Savages:
Love is the Answer

When I last interviewed the pair, around the release of debut LP Silence Yourself, they had the Savages press routine down pat. Thompson, a former long-distance runner and aviation student, exuded a deliberate patience, filling her bandmate’s gaps with brief, measured summaries. Beth, who at one point recalled aspiring to become the Ziggy Stardust of French jazz, and later denounced modern indie as a “phoney institution”, blazed through screeds on social, sexual and psychological emancipation. Her eloquent fervour was as much part of Savages as their music. In the manifesto that accompanied Silence Yourself, the band demanded we take on our oppressors and eradicate their tools of distraction from our tiny, disappointing lives. So intoxicating was the rhetoric that nobody bothered to identify those oppressors, or wonder what exactly they’d distracted us from. For Savages, rallying our fury was imperative; how to use it, they’d consider at a later date.

That date is 22 January, when the London four-piece will release Adore Life. To herald it, they’ve devised a new, somewhat less incendiary interview style. Asked, at various points, if the band has redirected its cause, suffered in the industry, or affected her own wellbeing, Beth issues gentle denials while peering out of honest, sprung-wide eyes, as if inviting me to climb in and search for the answer myself. Thompson, for her part, is now using casual PRisms like “natural progression” and “learning process”.

Where the debut’s manifesto waxed philosophical (“Perhaps having deconstructed everything,” it read, “we should be thinking about putting everything back together”) its follow-up looks for practical solutions. That record dealt with concepts – empowerment, distraction, sexual submissiveness; on the follow-up, social ills get personal remedies. How to conquer distraction, they propose, is a question of individual composure. Love, in many shades, is the answer. On Evil, about the French conservatives who fought same-sex marriage, love as liberal compassion is the answer; on I Need Something New, love via emancipatory fucking in corridors is the answer. On The Answer, the band’s all-pistons-firing comeback single, “love is the answer” is repeated as a mantra, and that statement is at once pithier, more vulnerable and bolder than anything on the debut.

If Adore Life distills Silence Yourself’s statement, it also refines Savages as a concept. The band, which existed in Thompson’s imagination long before it had a second member, is as much an idea as a body of work. Staying true to that vision, Thompson says, is crucial. “When I was first in London, there was this dark energy that was on the verge of being violent,” she remembers of mid oughts bands like Selfish Cunt, who helmed a cesspit of musical anarchy in the capital. “You needed these violent bursts that would push people into questioning what they were doing, and what was the point of things.”

Adore Life began to crystallise in late 2013, when Beth, worn down by work and drink, had just scrapped part of a tour and subsequently quit booze. Around Christmas that year, she stumbled upon a passage of Jazz Cleopatra, the biography of pre-civil rights black cabaret dancer Josephine Baker. It read, “She was a revelation of possibilities in human nature they hadn’t suspected. The animal inside of every human being wasn’t dark, tormented, savage. It was good natured, lively, sexy rather than sensual, above all, funny.” The message, Beth understood, was that greatness could be born of affection.

For a band of dark, tormented savages at low ebb, that idea might’ve threatened their very core. Instead, they returned with renewed intensity. In May, they released the single Fuckers, an instant, exuberant live staple; it now closes their sets, then slams the door shut. “We can fight until we’re dead/Don’t let them walk upon your head/ And we can drive away from town/Don’t let the fuckers get you down,” goes one verse, preceding a cathartic scree that suggests, whoever the titular fuckers are, or whatever they’re fucking, they’d be ill-advised to persist. Perhaps to prove a point, Savages’ next move would be the most brilliant, and least business-savvy, of their existence.

Bo Ningen, the longhaired Japanese psych-rock band, were among the contemporary inspirations for Thompson to form Savages in 2011. On Words to the Blind, a 37-minute “battle” piece, they became collaborators. Performed eye-to-eye on a U-shaped stage for the project’s two performances, the shows saw the bands erect shattering, competing sonic monoliths. Drums flailed, basslines panicked and guitars duelled, thudded, slammed, screeched, pirouetted, warbled and generally conspired to invoke hallucinatory visions of Jupiter being swallowed by the sun. During the intro, before the storm hits, Jehnny Beth whispers an eerily apposite monologue in French. In the speech, taken from the 1981 play Am Ziel by Austrian iconoclast Thomas Bernhard, a grandmother chastises a young playwright and his generation for skirting rebellious ideas. But her righteous stance, so scornful of our wilting political urgency, has a catch. “She’s nostalgic, as well, about her own past,” Beth explains. It’s an interesting point: is it rebellious, or just reactionary, to reject the here-and-now by reviving the revolutionary ideals of your recent ancestors?

Speaking in 2013 to the New Statesman, cult filmmaker Adam Curtis made the greatest challenge yet to Savages’ indie-rock supremacy, in an interview concerning “static culture”. The BBC archivist, famed for documentaries like Century of the Self, which weaves culture-spanning subplots into spectacular narrative arcs, condemned the band not as dilettantes or poseurs – their live shows, he conceded, are “extremely powerful” – but, with their post-punk indebted sound, a symptom of a generation lacking utopian vision. Simon Reynolds, the venerable journalist, approvingly blogged the New Statesman piece, likening Curtis’ static culture theory to themes explored in his book Retromania. Authentically rebellious music, they argued, requires innovation: a new sonic vision representing a radical shift towards a better world.

At an aesthetic level, Curtis’ gripe was that Savages lacked romance. “Post-punk was specifically anti-romantic at its time because it was very much of the mood of the early 80s, of industrial collapse, a collapse on the left,” he said. “What people are yearning for now is some kind of romantic visions of something beyond our present condition, and that would be good music.”