I.

[T]his record travels through many different countries … moving through different times, different eras, different countries – a journey, not particularly rooted anywhere, although the root is the soundⁱ

Albin Zak, in his impressive overview of the art and craft of record production, The Poetics of Rock, sets out an ontology of the recording medium that draws explicitly on Susan Sontag’s classic polemic, ‘Against Interpretation’: ‘[a] record is, above all, a richly textured surface, which we apprehend only as a sensory, temporal and complete experience.’ⁱⁱ He goes on to encourage listeners and critics to pay attention to the totality of the sonic phenomena experienced in listening to a record, warning against the common critical fallacy of focusing on certain elements at the expense of others: ‘All of its parts must be present in order to grasp it. As soon as we section off some part of it – the lyrics, the chord changes – we are no longer dealing with the record’.ⁱⁱⁱ

Zak’s exhortation to focus on the form of the medium, and furthermore, to honour the multifaceted, integrated nature of recording is a welcome counter to certain prevalent trends in rock criticism. Music journalists, writing to deadlines and keen to keep the casual reader interested, rarely engage with the technical or formal elements of recorded music, in anything more than a loose, impressionistic fashion. Academic pop criticism has tended to follow either a socio-cultural approach, exemplified by Richard Middleton in Studying Popular Music, which precludes the study of craft altogether, or, if engaging with technique at all, have tended to extract and forensically analyse only one facet of a record; one thinks of Christopher Ricks’ Dylan’s Visions of Sin or Walter Everett’s The Beatles as Musicians.

While the partisan subjectivity of music journalism can stand as an honest and engaging tribute to the power of recorded music, and close study of one element of a recording can be illuminating, Zak’s layered, integrated approach reflects the complexity of record-making and records: a ‘record’s power is in its sound, which represents multiple elements, processes, and voices … a complex network of phenomenal elements that we perceive as a whole’.^iv

There is much in Zak’s engagement with the ‘surface’ of records that I appreciate and will draw from in the course of this essay. I will make use of his taxonomy of record production – musical performance, which consists of what might be thought of as the traditional elements of music (compositional structure, melody, harmony, lyric, and vocal and instrumental performance); timbre, the character of a sound; echo, the reiteration of a sound during or after its initial utterance; ambience, the ‘acoustic context of a sound’,^v and texture, the ‘quality of composite sound images created by the interaction of diverse elements’^vi – in an analysis of PJ Harvey’s album, Let England Shake (2011), adding only sequence (the relationship of tracks to one another on a given record) and sampling, both of which he overlooks, although they could conceivably be placed within ‘musical performance’.

Lastly, I want to use Zak’s analytical framework to move beyond Sontag’s ‘loving description’ notion of good criticism. Sontag’s essay is a bracing antidote to simplistic, arrogant interpretation, but to take its command to ‘cut back content’^vii seriously would involve ignoring much of what this album is and certainly what its author intended it to be: a politically-charged record that demands scrutiny of the implications of its ideas. The album uses the many facets of phonography to engage with ideas beyond its borders: Englishness and patriotism, the experience of war by both soldier and civilian, nature, and historical cyclicality. In other words, the sonic spaces engineered by the album’s producers hint at depths beneath the record’s surface, implying ‘different times, different eras, different countries’ and a spectrum of hermeneutic possibilities.

II.

We all feel this terrible disappointment in what happens to our countries … this sense of connection and sense of push and pull with all the things you hate about it and love about it. They’re parts of you but then again you want to get it away from you at the same time.^viii

Harvey uses a range of phonographic tools to explore her ambivalent patriotism – her ‘sense of push and pull’ towards England – in two very different tracks, ‘The Last Living Rose’ and ‘England’. I will show, firstly, how expert handling of what Zak calls a track’s ‘narrative flow’^ix enables Harvey, in ‘The Last Living Rose’, to enact an assertive love-of-country being undermined by the recollection of the futility and historic cost of the same patriotic feeling. I will then demonstrate how Harvey uses sampling and a highly original vocal technique in ‘England’ to dramatise a similar conflict between her personal passionate love of England and recognition of its flawed history.

Zak develops the idea of the ‘narrative’ of a track’s production throughout The Poetics of Rock, in particular regarding the role of texture: ‘while … changes of texture often simply mirror song structure, they can also provide the track with a narrative layer that is more through-composed in conception, spanning the song’s usually sectional and strophic form with an overarching gesture’,^x and mixing: ‘The mix … involves placing the track’s elements into an overall arrangement and refining the sounds and dramatic progression of the musical narrative’.^xi Both aspects work in tandem in ‘The Last Living Rose’ to support the theme of the song, a veiled and ambiguous exploration of patriotism. Before looking at how the ideas are rendered phonographically, it’s worth looking closely at the implications of the lyrics, to establish what Harvey has in mind.

‘The Last Living Rose’ originates in the 19^th-century Irish song, ‘The Last Rose of Summer’, by John Stevenson and Thomas Moore. This song, often mistakenly believed to be traditional, outlines the image of a rose, left living when all around it has died. Although the key phrase in Harvey’s song (‘the Thames river, glistening like gold, hastily sold for nothing’) has been linked to criticism of Gordon Brown’s decision in 1999 to sell a large amount of Britain’s gold reserves and, more broadly, Britain’s post-imperial decline,^xii Harvey conflates the allusion to the older song with the rose as a symbol of English patriotism, associating ‘The Last Living Rose’ with one of the album’s broader themes: English youth, lost in wars, past and present. The song’s lyric, in short, denotes an affectionate pride for England, curtailed by post-imperial listlessness and recollection of its war dead.

The track’s phonographic strategy mirrors this idea in a number of ways. The song is in a modified AABA form, in which the second ‘A’ section is two lines shorter than the first and the third ‘A’ is an instrumental. The simple structure allows Harvey a natural format to build up an itemised tableaux of England through the first two verses over an increasingly diverse and energised instrumentation, shortening the second verse (‘Let me walk through the stinking alleys’) by two lines and adding drums to convey a sense of rising excitement, before dropping in intensity for the ‘B’ section (‘Let me watch night fall on the river…’). Her chord selections support the rise-and-fall trajectory of the lyric theme: the major tonality and constant movement inject an excitement and energy after the slow harmonic rhythm and minor key of the album’s opening track, ‘Let England Shake’. After revolving around Am, C and F every two beats for the first part of the song, the line ‘like gold, hastily sold for nothing’ is given special prominence by the first use of the dominant, G, and by the full bar given to both F on ‘hastily sold’ and G on ‘nothing’. The rising movement of F to G is then reversed on ‘Let me watch night fall’, supporting the later section’s sense of deflation.

Attending carefully to timbre, echo, ambience and texture, the producers construct a sense of development across the whole track: the opening is designed to provide the starkest possible textural contrast with the previous track, which is characterised by multiple overlapping elements (full kit, xylophone, autoharp, reverberant voices) throughout, dominating the mid-range of the frequency spectrum. The sense of clutter in ‘Let England Shake’ is met in the first seconds of ‘The Last Living Rose’ with a single sound event, a low-end, resonant, slightly distorted sequence of hits on the bass drum. It goes on to introduce the various elements one by one – kick drum, electric guitar and voice – each of which, in the first part of the song, are crisp and clearly defined.

The treatment of the track’s various vocal lines clearly demonstrates the careful phonographic strategy deployed by the producers to to reflect the theme of the song. Once again, in a deliberate reverse of the sound of the previous track, Harvey’s voice at the start of ‘The Last Living Rose’ is left undoubled and dry, consequently foregrounded in the mix. The vocal line is then bolstered by the addition of a mirroring vocal: it is doubled by its echo, which is delayed slightly and resonant enough to give the effect of another singer ‘joining in’. The use of ‘other voices’ throughout the album – whether they are overdubbed or doubled Harvey vocals or backing vocals provided by Mick Harvey and John Parish – is an important compositional technique, as Harvey has suggested: ‘I wanted the melodies to be … conducive to singing along with and I knew I wanted many voices, I wanted a feeling of community’.^xiii While this is the effect in the confident opening verses, the vocals in the ‘B’ section problematise the ‘community’ established in the first part of the song. As part of a broader thickening of the texture at ‘Let me watch night fall on the river’, low, male backing-vocal ‘aahs’ are heard in the background, making the lead vocal, once so authoritative, seem isolated and clouded by some nebulous, ‘other’ presence, perhaps suggestive of the dead young men which dominate the album.

The cumulative effect of the various elements of the track – the song itself, the vocal and instrumental performances, the treatment of echo and ambience, and the relationship between the elements in the overall texture – is a narrative representing a personal conflict of love and regret, of patriotism second-guessing itself; correspondingly, the clear, direct sound at the outset becomes, by the end of the track, blurry and diffuse.

The seventh song on Let England Shake, ‘England’, is on similar thematic territory, laying bare its conflicted feelings, at the lyrical level, more clearly: ‘I live and die through England, it leaves a sadness … the country that I love – England, you leave a taste, a bitter one’. The arc of the track appears, on first listen, to be the reverse of the earlier song’s self-doubt. At the level of tonality, for instance, the meandering, unanchored sequence through A minor, B minor, G, C and D in the early section of the song transitions at 1:46 through to a more stable sense of B minor, via the first use of its dominant, F#, closing on B minor, with a tonic B in the melody on the final syllable. In the lyrics, the battle between love and shame for one’s country appears to be won by love, closing with the defiant ‘To you, England, I cling undaunted, never failing, love for you, England’. And finally, the thin, trebly timbre at the beginning dramatically deepens during the transition section, bringing in an insistent bass rhythm, thickening the mid-range with a second vocal line on ‘people, they stagnate…’.

Any sense of emotional resolution is undercut, however, by the striking use of a sample of a performance of ‘Kassem Miro’, a traditional Kurdish love song, performed by Said El Kurdi, and recorded by a British recording company in Baghdad in 1932, in the final year of the British Mandate of Mesopotamia.^xiv It is heard almost from the very opening, the stringed instrument (most likely a qunan) heard first, followed by the vocal, behind Harvey’s, at 0:15. Different parts of the original then weave in and out, alternately clashing with and complementing Harvey’s voice and guitar part, before being heard, coda-like, in isolation at the very end. In teasing out the possible connotations of such a striking instance of sampling, it’s worth considering it in the light of Mark Katz’s comparison of sampling with the use of quotation in the notated composition tradition (Puccini’s use of the ‘Star-Spangled Banner’ in Madame Butterfly, Berg quoting Bach’s ‘Es ist genug’ at the end of his Violin Concerto, and so on): ‘Digital sampling offers the possibility of what I would call performative quotation: quotation that recreates all the details of timbre and timing that evoke and identify a unique sound event … traditional musical quotations typically cite works; samples cite performances’.^xv

It is sampling’s capacity to ‘evoke … a unique sound event’, to ‘quote … the sonic aura’ of a record (‘the reverberation that imparts a sense of space’^xvi), that gives ‘England’ its uncanny sense of a connection between two times and places, not merely a link between abstract musical works but two specific, time- and place-bound performances. Harvey has said that she was attracted simply to ‘the emotion’ in the Kurdish folk song: ‘there are these two love songs, hers is Kurdish, and mine is English and they cross in the middle’^xvii but whether deliberate or not, the manner in which they ‘cross in the middle’ implies much more than simply an emotional or musical affinity. Harvey highlights a connection between her record, written in the shadow of the Iraq War and intended to address it, and the recording of traditional Kurdish music during the previous British occupation of Baghdad, a colonial enterprise which saw the British seize ancestral land from the Kurds and become the first power to use chemical weapons against a minority. Harvey’s vocal performance accompanies El Kurdi’s, appearing to emerge in and out of it, implying the intimacy of a duet; the haunting quality of the song is due to the way the sample evokes various tragic ironies of the war: a reminder of Britain’s prior involvement and a suggestion of the deep – yet violently conflicted – bond between the coloniser and the colonised.

III.

You know how much your heart can break after watching a documentary about somebody else’s misfortune, a soldier who has been in these terrible situations, or a man who has lost his wife – blown up by a suicide bomber, and you feel.^xviii

In describing the role of timbre in recording, Zak suggests a two-sided categorisation: the physical and the rhetorical. Producers can address sound for sound’s sake, seeking to achieve a particular sonic character for no reason except acoustic instinct. However, sounds, perhaps especially in a recording context, often bring with them ‘conventional associations … which allow them to stand as symbols suggesting dialogues and resonances beyond the boundaries of the track’.^xix He is thinking especially of the use of timbre to trigger associations of genre – Spectoresque glockenspiel in Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born to Run’ – and indeed of the subversive effect juxtaposing generic timbres can achieve, as Michael Jackson demonstrated in his integration of Eddie van Halen’s conventionally ‘white’ heavy rock guitar sound (as well as a rap section) within an R&B context, in ‘Black or White’ from Dangerous (1991).^xx

I want to look at the way Harvey uses sonic and genre association as a specific strategy for handling the theme of the experience of war in two tracks from Let England Shake: ‘The Words that Maketh Murder’ and ‘All and Everyone’. In the first instance, Harvey conjures an association with a popular genre to construct a grotesque irony in the representation of a battlefield, and in the second, aural associations are invoked to imply an image – a funeral procession – which would be too blunt to state directly.

Harvey, in interview, has spoken of being wary of her status as observer, not participant, of some of the experiences the album covers, and that she was concerned to find a place she was ‘qualified to speak from’, a specifically ‘human, emotional point of view’.^xxi Track 4 of the album, ‘The Words that Maketh Murder’ is the moment when such concerns seem greatest: it is an explicit attempt to conjure up the experience of a soldier in battle, and, while her ‘human, emotional’ instinct might have informed some of the lyrical detail, it is her darkly ironic use of pop music convention which enables her to capture something of the horror of military conflict. She invokes a breezy pop hit from 1958, ‘Summertime Blues’ by Eddie Cochran, and fills it with graphic descriptions of the destruction of war; it is through the grotesque incongruity of such a juxtaposition that she finds an acceptable way to approach the subject.

A great number of reviewers of Let England Shake picked up on the line repeated eight times in the last section of the song, ‘What if I take my problem to the United Nations?’, a loose quotation from the third verse of ‘Summertime Blues’. On first listen, the reference seems simply jarring, a clunky critique of the notorious political background to the Iraq War. However, closer inspection of the track reveals it to be part of what is a thoroughgoing allusion to the classic rock ‘n’ roll song. Harvey mimics the handclaps of the original, in the conventional rockabilly rhythm (2 quavers on beat 2, 1 on beat 4, repeated in each bar), and furthermore, evokes the iconic acoustic-guitar riff of the original with a jangly riff of her own, which responds, call-and-response-style, to every line in the verses, as Cochran does.

The use of rock ‘n’ roll conventions means Harvey can summon dreadful images of war (inspired by Goya’s Disasters of War prints) – ‘arms and legs … in the trees’, ‘flies swarming everyone’ – in a context which does not diminish their power. Alexis Petridis, in his review of the album, noted that ‘Harvey clearly understands that the horror doesn’t really need embellishing’^xxii but in this song Harvey does not simply leave images of horror unembellished. She sets them in a musical context which uses connotations of a style closely associated with youthful, vigorous optimism to produce a black irony. And if one considers this irony along with other unsettling aspects of the track – the deployment of her unnervingly childlike vocal style, the archaism in the song’s title – the cumulative effect is one of an intricate grotesque, conveying that mode’s sense of ‘[a]stonishment … tinged with distaste’.^xxiii

Convention and association are used with equal subtlety, though to a quite different end, in the album’s longest track, ‘All and Everyone’. It is another song about the experience of war from a participant’s perspective but instead of conjuring a sense of its horror through the use of grotesque irony, ‘All and Everyone’ is more directly mournful, evoking the sense of a communal grief by filling the music with sonic allusions to funeral processions. Not only does this highlight the song as the heart of the album’s most basic emotional theme – the human cost of war – it allows Harvey to build a metaphor which might have seemed ham-fisted if it had been said directly: i.e. that the soldiers’ advance across the battlefield is akin to a funeral march.

The song follows ‘The Words that Maketh Murder’ in the album sequence and immediately a clear difference in tempo is perceived. The slow pulse in the song’s introduction lends a weary, beaten quality to the song’s texture, from which a slow repeating organ figure emerges within the first ten seconds. The series of organ chords are connected by single passing notes, evoking the improvised style one might expect to hear in introductory music for a church service. This organ part would have been played on the actual church organ at Eype Church in Dorset, where the bulk of the album was made. The pervasive bell-like resonance perceptible from early on completes the association with church. Furthermore, the steady, repeating quality of the musical structure (a repeating percussion pattern; a chord sequence which repeats Dmaj7, Am and Em three times; the organ melody) associates the song with ritualistic expressions of grief, a sort of wordless chanting.

The funereal atmosphere which is established at the outset of the song is consistently reasserted through the song, as it alternates between the verses, consisting of a quicker tempo as well as an increasingly prominent use of electric guitars and drums, and the choruses (‘As we advancing in the sun…’), which fall back into the very slow opening tempo and reprises the same percussion pattern and organ part of the introduction. Lastly, the use of trombone and a particularly resonant, ‘belly’^xxiv saxophone sound in these sections, as well as the long, fading outro, does not damage the funeral association but hints at an atmosphere close to that of a New Orleans jazz funeral; it also links the album back to a likely inspiration, the 1969 anti-war English folk album, Shirley and Dolly Collins’ Anthems in Eden,^xxv which prominently features traditional brass instruments like the cornett and sackbut. In this way, Harvey’s compositional style can be seen working consciously to make multilayered links with the past, not to a specific time or era but to several simultaneously. The resulting effect is one of a panoramic sense of history, a key theme of the album, explored in depth in the following section.

IV.

the cycle of conflict is ongoing, always will be, always has been, and long after we’re come and gone, it’s just going to continue … I wanted to look at history repeating itself … and the land, the way it keeps going after we’re buried in it.^xxvi

Much has already been said here about some of the album’s many and varied precursors, and although the relationships between Harvey’s compositions and their sources vary a great deal in type – the adaptation of a Russian folk song in ‘The Glorious Land’, the fusing of a 19th-century popular song about death with the emblematic resonance of the rose in ‘The Last Living Rose’, or the different forms of quotation in ‘England’ and ‘The Words that Maketh Murder’ – the conscious adaptation of historic sources is a device common to virtually every song on the album. In this section, I’d like to suggest that this enthusiastic utilisation of musical sources is part of an effort on Harvey’s part to express a particular philosophical notion of history. While a record may primarily be considered a ‘richly textured surface’, as Zak advocates, I believe that Let England Shake is an instance of a record which accumulates resonances from history and embodies a particular attitude to the historic concerns it raises, one that stands in opposition to a Hegelian, linear philosophy of history, and aligns itself with a basically cyclical, non-progressive attitude. Furthermore, understanding this crucial element of the work’s philosophical underpinnings can help explain other aspects of it: the album’s curious lack of explicit anger and overwhelming sense of resignation, even when the victims of war are referred to directly.

On first glance, much of the album’s lyrical content appears to contradict this preoccupation with historical depth: songs such as ‘All and Everyone’ and ‘In the Dark Places’ strive to make the battle experience more immediate, more present, not obscured by history. However, as several reviewers pointed out, there is a pervasive sense of a wide historical perspective, most obviously due to its many explicit references to old conflicts, in particular the First World War and the Gallipoli campaign. And yet the sense of ‘ancient textures and mysteries’, as The Telegraph‘s Neil McCormick put it,^xxvii is not merely a question of the album’s subject matter: the constant references to older musical forms, such as the use of sampling and the allusion to the rock ‘n’ roll idiom in ‘The Words that Maketh Murder’, as well as the re-working of some very old Russian folk lyrics in ‘The Glorious Land’ and ‘Bitter Branches’, imbue the album with an embedded sense of excavation, of multiple historic moments reflecting each other as well as the present. Certain lyrics seem to refer directly to notions of historic recurrence – of the basic facts of life remaining unchanged in spite of destructive human behaviour – most clearly in lines such as ‘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’ from ‘In the Dark Places’.

Aside from constantly referencing the past – reworking of old song forms, sampling and quoting pop music history – the most important musical technique Harvey uses to reflect notions of historical cycles, and it is one that runs throughout the album, is the use of repetitive cyclical harmonic patterns. Again and again, most obviously in songs like ‘All and Everyone’, ‘The Glorious Land’ and especially ‘On Battleship Hill’, the song Harvey herself mentions as the album’s key to its exploration of history and nature,^xxviii Harvey shows a predisposition towards chord sequences which emphasise cyclical repetition to a much greater degree than would be expected even in the context of the typically repetitive music common to the pop tradition. Several songs, such as ‘Let England Shake’ and ‘The Colour of the Earth’, end with instrumental sections which simply repeat sequences of three or four chords, with hardly any embellishment. Unlike repetition in say, the blues, in which a one-bar riff might be looped within a 12- or 16-bar pattern, or repeated motifs in a Romantic-era symphony, where a single melodic cell is repeated in continually shifting musical contexts, the harmonic cycles which populate Let England Shake are starker and more pointedly cyclical. They typically comprise of four-bar phrases that move from a minor tonality, through a series of major chords which fall back to the minor, over and over: A – G – F# – Em in ‘The Words that Maketh Murder’, C – F – C – Am in the saxophone solo in ‘The Last Living Rose’, which in similar fashion exactly repeats a series of six notes, with no embellishment, G – C – F – Dm in ‘On Battleship Hill’, played a full eight times before the first verse begins.

In ‘On Battleship Hill’, the opening section gives way quite abruptly, at 0:59, to a new harmony and textural quality. The percussion drops out entirely, and for the first verse, all that is heard is an acoustic guitar, playing an anxious insistent pattern on single strings, Harvey’s very high vocal line, with heavy reverb, and distant ambience reflecting the harmonic pattern. The texture of the opening – a percussion part emphasising the cymbals and hi-hat, and a muted electric guitar – then swiftly return following the end of that verse. The return to the texture of the repetitive instrumental introduction highlights the first verse as something of a ‘moment apart’, an opening-up of a new musical vista, so to speak, from the main body of the song, brought back to firmer ground in verse 2. The dramatic suspension of a strong beat emphasises the new texture, and the highly reverberant vocal timbre and indeterminate harmonic ambience of which it consists hint at a new acoustic space. The creation of unnatural ambient spaces is a crucial part of the album’s overall atmosphere, and, as explored in more detail in the last section, is a key to understanding the album’s fundamental philosophical outlook.

V.

[T]he place I did feel qualified to speak from was a very simple, human, emotional point of view, because we are all human. We all feel these things, or you can feel how it would have been for somebody in that situation.^xxix

In the first part of this essay I stressed, following Zak, the importance of considering records in their totality, as ‘complex networks’ of sonic phenomena, where individual elements – lyrics, performance, instrumentation, and so on – hold their full significance only in relation to the other parts of the form. A faithful analysis would hold up for inspection every part of a work simultaneously, like the suspended objects in a hanging mobile. In my attempt to elucidate some of the key themes in Let England Shake – patriotism, the war experience, history – I have tried to refer to all the salient features of the relevant tracks, not only the musical or lyrical content, but details of the production style as well. As a final demonstration of the type of phonomusicology^xxx I have been concerned with exploring, I wish to examine a song which has not been mentioned yet, and the only one to address the subject of civilian victims of war, ‘Written on the Forehead’.

In keeping with the album’s retrospection – its strategy of revisiting old forms – ‘Written on the Forehead’ reworks, and heavily samples, the classic reggae recording, ‘Blood and Fire’, by Winston ‘Niney’ Holness (1970), deriving from the older record’s curious combination of apocalyptic imagery and energised, almost euphoric musical atmosphere a sense of the chaos and devastation of a war zone. ‘Blood and Fire’ celebrates the apocalypse as a judgment day, of final reunion with God; Harvey detracts the religious sentiment but leaves the elevatory quality. Inserting images of human suffering drawn from war correspondent Anthony Shadid’s book, ‘Night Draws Near: Iraq’s People in the Shadow of America’s War’ into such a musical context, she achieves a sense of unreality and horror.

Harvey leaves the harmonic structure of the original – the oscillation between D and G – intact at the start of the song, but the upbeat quality this preserves is subtly altered by the large amount of ambience placed on the guitars, which is so great the initial sound event (i.e. the attack of each guitar chord) is completely obscured, leaving only resonance and echo as the audible aspects of the guitar parts. Ambience, as Zak explains, is the sense of the space a sound is heard in: by eliminating the initial sound and leaving only resonance, the production suggests an entirely artificial space – an acoustic that could not naturally occur – and the heavy tremolo effect that is placed on Harvey’s vocal, making it unnatural and obscured, completes the track’s deep sense of unreality.

As the song progresses through its ‘narrative flow’, it opens up, introducing lower frequencies, crisper percussion and moving into new harmonic areas (particularly at ‘Date palms and orange trees’, and the final repeated chorus), it is clear how Harvey has decided to treat these surrealistic images of civilian devastation: using a similar grotesque irony to ‘The Words that Maketh Murder’, the musical structure enacts a sense of rising euphoria to accompany images of terrible destruction. It’s worth reflecting again on sampling’s capacity to bring two times and places together in a radical juxtaposition. Just as the use of ‘Kassem Miro’ in ‘England’ brings a recording made in Baghdad over seventy years before Let England Shake into its orbit, as it were, the use of Holness’ reggae record, not simply as quotation but as a completely cut-and-pasted phonographic fragment, seems to stress the distance, in time as well in geography, between the two performances. The listener is, perhaps only subconsciously, aware of a ‘third space’: the space in between the records. This relates the track back to the album’s broader theme of deep historic time but perhaps there is also something troubling about the sense of unreality that the production style generates in ‘Written on the Forehead’. The upshot of the surrealistic effect is that, having established in prior tracks an attitude of philosophical resignation to the inevitability of human conflict, Harvey then expresses, in the one song on the album concerning civilian victims of British military activity, only a detached sense of sympathy, no anger, simply bewilderment and horror at the barely believable scenes of suffering.

As a final thought on the interpretation of this album, I’d like to suggest that only through careful examination of all the elements of the ‘surface’ of the record, taken together, can a listener place herself in a position to comment on its essential theme. Through establishing the record’s various salient features – its use of irony, historic and musical allusions, ambience and harmonic structure – a deep, weary resignation emerges, an attitude that may be a sincere reading of history but one that the civilian victim of war might well judge as complacent. This may be where analysis gives way to opinion, but nevertheless, it has only been through a properly multifaceted engagement with the record that the essential questions this album raises have been established.