Savages

The Magnolia's car park, on a Tuesday evening, is usually deserted; you can park right by the entrance without a worry and duck quickly into the venue, even quicker if it's 10°C outside in May. On Tuesday 21/05/2013, though, the line of cars stretches a bit beyond the usual checkerboard of metal in front of the entrance, running on for a few hundred metres along the avenue and hinting at a queue you wouldn't expect in the middle of the week.

You stamp your feet to keep warm, moving them along while humming the songs you'll be hearing shortly, if it weren't for a viciously dry drum machine announcing the start of the gig; Johnny Hostile has taken his place at the centre of the stage: he's alone.

Johnny Hostile is one half of the French duo John & Jehn; artist, musician, producer and co-founder, with Jehnny Beth, of Pop Noire Records, the label of Savages. The thin, almost anorexic French bassist and experimenter, by now transplanted to the UK, spits words into the microphone, modulating them the way the Cramps did in the early '80s, thickening the atmosphere with the acrid grumble of nothing but a bass-guitar. A reverbed voice, accompanied by cameo appearances from Beth and Thompson, darkens the colours of the venue, with this peculiar psycho-dubstep of borderline personality, hard to pin down.

The four Londoners don't keep us waiting long: they walk onstage to the notes of “Dead Nature”, an enveloping cloak woven from tolling bells and unease, before launching straight into “City's Full” and swapping the order of the triptych that had left such a pleasing mark on the album; in sequence come “Shut Up” and “I Am Here”, just gritty enough, familiar melodies put to use warming up the sizeable male contingent in the crowd, the bass gurgling noisily, before the explosion into “I Am Here / I Am Here / I Am Here / I Am Here”. Thompson's sounds are a surprise: the care and the power (not the intensity) of that Fender Jazzmaster – sky-blue and pearled beneath its white pickguard – bewitch the venue's '77 atmosphere, striking at our guts, trembling to be unleashed. The interlude of “Give Me A Gun” – a track included on the winter EP “I Am Here” – separates it from the opening triplet and readies us for the aching notes of “Strife”, in which Beth proves that any comparison to Siouxsie is spot on, while also saying, in effect: “who cares”; the vocalist has held back and then “fired”, moving at times like Ian Curtis's puppet, and at others revealing the intimate spirituality of Patti Smith: “Waiting For The Sign” is the apotheosis of Thompson's molten, incandescent blades, of calibre-35 bullets fired at a steady pace by Milton's drums, and of the voice, the vocal cords of Camille Berthomier, an opaque beam of light made up of the colours of Smith and Pj Harvey.

A step back in time with “Flying To Berlin”, a track included on the 2012 b-side single “Savages”, which rides the sounds of the very earliest post-punk, unleashing it with a certain restraint through Thompson's guitar work, once again. The journey leads on to the slap in the face that is “No Face”, in which the British band go back to hitting hard, growing fiercer because, after the fitting popular tribute of “She Will”, they stage an important representation of their own thinking: Beth reads, interprets, and then performs an intense piece of writing in the half-light, conveying, even before the fury of “Hit Me” begins, that condition of violence we're forced to swallow day after day, reaching a peak of transport and engagement; the following “Husbands” is the pre-closing release of tension ahead of the recent, unreleased “Fuckers”: “This is called Fuckers, for all fuckers stand 'round you”, an intriguing mix of post-core and tribal music, with an outro that for two and a half minutes keeps our eyes glued to the stage, in a visual and sonic trance, while Thompson grates at our eardrums and Milton beats the skins as she did in the distant past.

The classic backing track announces that the British band's exit from the stage is final, after about an hour of rage and caresses in which the girls from London showed and proved that their debut record was no fluke, and that if you really want to know the band's essence, listening to the record alone isn't enough – you have to sniff them out live and smell their scent of sweat and fury.

Photo by Valerio Berdini

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