Polly Jean Harvey – 50Ft Queenie

Not content unless she's pushing herself out of her comfort zone, PJ Harvey is truly one of a kind. Nigel Williamson celebrates the majesty of Polly Jean

- By Nigel Williamson

If there could be an alternative kind of contemporary English female 'national treasure', two possible candidates come to mind as an antidote to the traditional order of the great and the good. One would be Kate Bush. The other would be Polly Jean Harvey.

The work of both bears the mark of otherness, a disregard for convention, a rejection of the safe and familiar and a determination to strike out on their own path without concession to the fickleness of fad and fashion. So whatever one thinks of the antiquated British honours system, it's satisfying that Bush has a CBE and Harvey an MBE for their services to music. That such singular artists can be honoured with an investiture at Buck House, when once it was only family entertainers such as Lulu and Cilla who were so feted, is significant progress.

From Harvey's 1992 debut album as an alt-rock firebrand to Orlam, the surrealistic novel written in poetic verse, which she published earlier this year, she has opted for the road less travelled.

Harvey's music has ranged from the raw, aggressive goth-blues-grunge of 1993's Rid Of Me to the piano ballads of 2007's White Chalk via the spooked sensuality of 1995's To Bring You My Love. Perhaps characteristically, her least favourite of her nine studio albums is her most commercially successful, 2000's Mercury Prize-winning, platinum-selling Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea. It was the closest she has come to mainstream pop songcraft with Radiohead's Thom Yorke adding guest vocals, but she felt that ultimately the edges were too sanded down and it didn't venture far enough out of her comfort zone.

This mess we're in