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Sheela-Na-Gig (song)

"Sheela-Na-Gig"
PJ Harvey - Sheela-Na-Gig.jpg
Single by PJ Harvey
from the album Dry
Released February 1992
Format CD single, 7" vinyl, 12" vinyl
Recorded November — December 1991 at Icehouse Studio in Yeovil, United Kingdom
Genre Alternative rock, indie rock
Length 3:13
Label Too Pure
Writer(s) PJ Harvey
Producer(s) Rob Ellis, PJ Harvey
PJ Harvey singles chronology
"Dress"
(1991)
"Sheela-Na-Gig"
(1992)
"50ft Queenie"
(1993)

"Sheela-Na-Gig" is a song by English alternative rock singer-songwriter PJ Harvey, written solely by Harvey. The song was released as the second single from her debut studio album, Dry, in February 1992. The single was the second, and final, single from Dry and only single from the album to enter the charts in both the United Kingdom and United States. An accompanying music video, directed by Maria Mochnacz, was released alongside the single.

"Sheela-Na-Gig" was written in 1990. The song's title is a reference to the eponymous Sheela na gig statues; figurative carvings of naked women displaying an exaggerated vulva found throughout Britain and Ireland. The album version of the song, as featured on Dry, was recorded at Yeovil's Icehouse Studio—a local studio also used by Jay Diggins and Automatic Dlamini, a band she was previously in with John Parish—as part of the album's recording sessions. This version was produced and engineered by drummer Rob Ellis. A version, recorded for John Peel and produced and engineered by Mike Robinson and James Birwistle, was included on the compilation album The Peel Sessions 1991-2004, released in 2006.

The song's title is a reference to the eponymous sheela na gig statues. The lyrics to "Sheela-Na-Gig" make several allusions to the statues in lyrics such as "look at these, my child-bearing hips," "you exhibitionist," and "put money in your idle hole." However, the lyrics narrate "imperious male demands and female self-loathing" and "a leather jacket-wearing rocker, black-humouring the boys with her twangy moan." The male character conveyed in the lyrics is uninterested in the female due to her exhibitionism and him not wanting to be "unclean." The lyric "dirty pillows" is a reference to the Stephen King novel Carrie, in which Margaret White uses the term to describe breasts. The repeated lyric, "I'm gonna wash that man right outa my hair" is the title of a song from the 1949 musical, South Pacific.


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