Interview Savage Beauty: Jehnny Beth

Four years on from Savages last offering, 2016’s ‘Adore Life’, the first glimpse of solo music from their incendiary singer Jehnny Beth arrived last November in the latest series of Peaky Blinders. Polly Gray, the matriarch of the Shelby boys’ gang, is chauffeur-driven to a grizzly dockyard. She takes a final drag of her cigarette, flicks it out the car and struts through the smog to the thundering sonics of ‘I’m The Man’. The track in question, produced by Atticus Ross (Nine Inch Nails), possesses a haunting, self-destructive swagger, while its invigorating video finds the the singer adorning the coat of toxic masculinity; fights break out, cars are trampled on and drinks are tossed in a mesmerising one-shot sequence. It’s one hell of an introduction to her solo work.

“I was just getting pushed by necessity, it was something that I felt I needed to do,” she explains now of her decision to venture out alone. “This record particularly, it was something quite profound, quite deep.” Forthcoming LP ‘To Love Is To Live’, she continues, was forged in a spirit of “vital urgency” fueled by the notion that she might die tomorrow. The mass-exodus of musical legends in 2016 recalibrated the meaning of death and art to her, particularly David Bowie and his parting gift ‘Blackstar’.

“Death finishes art, it makes it complete,” she says. “Life and art makes sense because there is death, you’re leaving a mark and eventually this album will outlive me.” For that reason, Jehnny wanted to channel everything she knew into her debut solo offering. “It’s very eclectic,” she nods. “There’s a lot of contrasts in there. It goes from very quiet to very loud, from light to dark: all the extremes of life in the way I know it.”