We just kind of lost our way

PJ Harvey - 'We Float'/'This Wicked Tongue' (Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea - 2000)

By October 2000, I upgraded my paper round to a part-time job at a supermarket. This was over 20 years ago, working 15 hours a week, so my pay packet would come in at around £40-50 a week in my pocket. The following month I turned 17, that money would start to go to driving lessons and saving up for university. Of course, the closer I got to 18, the more of the money would begin to go on cinema visits, evenings and nights out. But a lot of it built up a CD collection, especially while I was still 16.

On one particular visit to the Our Price in Chatham, by now called VShop, in late October, I remember spending close to a whole week’s pay on three albums.¹ After hearing ‘Hewlett’s Daughter’ as the follow-up to ‘The Crystal Lake’ often on XFM and remembering good reviews in Q and NME for Grandaddy’s The Sophtware Slump was one. Based on inclusion in the 2000 Mercury Prize nominations list and references to Deserter’s Songs and The Soft Bulletin in reviews, the second sold me on The Great Eastern by The Delgados. The final album I picked, freshly released, was PJ Harvey’s Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea.

At the time, PJ Harvey wouldn’t agree with those saying this was her “New York album”. While the songs were written there, the cover features her in the city, and you have several references on ‘You Said Something’. She would maintain that the album was recorded back in South West England, and it isn’t rooted in a time and place²

Quote on this - Victoria Seagal

Despite this, Harvey moved to NYC in 1999, and it is a place that many people come to at a time in their life when they seek fame, fortune or fornication. Many come seeking one and end up lost, consuming another, chasing it rather than letting it wash over them.

‘We Float’ is a song that looks back on a relationship now it has ended but not in a bitter, resentful fashion. Instead, it is largely joyful and hopeful. It speaks of not getting too hung up on things out of our control and we should let some aspects of our lives wash over. While there is a path through life seeking success and love, we should make the most of what we have and realise that if we chase it, the hustle never stops. Eventually, we die and your soul floats away.

Harvey sings of Good Friday, of course, the start to a Christian holiday which ends with a resurrection - which if that’s what the relationship is going again does draw us to make the comparison to Kanye

Along with Harvey’s duet with Thom Yorke on ‘This Mess We’re In’ and ‘One Line’ the song purrs with sensuality and beauty. All of them carry a melody and the lush, cooed singing of the title in the chorus of ‘We Float’ is one of my favourite moments in all of PJ Harvey’s back catalogue and it sounds like pop music. OK, it is filtered through Patti Smith, Siouxsie Sioux and even Lou Reed but it is still pop music.

To float is your soul going up to heaven once you’re body dies. It’s going to happen to everyone one day eventually, so we should all make the most of the life we have.

Good Friday is a Christian holiday to remember the crucifixion of Jesus Christ before he came back on Easter.

This provides a note of optimism in the face of a sudden, unfair death – there’s hope of resurrection. They also have each other’s love. These lines are reminiscent of later ones by Kanye West

If we die in each other’s arms, still get laid in that afterlife
If we die in each other’s arms, still get laid

“It’s only pop according to PJ Harvey,” the singer said of Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea, “which is probably as un-pop as you can get by most people’s standards.” We Float bears that out: its melody is lovely, but its weightless, six-minute drift walks an odd, intoxicating line between blissed-out and sinister.

This Wicked Tongue

With her previous two albums taking a peek into some rather dark corners with some unsettling noises and sounds we see the dichotomy of what she recorded on Is This Desire? and To Bring You My Love and where she wanted to move away from it on the final track and the hidden track.

The flip side is the hidden track, ‘This Wicked Tongue’, which is a lot more like the scuzzy and violent music on those aforementioned records and ‘The Whores Hustle and the Hustlers Whore’ and ‘Kamikaze’ on the album proper. She even tells us, may times on the hidden track “And the noise is as much as I can bear”.

It says something about the quality of material on Stories From the City … that a song as good as This Wicked Tongue was relegated to hidden-track status. In fact, the earlier Peel Session version may be the definitive one. Tougher and noisier, it fits the lyric’s apocalyptic darkness: “Where’s the heart in the rubbish heap of man?”

Mercury Prize 2001

Mercury Prize 9/11

"It's been a very surreal day - this comes at a time when I'm feeling pretty stunned by everything," she said. "Obviously I'm absolutely shocked, this whole city is in shock. Myself and my band are involved in all that, we can see the Pentagon from our window. It's hard to take it in."

126/348 albums

1. As I was paid weekly, I has already picked up Radiohead’s Kid A at the start of the month.

2. As Stephen Deusner pointed out in a 2016 PJ Harvey special edition for Uncut, the album is more “the city” than “the sea” to the extent that many people cut the album’s title off at the comma.