13. Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea - PJ Harvey
There is a stretch on the train line, between South Yarra and Richmond stations, that has my favourite view of Melbourne.
The train pulls out of South Yarra, freshly unburdened of the horde of Melbourne High students, banks slightly and approaches the river.
If you’re in the right spot — facing the front of the train, on the left of the carriage, shoulder to the wall, looking out the window — the view runs along the bank and around the bend as the murky landmark flows into the city proper.
The CBD stands alone, the suburbs mostly hidden except for the little Parisian pocket of South Yarra on the southern bank of the river.
If the time is right — early morning, Autumn — the sun glints off the glass towers, with the shine rapidly changing position as your train trundles along.
The foreground is green, Melbourne’s lush parks and indulgent sports grounds hopefully recovered from the brutality of our summer.
Beneath the iron bridge flows — sporadically — the Monash Freeway, the sclerotic artery many city workers rely on to do their makeup, bathe in AM outrage or check their phones.
It’s a perfectly framed image that you see for a few seconds before your carriage crosses the bridge and takes you through the tamely graffitied roofscape of Richmond’s former factories.
The train curls around the final bend and pulls into the inexcusably shoddy Richmond station, borne of the Age of Asbestos and Frugality and clearly not fit for purpose in a modern city.
It’s a postcard view, showing the city as fresh, shiny and safe.
Bustling, but sanitised.
Commercial, but personal.
It’s also, I came to learn, not the full story.
* * *
I’ve experienced this view countless times — school excursions, furtive trips into ‘The City’ with friends, my time working in Richmond and now the infrequent trips I take for meetings, training or socialisation.
Most times I’ve been wearing the armour of the modern commuter — headphones, mildly annoyed blank face — listening to, naturally, music.
One period I remember vividly was listening to PJ Harvey’s outstanding album, Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea.
If you want to hear a beautiful voice make it clear they’re fed up, but also trying to work out just what they’re doing, this is the one for you.
Layer in some sharply dismissive guitar lines and the storytelling and you have the aural backdrop for your attempts at navigating this odd world we’re still building for ourselves.
It’s vulnerable, punchy, raw, assertive, bold and vital.
The call to arms that opens the album feels like being punched by a velvet glove — that’s hiding brass knuckles.
The duet with Thom Yorke aches with regret, fear and hope.
Kamikaze positively grooves with knowing.
It fully deserves it’s reputation as a great album.
I’ve always heard it as PJ Harvey exploring the differences between the shiny front a city, or a people, will put on, and the grimy belly where the more interesting stuff is.
The aspects of life that isolate and dehumanise.
They’re not pretty:
The whores hustle and the hustlers whore
Too many people out of love
The whores hustle and the hustlers whore
This city’s ripped right to the core
But that doesn’t make the stories any less vital or relevant.
She doesn’t shy away from those topics the city council probably wouldn’t want us to know about — because shying away would be dishonest and this album is nothing if not honest.
Istarting really listening to this album at an interesting time (for me, anyway).
Midway through my degree, I thought that if I was heading towards a job in an office, I should probably get some office experience to supplement my years of work in fast food and video stores — remember video stores?
Which is how I found myself studying full-time, working 20 hours at my suburban Blockbuster Video and commuting into Richmond a few days a week.
I was learning about the things that really mattered — The Smiths songs, country music, how annoying office workers could be, the unspeakable glory that are the potato cakes at Richmond Station — with a team of fascinating, challenging people with oodles more knowledge than me in the areas I was interested in.
We’d work hard, tacking our way through the start-up phase of this electricity retailer, then head out to one of the many local bars and see how deep into the glass our entry-level income could get us.
Then the mental arithmetic of travel times and bus timetables before a rushed farewell, and a dash to the dilapidated station a half an hour’s walk (or 20 minutes jog) away.
I’d walk along these streets — from the seedier end if we ended farther afield, but mostly up Church Street if we’d stayed close to the office, past Dimmeys, over Lennox Street, around the lines out the front of The Corner Hotel, under the clanging railway bridge and on to Richmond Station — at varying times of night.
Those walks were enlightening, if not always entirely clear of an alcoholic fog.
Because — as PJ Harvey knows — cities are different at night.
The shine, the gleaming hope of daylight disappears into the Melbournian cliché of wet streets and shady angles — particularly in Richmond, at the time the seedier counterpart to the artifice of South Yarra.
Little people at the amusement park
City people in the dark
Speak to us, send us a sign
Just give us something to keep us trying
The drug trade — hidden in the sociable hours — was easily visible to anyone else familiar with Dandenong in the late 90s.
Speak to me of heroin and speed
Of genocide and suicide
Of syphilis and greed
Speak to me the language of love
The language of violence, the language of the heart
The smell of stale beer and eerily fresh urine was medievally strong.
Similarly, people with limited options save their travel for these times, better to avoid the interfering glances of their other citizens, I suppose.
The shops are shut, those frequented by the office workers anyway. After all, nobody’s really looking for a new scented soap at 10pm.
The litter really piles up too, but occasionally you’d see the street sweeper come through to try and hide the careless destruction of the masses.
On to the train, where carriages were typically empty, save for the occasional drunk trying to make friends (or enemies — this was before the PSOs).
I met a man
He told me straight
“You gotta leave
It’s getting late”
Too many cops
Too many guns
All trying to do something
No-one else has done
