(Credits: Far Out / Seamus Murphy / Galway FIlm)
Wed 24 September 2025 21:30, UK
There are certain artists who are impossible to ignore, no matter what. They loom so large that their impact touches seemingly every musician ever since, even one’s worlds away from their music. Even ones as singular as PJ Harvey.
PJ Harvey’s musical world often feels entirely her own. She’s a reference that many people use for their music, but her own aural landscape often feels reference-less, pulling instead from literature, history and folklore rather than from other artists. It’s also a musical world that changes a lot. How can there be references when in one moment, she is a punk, but in the next, she’s a wistful and weird folk singer? Surely no inspiration could keep up.
Even if they could, no one would ever think that inspiration would be Elvis Presley.
PJ and Presley, is there even a singular tie between the two? It’s tough to think of even one thing that really bridges the gap between these two disparate worlds. Presley was ‘The King’. He dominated the radio and packed crowds with screaming girls passing out over his shaking hips. He was the leader of rock and roll as he took the sound of blues and made it more vanilla, adapting it for the radio to allow it to break into the mainstream.
Meanwhile, Harvey couldn’t care less about that. When writing a song like ‘Let England Shake’, confronting her country’s violent past and developing it into an entire album all about injustice and warfare, she’s clearly not thinking about hit-making, chart domination, radio play or screaming crowds. When writing a song like ‘Rid of Me’ with its swelling and shrinking take on seduction, she’s not thinking about pleasing the masses.
But, as I said before, there are some artists who are impossible to escape, and Elvis is one of them.
“I was fascinated with Elvis as a child. There are so many layers there,” she said, considering his legacy by stating to The New Yorker, “I think his voice is otherworldly. It has a soulfulness that I find very, very moving. And his beauty, his exquisite beauty. That voice, that beauty, it feels like such a gift to the world.”
She’s not alone in any of this. So many artists have had the same experience of growing up on Elvis, or for the 1960s icons, having a sort of awakening moment watching his career unravel. For so many, Presley’s ability to entertain the masses with such charm, power and broad appeal remains endlessly inspirational, even just as a reminder of how dizzying the heights of fame can get as he truly was the ruler of the music world. For Harvey, it’s the allure of the olden days to a degree, as she added, “I remember also being fascinated with James Dean and older movies. I was always interested in that sort of magical distant past”.
So even while Presley’s music may not impact her own, his legacy as an entertainer, a music maker and an all round icon undeniably did as she put plainly, “He’ll always be a huge figure in my life”.
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