PJ Harvey has returned with a video for her new single “The Wheel,” from The Hope Six Demolition Project, via Noisey. Directed by Seamus Murphy, the haunting clip largely features footage shot on Harvey’s journeys to Kosovo between 2011 and 2015, a video diary of sorts that captures the juxtaposition of life’s simple beauty and horrific struggles in the war-torn area.
The song’s lyrical exploration pulls you deeper into the video, walking the streets of the long-besieged region alongside celebrations and struggles, drunk with poignance as scene after scene unfolds depicting common hardships and evidence of destruction the Western world can hardly conceive of. Watch for one particular moment in which a man can be seen playing a clarinet as bugs scurry up the wall next to him, intercut between images of the heavy influences of pre-9/11 American culture: a large mural of Bill Clinton, a hotel adorned with a Statue of Liberty replica and more.
The call-and-response lyric about the disappearance of 28,000 children “lost upon a revolving wheel… of metal chairs” is haunting for its historical truth, anchored by an outro in which Harvey repeats “and watch them fade out” two dozen times. The number itself has a disturbing interpretive significance: the number of troops NATO anticipated deploying to Kosovo, as well as the number of street-working children in Kabul as determined by a survey in the late ’90s.
“When I’m writing a song I visualize the entire scene. I can see the colors, I can tell the time of day, I can sense the mood, I can see the light changing, the shadows moving, everything in that picture,” Harvey said in a press release. “Gathering information from secondary sources felt too far removed for what I was trying to write about. I wanted to smell the air, feel the soil and meet the people of the countries I was fascinated with.”
Murphy added, “The song ‘The Wheel’ has the journey to Kosovo at its center. Who is to say what else has influenced and informed its creation? The sight of a revolving fairground wheel in Fushe Kosove/Kosovo Polje near the capital Pristina is the concrete reference point for the title. … Was that sight alone the inspiration for the song? Without being told the stories of people who had suffered during the war, without visiting villages abandoned through ethnic cleansing and cycles of vengeance, without experiencing the different perceptions of people with shared histories, could the song have been written?
I made a return trip to Kosovo in December 2015, armed this time with the knowledge of how the project had developed. … The enormous refugee crisis in Europe had been news for months. I spent some time on the Greek and Macedonian borders, and in Serbia, before traveling into Kosovo. It was happening in and through territories associated with recent conflicts in Kosovo and the wider Balkans. The idea of cycles, wheels and repetition once again being all too apparent and necessary to make.”
The Hope Six Demolition Project arrives April 15 via Island Records.
