With the recent release of Harvey’s tenth long player I Inside the Old Year Dying, her first since 2016’s Grammy-nominated The Hope Six Demolition Project, the Dorset-born singer chose Glasgow’s Barrowlands to play her first full UK show since 2017.
The leaves blowing outside the venue seemed the perfect setting for this autumnal set steeped in strange folklore and verse from her recent poetry collection Orlam which she read from at last year’s Edinburgh Book Festival.
The poems translate well into emotive stark songs which concern a year in a young girl’s life through the seasons using the Dorset dialect and ancient words. During this story out of time, the listener and audience are taken into a strange and dreamy space.
The album much like the first half of her live show is like a suite of songs bringing something fresh to both her performance and the vinyl experience almost like a concept album without the dreaded connection to prog rock.
The second set includes classics and fan favourites with Harvey playing Man-Size while strumming her Gibson Firebird, a guitar now as synonymous with Harvey as much as Brian Jones.
Tender ballads such as Angeline are a good fit for the set, as was the closing encore of White Chalk, her emotive harmonica playing at the end of the night was a moment to savour.
