Dark clouds seemed to gather over the Corn Exchange as Polly Harvey and John Parish began their British tour with a show that was a study in various shades of existential gloom. Picking up on a collaboration that goes back to their teenage years in Dorset, Harvey and Parish have recently released a new album, A Woman a Man Walked By.

Combining songs from this with numbers from their previous, 1996 album, Dance Hall at Louse Point, they conjured an atmosphere of stark, claustrophobic intensity that built gradually from the moment they took the stage. Harvey, the much decorated grande dame of British art-rock, was dressed in a skimpy black dress and clutched a small handbag. Parish wore a trilby, as did Giovanni Ferrario, the guitarist, and Eric Drew Feldman, the bass player, a band uniform from which only the drummer, Jean-Marc Butty, was exempt.

They opened with Black Hearted Love, a clanking, chugging, alternative rock song that provided the perfect setting for Harvey’s eerie wail. Parish switched to banjo for Sixteen, Fifteen, Fourteen and the mood turned darker as Harvey warbled a lyric about a game of hide and seek that takes a sinister turn: “The sun is leaving the scene/ It took a look and turned away.” Rope Bridge Crossing, the first of the older songs, was a slow, loping, discordant blues with Parish and Ferrario producing a harsh, dense mesh of sound from vintage electric guitars as backdrop to Harvey’s tense soprano.

Harvey sang well and everybody did their bit, but it looked like hard work, and began to sound like it after a while. The Soldier found Parish playing a miniature ukelele and Ferrario blowing a desultory refrain on a melodica as Harvey took a rather aimless path around the vaguest of melodies. Then came the mad woman routine, beginning with a hysterical rant on Taut and a sequence of visceral abuse on A Woman a Man Walked By/The Crow Knows Where All the Little Children Go, during which she yelled obscene, anatomically discomforting threats. After such high drama, Passionless, Pointless sounded every bit the despairing, drifting dirge that it was. For the finale, Pig Will Not, Harvey stated the title of the song over and over, punctuated with a yapping noise in time with the drums — literally barking.

This bizarre performance received a tumultuous ovation and the band returned for an encore of False Fire, a speedy, rockabilly strut with Parish on lead vocals: the one moment of levity in an otherwise powerful but emotionally oppressive night.

The tour continues tomorrow at the Anson Rooms, Bristol. For more details see www.pjharvey.net

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