Savages

http://pitchfork.com/features/cover-story/9123-savages/ Savages In an era of endless distraction, this London quartet wants to focus our fleeting attention with guitars and drums and fury. Turn away at your own risk. By Laura Snapes , April 30, 2013 Savages Photos by Se Young Savages: "Shut Up" In late February, Savages play a show at David Lynch’s exclusive Paris nightclub, Silencio. As the red velvet curtains open-- of course there are curtains-- the four-piece peer out into a room of perched and propped Lynchian devotees swirling $20 cocktails. The band stare at them silently for 30 confrontational seconds before drummer Fay Milton eventually breaks the war of attrition. The following night, the group walk on stage at London’s Electric Ballroom for their biggest hometown show yet. Once again, the music doesn’t start immediately. This time, though, it’s not intentional. The dude manning the monitors, who had been uncooperative and snide during soundcheck, has vanished. He does not reappear. Three awkward minutes pass. Finally, frontwoman Jehnny Beth flashes her gimlet eye and seethes, "I think we’re all fucking ready, right? This is called 'Shut Up'." Ayşe Hassan’s bass and Gemma Thompson’s guitar rumble in, restlessly steering the sound. Beth, a heart-faced woman with a severe Mia Farrow crop, jogs on the spot, circling her fists as if poised to sprint, or brewing a sharp right-hook. Jehnny Beth In the café of an artsy east London cinema the next afternoon, the mood is good-humored, though the shrill coffee machine grates against some severe hangovers: Milton went to bed at 7 a.m. after being dragged to a gay club once the band’s own after-party (where they hung the DJ and just played Bowie records) kicked out. A week-old bruise on her left eyelid shows when she rolls her eyes while the band discuss the previous night’s sound issues. They’re certain the venue’s monitor tech didn’t like being told what to do by women. When Savages started performing in early 2012, too many similar experiences persuaded them to employ their own sound team. "One guy gave us really awful sound, then came and apologized afterwards, saying, ‘Sorry, I didn’t realize you were going to be good,’" says Milton. "‘I didn’t realize you could play like that,’" mocks Thompson, a trilobite tattoo visible on her forearm as she ruffles her ostensibly home-cut hair. "People tell me, ‘Don’t let the fuckers get you down,'" says Beth, raising her eyebrows. That mantra forms the chorus to the castigating "Fuckers", last night’s abrasive set closer, where she gnashes at the edict like Nick Cave with barbed-wire for teeth. "I’m like, 'No. Don’t let the fuckers get you down... and then give them a lesson!'" "I’m trying to talk to people about themselves, to just tell the truth, and maybe that’s why people come to see us, as an inspiration for emancipation." -- Jehnny Beth In the 18 months since Savages formed-- three friends, plus a brutal drummer unearthed via recommendations-- they’ve executed their music, shows, and business with ruthless efficiency. In one of their declarative mission statements, which appear online and are appended to their releases, they call the band a "self-affirming voice to help experience our girlfriends, our husbands, our jobs, our erotic life, and the place music occupies in our lives differently." Their stealthy music takes influence from post-punk’s aerodynamics, hardcore’s abrasion, and the overdriven plundering of metal, with songs rewritten until they’re reduced to the most essential ideas. And at the quartet's uncompromising heart is a vitriolic refusal of victimization, though they shrug off potential affiliations with riot grrrl, or the dogmatic approach of a band like Fugazi. Instead, their strident lyrics about embracing your creative and erotic pleasures eschew soapboxing in favor of something more instinctive. Considering all that, Silence Yourself might seem like a strangely bossy title for the debut album of a band so concerned with self-expression. But it’s more about shedding distractions. "We’re submerged by voices, opinions, images," says Beth. "They take us away from who we are. The idea with Savages is to get back to this more focused attention, so you’re harder to reach." Fay Milton As a child, Jehnny Beth’s theater-director parents wouldn’t let her watch television or do "kid things." Born Camille Berthomier in Poitiers, a small city in western France, on December 24, 1984, one of her earliest memories is of touring Russia with one of her father’s plays. She loved the films her parents showed her by Hitchcock, Truffaut, and John Cassavetes, whose New Wave sensibilities played well in France. Silence Yourself begins with a sample of dialogue from Cassavetes' 1977 drama Opening Night, which deals with an older actress' struggle to pursue her career in accordance with her beliefs. "She doesn’t want to follow the rules, so she’s fighting, and that’s what I like about the film," explains Beth. "She would never give up." Beth’s parents "emancipated themselves" from their agricultural backgrounds by reading and going to university, and were keen to impress the importance of academic study on Jehnny and her sister. "They were very open intellectually, although still coming from a Catholic background-- an interesting mix!" she says with a yelp. Savages: "I Am Here" It’s a cold afternoon in January, and Beth is the last member to present herself for an individual grilling at a central London cafe decorated like a mad aunt’s parlor. The band has insisted on being interviewed separately, in consecutive half-hour sessions, a turn of events made no less odd by the fact that Beth records our conversation on an enormous tape recorder that looks like she stole it from a Cold War museum. "For my memories," she says, in a way that doesn’t suggest something for the grandchildren. She repeatedly returns to the word "emancipation." When she was in her late teens, she met Nicolas Congé, aka Johnny Hostile, who she calls "a big part in my emancipation as a person, but also as a musician." They remain together, having moved to London in late 2006, adopting new names to form John and Jehn, a Kills-like duo. That band took precedence over Beth’s burgeoning acting career-- she stars in 2005’s A travers la forêt and 2009’s Sodium Babies, two French-made fantasy/horror films. In old interviews, Hostile joked that he kidnapped her. "Both of us wanted to avoid boredom in a small town in France," Hostile tells me. "We became hyperactive in all aspects of life: how we deal with our job, our sex life, our families, our friends. She emancipated me equally." "They moved around in a very menacing, jerky fashion," remembers British Sea Power frontman Scott "Yan" Wilkinson, who often had John and Jehn open for his band and gave Savages their first gig in January 2012. "You couldn’t tell if they were going to have a kiss or a fight-- made me think of erotic roosters." "Pornography has been very important for me, to liberate myself from the pressure of romanticism and the myth of a woman’s pleasure." -- Jehnny Beth Hostile is always around Savages, his swooping black coat and crooked, Gallic good looks providing no small amount of presence. Although he co-produced their album, his role seems to challenge rather than control; none of the other three members visibly resent his suggestions. He’s aware that he can be domineering, though. Savages was Thompson’s baby, and when she originally asked Hostile to front the band, he declined. "I respect her too much," he says. "I didn’t want to waste her time with me trying to change everything. She deserved someone easier to work with." Beth says Hostile’s role in her liberation means she can’t call herself a feminist. Although she agrees with the movement’s aims for equality, she has misgivings about its wider motivations and is fascinated when women put a feminist reading on Savages. "They tell me they think pornography is bad for women and assume I’m going to understand," she says. "The thing is, I watch a lot of pornography. It’s been very important for me, to liberate myself from the pressure of romanticism, the myth of a woman’s pleasure." Towards the end of Silence Yourself is a song called "Hit Me" that was recorded entirely live, making its Meat Puppets-playing-axel-grinders maelstrom even more striking. "I took a beating today/ And that was the best I ever had," Beth moans, adopting the perspective of her favorite porn star, Belladonna, who gained widespread notoriety following a 2003 "Primetime" interview with Diane Sawyer in which she cried about some of her experiences, and subsequently became used as a strawman for porn’s "manipulative evils" by lobbyists. (She spoke out afterwards about how "Primetime"'s editing misrepresented her as a victim.) Elsewhere on the record, Beth sings about dark sexual liberation, unmasking your soul, vanquishing faceless cowards-- and finding yourself sleeping with them, too. Though the album’s most surprising lyric is also its most domestic. "How come I’ve been doing things with you/ I would never tell my mum?" Beth sings on the swaggering, Suede-worthy "Strife". She describes it as "almost showing your weakness" and "that sense of becoming a child again, when you’re doing these crazy, dirty things." Savages: "Strife" Savages’ honesty about the complexities of female sexuality places them in an underpopulated but fervent lineage that stretches from Patti Smith through Liz Phair, PJ Harvey, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and beyond. (At its most aggressive, Beth's wail is a dead-ringer for Karen O’s pixellated yowl.) Women to whom expressing the desire for violent or so-called deviant sexual pleasure is empowering, rather than a cheap signifier of "transgression" or vulnerability. "I’m trying to talk to people about themselves, to say things as they are, to just tell the truth," Beth ponders. "And maybe that’s why people come to see us, as an inspiration for emancipation." She refers to a trans-woman in the process of gender realignment surgery who recently wrote to the band. "Savages was helping her go through this process, the pain," says Beth. "We were all really moved by it." Gemma Thompson Last November, Savages entered the Fish Factory studio in northwest London to begin recording their debut album. They spent three hermetic weeks there with Hostile and co-producer Rodaidh McDonald, who worked on both xx albums, How to Dress Well’s Total Loss, and heaps of others. The band’s debut single was essentially recorded in a tricked-out cupboard in Beth and Hostile’s north London house, where the parts were captured separately. McDonald instigated the opposite approach for the album, setting them up like the live band they are. Silence Yourself comprises 11 songs that shriek and writhe within a consistently ominous ambience. It’s exhilaratingly aggressive. The guitar work on "I Am Here" sounds like it takes cues from post-hardcore titans Converge, the cymbals on "She Will" from krautrock greats Faust. The groan that opens "Husbands" is sampled from a film Thompson found while working at London’s Natural History Museum that captures the sound of lava solidifying underwater. Although the band laughs guiltily at how picky they were in the studio, McDonald appreciated it. "It’s unusual to work with a guitar band where each member is as deeply into experimenting within their role, and pushing it to the extreme," he says. "It’s refreshing." Only the final song of each side, "Dead Nature" and closer "Marshal Dear", are contemplative-- the latter features piano by Beth, who is a trained jazz pianist, and would sound at home in at a sleazy smoker's den. It leaves the album enticingly open-ended. Still, there's no escaping it: Savages do recall a number of post-punk, no wave, and metal bands. "I call it the 'Old Man’s Disease,' which I had when I was 21," says BBC 6Music DJ Marc Riley, debating whether the band’s originality, or potential lack thereof, matters. Riley was a significant enough early member of the Fall for Mark E. Smith to write at least three overt cuss songs aimed at him, and he gave Savages their first live radio session back in May 2012. "I remember the first time I heard the Jesus and Mary Chain, I thought, I’ve got White Light/White Heat, why bother? But of course you’re wrong to think like that. Savages get compared to Public Image Ltd. and Siouxsie and the Banshees, but the songs are great. That’s all that matters." "Savages are a band like My Bloody Valentine-- one of those classic bands that you just love. They’re proper." -- Portishead's Geoff Barrow Savages have found another fervent admirer in Portishead founder Geoff Barrow, whose crush began when they played his hometown, Bristol, last August. They met, and did some non-committal recording later in the summer-- just friends, experimenting, and no, you can’t hear it. I meet Barrow in Bristol on another bitterly cold night in mid-December, at a dank pub on an out-of-town road where it’s impossible to buy cigarettes, but very easy to get a "special" massage at the Village Sauna. "This is a band like My Bloody Valentine," Barrow says over a beer, smoothing his Earth t-shirt. "One of those classic bands that you just love. They’re proper." Next door at the Exchange, preparations are afoot for Apocatastasis, a Christmas party thrown by Barrow’s Invada Records, where Savages will play their last date of 2012. One of Barrow’s other bands, Beak>, open Savages’ Electric Ballroom date, and Savages will return the favor by playing before Portishead on their European tour this summer. The mutual admiration is strong. It has to be, as it quickly becomes apparent that Savages aren't wild about playing opening act for anyone when they offer themselves up for interview two at a time before the Apocatastasis gig, putting on a sort of good cop/bad cop act across a corner table in the pub. Talking about their experience as a support slot for guitar rocking also-rans the Vaccines last May, Beth juts her jaw. "It was shit," she spits unexpectedly. Although Savages’ then-managers didn’t force them into it, it seems to have been at their suggestion. They also wanted the band to sign with a label-- any label-- by June 2012, a notion Beth balked at. (John and Jehn remain in a bind over a previous bad deal.) "It was a bad time for us," she says. "We almost lost the band." On May 29, Savages released their debut single, "Flying to Berlin" b/w "Husbands", and headed to Salford the following day to play their 6Music session for Marc Riley. It was a pivotal moment. "There was so much tension in the air," Milton says. "We worried that we were going to fuck up live on the radio." They didn't. "The session was amazing," recalls Riley. In the van on the way back to London the next day, they decided to sack their managers. Thompson and Beth severed ties in person. "It was a good fucking thing to do," Beth says, with no small amount of intensity. In the end, Savages refused to sign to a label until they had finished making their album, which they say they paid for themselves. It's all about rejecting what they see as severely outdated industry-- and generational-- hierarchies. In short, they don’t take advice easily, though their new manager, John Best, was a Britpop mastermind. "Even supposedly experienced people don’t know how to do things now because everything is broken down," Beth says. "When people tell you you have to support another band for some reason-- that doesn’t really make sense any more! Our generation doesn’t believe in elites. The filmmaker Adam Curtis said we are an apocalyptic generation. I thought that was great-- that's exactly where our name comes from." Savages: "She Will" Over our three meetings, the singer regularly talks of her admiration for Michael Gira, and how he chose to end Swans in the late 90s rather than jeopardize his vision. "Some people’s souls are too big and strong to do the compromises constantly asked of you when you play rock music, because it’s not considered an art," she says of him. Though Beth and Hostile run their own small imprint, Pop Noire, last month it was announced that Silence Yourself will be released through Matador Records. Over email a couple of days later, Beth explains that she doesn’t think the deal merits congratulations. "I have no pride or happiness left in me for these kind of things," she writes. "I came to a point where I absolutely had to demystify the cult surrounding indie labels. I see things differently, I guess-- I believe artists make their own success. No record labels are my heroes today. Ayşe Hassan Although she’s the most vocal member of the band, Beth was in fact the last to join Savages: After Hostile turned down Thompson’s offer to front the band, Beth sent a tentative email asking if she could try out, to Thompson’s total, delighted surprise. "From the first rehearsal, it was very productive-- we weren't just there to tell each other we're great," remembers Milton, who arrives for her one-on-one grilling carrying a copy of The Fountainhead. Hassan was Thompson’s original foil: they met through the bassist’s crazy Halloween parties and went on to play in the band Hindley. "It was a kind of My Bloody Valentine noise-fest," Thompson recalls. "We played at every shit-hole in London. We had our own smoke machine, lights, costumes-- no matter where we were, it was about perfecting the performance." Her meticulous presentational streak remains: Savages no longer play "shit-holes" with any desperate regularity, but they curate everything from posters to video trailers, support slots, visuals, and the music between acts. Their show at the Electric Ballroom is a comprehensive display of how maintaining such total control can manifest in something truly uncompromising. Since the doors opened, a creaking chime-- like midnight sounding over the River Styx-- has been playing over the venue's sound system, though no one really notices. Attentions are piqued, however, when a woman in white suddenly lays on her back near the bar end of the room. Knees bent, she uses her feet to push herself down toward the stage, narrowly avoiding getting stepped on. Another four dancers follow, a space clearing around them. They reach the end of the room and roll onto their fronts, crawling in a circle at a deathly slow pace, as if the air had the consistency of wet cement. Eventually they rise together, heads bowed, shoulders locked, looking like decapitated corpses. The equal parts intimidating, tedious, and awe-inspiring spectacle lasts 35 minutes, making some of the crowd hilariously antsy. "I don’t think they’re about to do the 'Thriller' dance, do you?" an incessantly chattering woman mugs to her friends. Milton’s friend Fernanda Munoz-Newsome choreographed the piece, titled "Rewind-It". Her motivation was to create "something that would not be easy to sit back and watch." And then some. Smoking in the freezing back alley, Thompson explains that the impetus to stage such a piece came from a performance by Wire at the same venue 33 years prior, captured on 1981’s Document & Eyewitness. Wire antagonized the audience by scrapping the hits and including a bizarre Dadaist cabaret that constantly interrupted their set. The skinhead-heavy crowd bottled them. "The concept was to challenge the audience," she says, shivering in a long black coat. It certainly shows some gall to subject a Thursday night Camden crowd to an avant-garde dance performance. Upstairs in the dressing room, the band is pleased as punch. "It was like an art space!" a stage-ready Beth crows, hopping from hot pink heel to heel. "I absolutely had to demystify the cult surrounding indie labels. I believe artists make their own success. No record labels are my heroes today." -- Jehnny Beth In the cinema arts café the afternoon after the Electric Ballroom gig, the band is considerably loosened-up from the first time we met, repeatedly collapsing in hoots, and listing their ultimate hard-rock hunks (it’s a toss-up between Thor Harris from Swans and Josh Homme, "the modern-day Elvis."). The hangovers may have something to do with it. After some prodding, they admit that their more pointed moves over our meetings for this feature-- being interviewed individually, the imposing tape recorder-- really just represent their lack of experience in press situations. Still, their occasionally over-protective hold on precisely what they’re doing is part of what makes them thrillingly distinguished from countless young groups who tend to delight in shambolic guilelessness and caring for precisely naught. Those bands can never be caught out because they never had any beliefs to begin with. Savages may contradict themselves at times, but they're more interesting for it. These imperious, Romantic punks want to be nothing less than a gateway drug to transformative art and ideas. But for now, there are headaches to tend to (Milton’s face is on the table more than once). And true to their most primal desires, Savages are reduced to offering the simplest interpretation of their sound yet. "It’s music to break shit to!" laughs Thompson. "And fuck on the floor to!" says Milton, crumpling beneath extreme-hangover hysteria. Thompson concludes: "It’s music to break shit and fuck on the floor to." Artists: Savages