Some artists play concerts. Others conjure worlds. PJ Harvey, enigmatic and endlessly innovative, belongs firmly in the latter camp. On March 13, 2025, against the dusky silhouette of the Sydney Opera House, she delivered not merely a performance but a séance of sound, storytelling, and spellbinding theatrics. It was her first Australian tour in eight years, and if absence makes the heart grow fonder, her return proved why distance is no match for devotion.
Accompanied by longtime collaborators John Parish, James Johnston, Jean-Marc Butty, and Giovanni Ferrario, Harvey crafted an immersive experience that felt less like a retrospective and more like a reawakening. The setlist was anchored by 2023’s I Inside the Old Year Dying, an album steeped in Dorset folklore and spectral reveries. A pastoral dreamscape enveloped the stage - twisted branches reaching skyward, an atmosphere thick with the hum of unseen creatures. It felt less like a mere concert venue and more like an ancient glade where songs, like spells, were whispered between the leaves. Even before a note was played, it was as if the audience had wandered into a waking dream, each breath laced with the scent of nostalgia and possibility.
Clad in a flowing priestess-like gown, Harvey emerged as the enigmatic narrator of this twilight world, opening with “Prayer at the Gate.” Her voice - delicate, keening, and full of a sorrow as old as the land itself - drifted over the Forecourt not unlike mist rolling in from the sea. The performance was an incantation, a beckoning, an invocation of things both lost and lingering.
“Seem an I” saw her transition from solemn incantation to a kinetic display of movement, her spectral presence dissolving into the rhythms of the song. The forest of her imagination had taken root in Sydney, and the audience, spellbound, surrendered willingly to its tangled branches.
What followed was a set that traced the trajectory of Harvey’s artistic metamorphosis, each song a breadcrumb leading deeper into her world. The folk-inflected hush of her recent work dominated the first half, casting a hypnotic spell, but it was punctuated by the urgent pulse of the past. “50ft Queenie” arrived with the brash confidence of a time traveler, its jagged energy splitting the night like lightning. It was a reminder that Harvey is an artist of duality -both ethereal oracle and riotous punk priestess. If anyone had come longing for the visceral rage of Rid of Me, they were not left wanting. It was as if time folded in on itself, the old and the new coexisting in an exhilarating embrace.
A rare duet with John Parish on “Black Hearted Love” rekindled the alchemical magic of their longstanding partnership, their voices curling around each other like twin flames, illuminating the stage with an intimacy that felt almost voyeuristic to witness. The yearning strains of “The Desperate Kingdom of Love” stilled the crowd into reverent silence, Harvey’s voice carrying the weight of every love lost and found in the echoes of time. Each note seemed to reverberate through the very bones of the Opera House, as if the structure itself had become a vessel for longing.
The latter half of the performance expanded into a more theatrical format, reinforcing that Harvey’s artistry is as much about presence as it is about sound. A wooden desk was positioned at center stage, and during “The Garden”, she sat with the posture of a poet deep in composition, as if the very act of creation was unfolding before our eyes. It was a tableau - Harvey, the scribe of forgotten myths, reconstructing them before us in real-time. The ethereal threads of “The Words That Maketh Murder” wove seamlessly into the folktale fantasia of “The Glorious Land,” where bugle calls and echoes of a war long past reverberated through the Sydney night. The ghosts of history and the present intertwined, merging into a single, haunting refrain.
Harvey’s ability to shapeshift extends beyond genre - it is a movement, a philosophy, an understanding that music should never be static. Culminating with “Down by the Water”, she reached back into her gothic blues roots, the song’s haunting refrain - Little fish, big fish, swimming in the water - lulling the audience into a trance, as if we too were being carried away by the tide of memory. It was both a baptism and a benediction, a final plunge into the depths of her artistry.
There were no grand speeches, no indulgent crowd-pleasing antics. Harvey simply let the music do the speaking. When she did offer words, they were simple: a whispered thank you, a hand to her heart. And with that, she was gone - an artist forever in motion, forever leaving us wanting more.
PJ Harvey does not just perform; she inhabits, she transforms, she transcends. On this night, Sydney was not merely an audience. We were participants in a ritual - one that, long after the last note had faded, would continue to echo in the chambers of our minds, like the last ripples of a stone cast into dark, endless water.
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Words by AW.
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