You wouldn’t have bet against PJ Harvey winning the Mercury for a second time after seeing the show that brings her extraordinary piece of work Let England Shake to life.
Standing to one side of the stage in a long, black Victorian dress, her hair crowned with a hat of oily-black plumage, the singer looked like some sort of mythical crow-queen. Strumming an autoharp cradled in her arms like a baby, she began with the album’s title track. “The West’s asleep. Let England shake/ Weighted down with silent dead,” she sang in a high, skittish voice that darted across the