It’s one of many glimmering, humorous, anthemic moments on 4-Track Demos in which Harvey sets herself up as some sort of regal indie-rock guru, an experimentalist extraordinaire. “ Even Aphrodite, she got nothing on me,” she insists, her dark tone daring you to disagree. “ Robert De Niro, sit on my face,” before introducing a manic keyboard accompaniment for extra drama. On the next track, Reeling, Harvey hollers.

So intimate is Harvey with her tape machine that her movement – the sweat on her fingers fuzzing off her guitar strings, her groans and heaving sighs, every sneaky throat-clearing – is beautifully captured. On Legs, before Harvey howls in a trembling voice that approaches flamenco-style Spanish folk, she can be heard coughing off-mic. Apart from Reeling, the opening few songs were all featured on Rid of Me. She musically manifests elements of the primitive female brain – a wolfish, fanged mother protecting her kin – and the lustful, insatiable Aphrodite unashamedly hungering for sexual healing, since love seems so flawed and impossible.Ĥ-Track Demos features 14 songs, but listeners who heard Harvey’s albums in chronological order were aware that eight of those raw, unpolished recordings were later gussied up for her second album Rid of Me, released a few months earlier by Island Records.Īll 14 songs were recorded towards the end of 1991 and into 1992, not long before the release of Dry. She urges you to “ rub it better, until it bleeds,” then hollers and howls at the man who’s left her pregnant and alone.

Her voice is more than a song, it’s a hiccupping, percussive, unbridled instrument. Harvey was listening to records, reading profusely, deeply engaged in the act of language as a rebellion and an act of love. The album was recorded directly to a Yamaha MT 2X 4-track recorder in a flat above a Dorset restaurant. She’d defer it again to write 1993’s Rid of Me, during which these demos emerged. She was an art school student, her sculpture degree deferred to fulfil a record deal she’d signed for 1992’s Dry. She was untamed, wild in a way that felt nerve-tingling: sexual, sensual, violent and demure without signposting which Harvey was about to emerge in the following moments.

Ibanez guitar 1993