IT IS hard to imagine a more appropriate venue for Polly Jean Harvey’s first UK show in two years than the eco-friendly Eden Project in Cornwall, just a short gallop on goblin feet from the seaside Dorset idyll that the singer calls home. Despite spending short spells in London, Bristol and New York during her decade-long career, the vampish scarecrow diva has always treated the West Country as comfort blanket, muse and spiritual detox from the trials of urban life.

Universally known by her punchy dual initials since emerging as a blues-punk bootgirl with her raw 1992 debut album, Dry, Harvey was raised in a Dorset village by bohemian parents who weaned her on Bob Dylan and Captain Beefheart. The rolling landscape of Thomas Hardy’s Wessex, she says, was “alive with ideas and the space in which to create them”. But unlike many city dwellers, Harvey does not sentimentalise the savagery and sadism of country life. “Seeing the hunt out on the fields is just so natural to me,” she told me in 1998, a statement heroically out of step with metropolitan liberal tastes. “I can’t imagine it not being there. Also, I was brought up on a farm, and so many times our entire set of chickens was wiped out by a fox. If I could have physically strangled that f***ing fox with my bare hands I would have done it!”

Harvey’s most recent album, the Mercury Prize-winning Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea (2000), turned this tension between urban and rural into sensual, seductive sound paintings. In fact, although the title referred to the locations in which it was written — New York and Dorset — it was also grounded in the Jungian notion of “the sea being the subconscious and the land the conscious”. Dorset remains a potent symbol of childhood for Harvey, a rose-tinted hinterland of happiness to which she often refers.

Yes, you guessed it — Polly has been in therapy. At least one near-nervous breakdown in the early Nineties drove her back to her home county from London. Later, during the 1995 tour to promote her Grammy and Mercury-nominated album To Bring You My Love, she admits she “lost it for a while”. Dressed like a vamp queen in cartoon eyelashes and designer frocks, her new image was taken by some as a commentary on beauty conventions. In reality it was a mask to hide behind.

Harvey was also skeletally thin, which some took to be a symptom of anorexia. She has always shunned this label but concedes that she was sick. “I did get quite ill because of not knowing what was going wrong, not recognising how I was abusing myself,” she admitted in 1998. “There were just a lot of things in my head that weren’t sorted out. And as with anyone that has some sort of turmoil going on inside, it tends to come out in different ways of self-abuse, whether through drugs or alcohol, overeating or undereating. Just hurting yourself because on some level you don’t like yourself.”

In the mid-Nineties Harvey engaged in a high-profile relationship with the Australian singer-songwriter Nick Cave (see The South Bank Show, Sun, ITV1, 11.15pm), an uncanny match of physical and musical types. Cave’s 1997 album The Boatman’s Call contained several thinly veiled serenades to his “West Country girl”, although the relationship was over by then. “We loved each other very intensely,” Harvey later admitted. “So intensely that it actually turned out to be quite damaging for both of us.”

Harvey’s 1998 album, Is This Desire?, introduced a strain of trashed electronica to her formidable sonic arsenal of bucking-bronco blues and spooked orchestral balladry. The lyrics were haunted by tormented Brontë heroines called Elise, Angelene, Catherine, Joy and Leah, but their creator was mellowing as her 30th birthday loomed. In recent years she has seemed to become happier, more confident. Perhaps her rumoured romance with Vincent Gallo, the intense musician and film-maker, has put her own psychologically fragile moods in perspective. Out of the frying pan, into the blast furnace.

Because she rarely gives interviews, Harvey remains an enigma. Media commentators fill in the blanks, casting her as a ditch-dwelling hobgoblin or a cock-rocking voodoo sex queen. On stage, perhaps, these interpretations make sense. But in person, she is about as ordinary as original rock icons get, an unassuming country girl with a self-mocking sense of humour and a soft Dorset accent.

As fresh and charming, in fact, as the West Country itself. Maybe there’s something in the water.

P. J. Harvey, Eden Project, St Austell, Aug 15 (01726 811972)

CV: P. J. Harvey

Born October 9, 1970, in Corscombe, Devon

Early years Played with various bands around the West Country, most notably the Bristol-based Automatic Dlamini with the guitarist John Parish

Clean living Polly shuns rock’n’roll excess, especially drugs. “I have smoked dope and it didn’t agree with me,” she says. “I just went off to a place where I was absolutely terrified. I felt like I was dying.”

Polly filler As well as making a 1996 album with John Parish, Dance Hall at Louse Point, Polly also acted in the short film A Bunny Girl’s Tale (1998).

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