whether she will have the courage to join the Exodus, herself: He’s running naked through the trees/Scare the shit right out of me/Bought my ticket, take my ride/Take me to the sunny side.
Just like Missed, it’s a fascinating scenario, brilliantly brought to life by the whole trio.
Primed and Ticking and Claudine, the Inflatable One are more thematically straightforward. They are both, especially Primed and Ticking, aggressive love songs, heavy on sexual suggestion. With her squealing guitar and the dissonant brass - provided by Mike Smith and Dennis Rollins - the implication is that the sex will be utter carnage, and that Polly will absolutely tear her prospective lover to shreds. So certain does she sound about her place in the lover’s life and future that the shrieking chorus of I believe my days will end with you starts to take on an air of obsessive control rather than one of heartfelt devotion.
At least Prime and Ticking has a recognisable target for its lust/devotion; the protagonist of Claudine, the Inflatable One has to play out their sexual desire with a blow-up doll. Nevertheless, a good time is still promised for all: I’ll blow your mind…I’ll show you heaven…I’ll make sweet honey, I’ll treat you nice etc. I had briefly thought that Harvey was singing from the perspective of the doll itself, but I’ve come round to the orthodoxy that it’s sung from the perspective of Claudine’s owner, and that their need is just as ravenous as Polly’s was in Primed and Ticking: Want to get into your sack of skin. Furthermore, the Scream blue murder refrain in the playout ties into the notion that both songs have of using sex as a way to expel all negative emotions, energy and pain from oneself by giving yourself over utterly to another person. In body, soul, mind and heart in Primed and Ticking; in body only - at least as a start for practice - in Claudine, the Inflatable One.
The fourth track in the session was the only one that was going to be commercially available to people in 1993, namely the trio’s cover of Wang Dang Doodle, written by Willie Dixon, who had died in January 1992. This session version featured as a b-side on the Man-Size single, and Peel subsequently complained on air a couple of times that it wasn’t credited as having been recorded for his programme. I passed on it as I found it too irritatingly mannered. This has been a common complaint from me about her music from this period.
In considering the three songs included here, it suggests that the PJ Harvey trio would have streamlined the harder edged tone of Rid of Me into a funkier blues/rock sound that focussed on sex and humour, had they continued working together on another album. All three songs sound like they would have been perfect fits on an album made by Harvey, Ellis and Vaughan. They clearly had belief in the songs as Naked Cousin and Primed and Ticking were included in the trio’s live set over the summer of 1993, including on a Radio 1 concert, hosted by Peel, broadcast on Saturday 31 July 1993, starting at 7:30pm, just as the curtain was going up on the third night of my production of Guys and Dolls. But when the trio went their separate ways at the end of the year, the songs went into cold storage too. They wouldn’t have fitted on Harvey’s first solo album, To Bring You My Love, and although she started working with Ellis again from about 1998 onwards, the songs have never been recorded by her on any of her subsequent albums.
In the immediate term, the songs represented a last gasp of the early PJ Harvey. She would write and record many fine songs across the rest of the 1990s, but very few of them came at the listener with the same force and attack of these songs. Her work became more introspective, cinematic and warmer in tone. There was room for romance and love amidst the darker, serious material that she wrote through the rest of the decade, but no place for humour or wit. It would arguably take until 2000’s album, Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea for Harvey to rediscover a sense of brashness in tracks like Big Exit or This is Love, which is to all intents and purposes, Primed and Ticking’s younger, prettier sister.
Meanwhile, Primed and Ticking and Claudine, the Inflatable One remain locked away, unreleased and unknown outside of this Peel Session. They didn’t even get to join Naked Cousin either on the selection of session tracks which made up Island Records own The Peel Sessions 1991-2004 or the extensive 2022 release, B-Sides, Demos & Rarities, which has the studio version of Naked Cousin - recorded by Harvey with John Parish - which turned up on the soundtrack album of the 1996 film, The Crow: City of Angels.
Videos courtesy of stoner 7412 (NC) and Black Thyme Thames (P & T, CTIO)
All lyrics are copyright of Polly Jean Harvey.
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