WHEN PJ Harvey takes to the stage at Glasgow's Royal Concert Hall tonight, the audience will encounter one of the most eloquent protest singers that this country has produced since the 1960s – but they won't be hearing what we usually think of as "protest songs".

WHEN PJ Harvey takes to the stage at Glasgow’s Royal Concert Hall tonight, the audience will encounter one of the most eloquent protest singers that this country has produced since the 1960s -- but they won’t be hearing what we usually think of as “protest songs”.

That term is irretrievably locked in a cliché version of the 1960s, along with Afghan coats, badly strummed guitars and love beads, and it seems unlikely it will ever be rescued. Yet protest is at least part of what Harvey is doing, especially in her most recent album, Let England Shake. And now, after a decade of unjust wars (overtly in Iraq and Afghanistan, covertly in other regions where our Government actively supports policies that confirm Gandhi’s famous dictum, “poverty is violence”), a rich and complex voice is emerging, a voice with the necessary lyrical and artistic intelligence to articulate our disgust with those who prosecute those wars.

What we need now, urgently, is exactly that level of articulation. Because thought must precede action, we need to find the appropriate language to express not just our rage but our sense of justice and our real values, in order to rise above the blind impulse to lash out. For, as understandable as recent events on the streets of London may be (and it is a lie when politicians pretend the riots were anything other than an expression of justified rage at the crimes they and their masters have perpetrated), disorganised action -- violence -- plays into the hands of an enemy keen to represent those they have defrauded as thuggish and avaricious.

I don’t know if a song can change the world, but we do need protest -- so long as it is a protest for our times, not a harking back to some lost era of peace and love.

Anyone who has watched footage of the 1969 Woodstock festival remembers Country Joe And The Fish launching into their trademark anti-war song, Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die Rag, with the audience singing along like a band of unkempt boy scouts (And it’s one, two, three, What are we fighting for? Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn, Next stop is Vietnam ...)

With the benefit of hindsight we can see that by 1969, with Nixon in the White House and Vietnam on television every night, the days of the traditional protest singer were already numbered. Musically unsophisticated (a man -- or Joan Baez -- strumming a guitar, or a better-than-average jug band knocking out an old blues or rag), the 1960s protest song had begun to seem formulaic, a way of preaching to the converted that had everyone feeling a little warmer inside, but didn’t make a blind bit of difference at the end of the day, when the tents were stowed in the camper van and the guy who’d taken the bad acid was talked down from the lightshow rig.

By then, Dylan had abandoned the protest classics that made him famous. Baez had started to sound just a little too whiny and, after Barry McGuire hit the charts in 1965 with PF Sloan’s glib, near-parodic anti-nuclear song, Eve Of Destruction, it was clear the music industry had jumped on the political bandwagon. “Protest” (like “folk”) was now the domain of Tin Pan Alley.

Yet something else happened at Woodstock that not only took the audience by surprise, but also pointed to a new way of expressing opposition to war. This protest was excoriating, grief-stricken and, had it not been so musically inventive, it would have been unbearable. It was also wordless.

At eight o’clock, on the morning of August 18, 1969 -- the last day of the festival, when most of the audience had picked themselves out of the mud and headed for home -- Jimi Hendrix ripped a raw and genuinely tragic version of The Star Spangled Banner from his white Fender Stratocaster and a new kind of protest was born. All that was needed, now, was to marry this musical inventiveness with lyrics that didn’t reek of patchouli and self-congratulation.

It wasn’t that the folk-protest song had failed, it was just that the powers-that-be had assimilated it and were now in the process of turning our cris de coeur into commercial mush and feeding them back to us. Today, this is an all too familiar scenario: 1960s radicals made a huge mistake when they underestimated how effectively “The System” co-opts and denatures all opposition, taking songs that once moved demonstrators to sit down in front of armed men with dogs and recasting them as movie trailers and supermarket commercials, until what had seemed the makings of a genuine counterculture is now little more than a rummage bin of T-shirts, nostalgic DVDs and brightly-coloured accessories. If we learned anything from the 1960s, it was that we have to keep inventing the alternative culture anew.

But we also learned the virtue of recycling and, as Hendrix showed, the best cultural artefacts to recycle are those that the powers-that-be hold so dear: homeland, the idea of order, the flag, the hymnal, tradition. Not all radical change is subversion; sometimes it’s a matter of salvage. To overthrow corruption, we must shake the walls, but also reclaim, recollect and redefine. The proverbial System is built from fabric that is dear to us, but in a degraded form; those protest singers who recognised that were also the most effective and, after the incense cleared and the hippies turned into eco-businessmen, they passed down what they knew to another generation.

Some process of reclamation has, of course, been central to the work of all the best musicians. Dylan understood its importance from the beginning and, through five decades of work, has renewed his sound constantly by digging deeper into American musical history. Every time the mainstream seemed to have a handle on him, he turned up in a new costume, with new things to say and, though his work in direct protest has been sporadic, his ability to recreate himself for the times is exemplary. A less well-known example is Roy Harper -- surely England’s most under-appreciated musical genius -- who, in the late 1960s, released a series of brilliant, powerful records that mixed anger and tenderness in equal measure, as in the extraordinary Stormcock, where he fires off a battery of jibes against the powers-that-be, from smug Melody Maker music critics to those who use nostalgia for the supposed glories of the past to divert our attention from a shameful present:

 

And when you stood with your mottos on your knuckles,

And they were really pleased to see you there,

Well you could have taken grandad and his medals,

And played a different game in Grosvenor Square.

 

Yet alongside this countercultural blast, Harper carefully mined the imagery of England’s real history, and of its flora and fauna, a process that led to the creation of his alter ego, the Stormcock, or Mistle Thrush, “that bird who sings into the teeth of a December gale … The old Stormcock …The same old gale still blowing”. At the same time, Harper closed the album with a lushly orchestrated pastoral worthy of Vaughan Williams. The final result was not simply a diatribe against war and injustice, but a setting of that critique in a wider context, informed by real values: justice; tenderness; respect for, and wonder at, the natural world.

 

Harper was also a master of hard political analysis. In the savage and biting I Hate The White Man, he draws a clear link between violence and imperialism, a point rather overlooked by the counterculture, which took a level of comfort for granted, though it was a central tenet for radical political groups like the Weather Underground.

It wasn’t just the “masters of war” who were guilty, Harper suggested, it was whiteness itself: the privilege of whiteness, the power that maintains the lifestyle of the developed world at the cost of the majority of people on the planet.

Of course, the question of colour was always of central importance in war, especially in Vietnam: Creedence Clearwater may have pointed out that poor whites couldn’t evade the draft, but it was left to black singers like Marvin Gaye, on his 1971 album, What’s Going On, to ask why a disproportionately large number of young black men were dying in south-east Asia. He used the supposedly apolitical language of soul, reminding us all that the first great protest song of the pop era was probably Sam Cooke’s A Change Is Gonna Come. Still, it would be a while before anybody else spoke out against white privilege per se, and Harper showed real courage in the position he took on the subtler effects of imperialism.

Today, there are artists who continue to use traditional resources to great effect, rescuing the past from those who would use it to bolster a corrupt politics, sell T-shirts or send “our boys” marching off to war to protect the interests of the people who exploit them at home. Younger songwriters -- Conor Oberst, of Bright Eyes; John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats; Willy Vlautin of Richmond Fontaine -- have used “country” and traditional music in the last decade or so to oppose Washington’s disastrous foreign and domestic policies, with Bright Eyes’ Cassadaga -- released in 2007 -- being the high water mark in anti-war protest. This, for example, is from the almost unbearably poignant No One Would Riot for Less:

 

Little soldier, little insect, you know war it has no heart,

It will kill you in the sunshine or happily in the dark,

Where kindness is a card game or a bent-up cigarette,

In the trenches, in the hard rain, with a bullet and a bet.

 

Out of context, this lyric may sound not much different from a 1960s folk-protest song (there is even a sly reference to Dylan’s Hard Rain Is Gonna Fall). Coupled with an extraordinarily powerful guitar and string arrangement, however, it becomes both hugely original and traditional in the best possible sense. At the same time, Oberst’s opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is set alongside a profound secular-spiritual vision of the human condition that sidesteps any possible accusation of nihilism (the usual mainstream riposte to radical protest). Protest is expressed here, but so are real, hard-won values.

All the artists just mentioned are American, and until now we in the UK have lagged behind in our protests. In fact, listening to various Brit bands over recent years, it’s surprising how little they take on and -- with the exception of Radiohead, whose Hail To The Thief took a swipe at the Bush-Blair axis -- most have been more interested in money and fame than in politics. Yet PJ Harvey has always travelled her own road, combining outstanding musicianship with a poet’s sense of language, and drawing on poetic as well as musical traditions that can have her referring to Eddie Cochran one moment and Siegfried Sassoon, or Wilfred Owen, the next.

Indeed, some of the figures who move through the war zones of Let England Shake bring to mind the characters who populate Sassoon’s First World War poetry, like the “simple soldier boy” of Suicide In The Trenches, who “grinned at life in empty joy” at home but, carried off to the brutal and bewildering life of the front, “cowed and glum, He put a bullet through his brain”.

It’s a powerful reminder that anti-war protest didn’t begin with Blowing In The Wind. Harvey learns from a poet like Sassoon the use of natural imagery to contrast with the mechanical destruction of war, the use of simple, sometimes almost bare language against the sophistries and deliberate obfuscation of generals and press-liaison types. It allows her to echo, without directly quoting, not only his bitter attacks on the “smug-faced crowds with kindling eye/ Who cheer when soldier lads march by” before sneaking home to pray they will “never know/ The hell where youth and laughter go”, but also the sense of wonderment and the fellowship in life that Sassoon experiences, sometimes fleetingly, but always vividly, when he is “dazzled with blossom in the swaying wood”.

This, perhaps, is the key to the great protest song or poem: it opposes the violence and injustices done in our name, but also proposes alternative ways of being and of belonging, so that, even while crying out against its crimes, a superlative protest singer like Harvey can assert, her “undaunted, never-failing love” for the very England she wants to shake. History tells us the protest singer can play a meaningful part in effecting social change, yet if she is to achieve anything solid, she must not only knock down the walls of the old castle, but come armed with a blueprint, however tentative, for what she would set in its place, even while she accepts, as Harvey does in The Last Living Rose, that all she really has is a series of fleeting and tender moments on this earth:

 

Let me watch night fall on the river,

The moon rise up and turn to silver,

The sky move,

The ocean shimmer,

The hedge shake,

The last living rose quiver.