PJ Harvey voiced her upset about Brexit via her sets in both Glastonbury and Down the Rabbit Hole, reciting John Donne’s legendary poem, “No man is an Island”. Her political gesture was a summary of how many of us, including other artists, are feeling about the vote to leave the EU. Her explanation for her mid-concert speech was simple but accurate, stating it was ‘“a very strange day for a lot of us here”.

This isn’t Harvey’s first political stunt, her latest album ‘The Hope Six Demolition Project’ qualifies as a journalistic approach to poverty witnessed on her travels to Washington D.C, Kosovo and Afghanistan. If you ask us, her fierce vocals are perfectly equipped for poetics and politics.

See poem below:

“No man is an island entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe
is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as
well as any manner of thy friends or of thine
own were; any man’s death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”