[Video] PJ Harvey - The Wheel

Words: Ellie Ward

After announcing  her long-awaited ninth album - and follow-up to Mercury Prize-winning ‘Let England Shake’ - ‘The Hope Six Demolition Project’, released on April 15, a few weeks ago, PJ Harvey now shares the video to single cut, 'The Wheel'.

'The Wheel' is punctuated with the theme of war, and it is war photographer Seamus Murphy who directs the film above, which was shot in Kosovo, where Harvey visited Kosovo in 2011.

Watch the video and hear what Murphy has to say on it below:

"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. I can tell you its date — 4th August 2011 — from the piece of footage I made as we walked up the street to our parked car near the train station. It was a passing observation of a commonplace image, one of many that day. While Polly took notes I might have been more interested in something else happening across the street and not bothered to shoot or even have seen it. That day we were gathering material in a blind, optimistic endeavor; characteristic of the way we tend to work together. We had no idea if any of it would ever be seen, heard or would make sense. 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?"