PJ Harvey

Squatting above the natural amphitheatre in Cornwall's hills, which PJ Harvey has picked for her first British gig in two years, the Eden Project's huge glass eco-pods secrete sweaty jungle foliage, while nearby a giant model fly sits on the grass, unexplained.

The Project is an early Seventies science-fiction dream somehow brought massively to life, and Harvey's decision to support it on her return makes perfect sense: with her Somerset hippie parents and schooling in arcane folk and blues, Harvey, like Eden, is an eccentric, brilliant, contrary creation of the far West Country, England's most mystical, isolated corner. So this should be the perfect spot to find where her bloody, feminised blues spirit has taken her after so long away.

On a perfect, still summer's night, she comes on to the creeping blues crawl of 1995's "To Bring You My Love". In a flouncey white dress just covering her crotch, with long bare thighs and high-heeled boots braced wide, she is still a playfully glamorous, powerful sexual presence whom no other British woman in pop quite knows how to match. Behind her the large band that she employed the last time she played has been stripped to a trio. It signals a return to basics, confirmed by the songs she then plays from her 1992 debut, Dry, and the way its tough, bluesy spirit takes over the night.

It's the same switch her hero Bob Dylan made in 1988 when he felt his sound had become bloated; The White Stripes' crackling stage heat is a more recent comparison, in a garage-rock world that should be friendly to Harvey's rawness right now. Certainly when the singer is howling "It's al-rai-arai-aright!" during "Oh My Lover", or the band make a rail-track clatter for "50ft Queenie", while the crowd surge, things seem to work.

So petite that her acoustic guitar looks almost overwhelming on her, but wickedly strong when, arms spread like bat-wings, she imagines drowning in "Water", she remains a fascinating presence. New songs like "Who the Fuck Do You Think You Are ?", and the way she weds "love", "violence"and "genocide" in the lyrics to a new number, before screaming "Wah-hooh!" into the dark, shows compromise is still not on her agenda.

But finally, there is a sense of slight anticlimax tonight. Her roar just doesn't climb high enough up the sides of this open venue, dissipating in the air. Noticeably too, the knot of crowd dancers have stopped long before the end. It's as if the power on stage hasn't been turned full-on, as if Harvey hasn't quite remembered how to project this basic noise.

It has still been a magical West Country night. But Harvey's own spell, for once, wasn't cast.