PJ Harvey to be offered chance to become 'official war song correspondent'

The avant-garde rock star PJ Harvey is being given the chance to travel to conflict zones where the British army is fighting by the Imperial War Museum. The songs on Harvey's new album, Let England Shake, reflect her strong emotional response to living through a period of war in the Middle East and to other people's memories of previous campaigns. The 41-year-old singer from Dorset composed her album by imagining she had already been given the job of "official war song correspondent".

Already tipped to win the Mercury prize, Let England Shake, includes the track The Words That Maketh Murder. The album's first single, its lyrics include a serviceman's recollection: "Soldiers fell like lumps of meat, blown and shot out beyond belief, arms and legs were in the trees". Another track, This Glorious Land, depicts a countryside ploughed up "by tanks and feet marching". "We are certainly interested in working with PJ Harvey," said Roger Tolson, the museum's head of collections. "It is something we can take forward as we have never commissioned anybody in that capacity.


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"We have other kinds of works of art using sound, like the art of Susan Philipsz, who won the last Turner prize, but we have never sent a musician out to a conflict zone." Tolson said the museum wanted "a different perspective". "We want to find fresh pairs of eyes, although in this case it would be a fresh voice," he said. The initiative was prompted by an interview Harvey gave last week to Radio 4's Front Row. She told presenter John Wilson she would have gone out to write songs in the field of battle had she had been asked. "I would have relished that," she said. "I find myself more and more yearning to do work like that, even if there is no such official appointment, to just go out there anyway."

The suggestion was applauded by Jeremy Deller, who won the Turner prize in 2004 and whose sculpture 5 March 2007, made from the bombed wreck of a Baghdad car, provoked strong reactions at the war museum in London last September. "Why not have a response in music?" asked Deller. "It would be brilliant. It would be unexpected as well because it is usually men going out there. It would be a breath of fresh air."