The day I photographed PJ Harvey

October 29, 2015

The day I photographed PJ Harvey

Polly Jean Harvey at home in 1991

LAST week I popped over to our sister paper the Wells Journal to have a rummage through boxes of my archived negatives files which have been recently released from storage.

As I was driving to the offices in Wells, I planned to sift through the boxes and rescue my negatives from amongst the other photographers who worked at the Western Gazette during the 90s. The likes of Ian Sumner, Kevin Allison, Clive Davies and Eugene Taglione to name but a few.

These guys were well known in the areas they coved. In my head I assumed this would take an hour maybe two. Oh boy, how wrong I was.

As I stepped through the storage room door I was faced with boxes upon boxes crammed with negatives.

Each box contained a small folder containing a roll of 36 exposure film cut up into strips of six.

On the cover of the folder was a reference number but unfortunately no list of the contents to accompany them. Luckily within the folder each strip had the initials of the photographer who took the pictures and very brief details.

This was going to take days not hours to sort through. Oh well, luckily I have a few days’ holiday that needs taking, and I know just how the time will be spent.

I did have a quick look at some of the folders and there are some real gems of pictures there.

I had forgotten that I covered camel racing at Stanchester School in 1991, with real camels!

I also found negatives from a news event that happened in 1994. I received a phone call from my editor Phil Pledger to say that there had been an escaped convict found in Corscombe.

Great, I thought! I’ll go straight across first thing in the morning. My editor informed me that he would be around to pick me up in ten minutes.

An excellent evening was had chasing around the Dorset countryside, photographing police activity and a sleepy village suddenly on the media map.

Obviously there was no Internet in those days, so papers, radio and TV were there en masse. There were a lot of us then!

But as a newspaper our job is to cover events as they unfold, and also to come up with a new line to interest our readers on publication day. So the following day I went back to the village with a reporter to interview witnesses and take more pictures, this time in daylight.

One lady invited us into her home and related her story of events as we sat in her garden drinking cups of tea. Sat alongside her was her daughter who I chatted to while the reporter took noted from her mum.

She informed that at the weekend she was going up to London to see about a recording contract. I wished her good luck and to be honest thought no more about it.

The next time I saw this lady was at one of her own concerts. She was Polly Harvey better known as Mercury award winner PJ Harvey.

I’ve seen this woman many times in concert and even got the chance to photograph her at Glastonbury. Who would have thought that the shy young woman I photographed wrapped around her mother would turn out to be one of best song writers and vocalists going?

There was only one frame from this shot but it is one of my all time favourite images. I’m a very happy man.