Jehnny Beth: 'David Bowie's Blackstar has a huge importance for me'

“I think they knew (Blackstar) was a record that was important for me so they asked me to write an introduction text to the panel, and there was Donny in the panel, there was also Jonathan (Barnbrook) who did the artwork and Nicholas Pegg, who wrote a book about Blackstar. It was so interesting. I did my introduction in the evening and Blixa Bargeld was singing a few songs and before him I was singing Girl Loves Me and Dollar Days. I hadn’t played piano in front of an audience for 10 years...It was very scary but it went so well.”

Bowie’s work has had “great importance” for Jehnny Beth since she first heard his song Jean Genie. “I realised he was pronouncing Jean Genet (the French novelist and playwright) and I thought, oh my God, wow. I think it was his bridges through art that was attractive to me as a young person. I had read Jean Genet as a French student interested in literature and here was a kind of pop artist who was referencing that who was so cool and I thought, am I cool?

“Blackstar has a huge importance for me. I wrote To Love Is To Live, my first solo record, because of Blackstar and it was when he died that it started an idea in my head to do that record before I die. It just made me think of the passing of time.”

Gazing at the poster on the wall behind this writer as we talk, she says: “It’s funny because it says ‘David Bowie is here’. For me he is one of those artists of the present and I don’t know of any higher function of an artist but to be in the present and to talk about the present.”

This month the former Savages singer is embarking on a fresh UK tour to promote her second solo album, You Heartbreaker, You. Released last August, it’s a raw-in-tooth-and-claw record that demands to be heard live.

“It was really written with the idea of live performance in mind,” she says, explaining the album was “conceived – in the sense of thought of” – while she was touring the US supporting Queens of the Stone Age. “I think I had spent a lot of years out of my body, I felt quite distant and detatched from myself. In that moment onstage I had an out-of-body experience, it’s almost like I came back and I woke up and I had this vision of the record.

“Music for me is to prepare for onstage, I think it’s where I have my full potential, so I try to keep that as a fantasy almost while I’m in the studio, to keep it alive and to keep it in mind, it helps me to find the truest forms for the songs.”

Having been denied the opportunity to play shows to coincide with To Love Is To Live due to the Covid pandemic, she found herself as a support act for the likes of Depeche Mode and QOTSA. Stepping out as headline act is something new, though. “It was at first quite scary because I’d never tested the project on the road. When I played the first shows and realised the connection and people were singing back lyrics you’d written in your bedroom, it will never cease to blow my mind that feeling.”

Jehnny Beth’s rule of thumb with this album was, she says, not to be boring. “I think that’s the least you can do for people. I didn’t want to be boring and it’s not that I wanted to hide myself, but I didn’t want it to be about me in a way. I knew it would be because I’m doing it, but the central focus was not trying to solve my issues with writing songs. That’s when I felt ready to write the record, when I felt that I could put less of me in a way and leave space for the world or others to come in. I think when you write too close to the inner woes it’s almost like bad poetry, when you write a love letter that’s too much in the feeling to make the leap towards art. So that’s when I felt ready, I think. That creative distance was necessary.”

In You Heartbreaker, You the singer addresses the pain she observes in the wider world. “Pain as being inherently intertwined with love – I think that’s what the record talks about,” she says. “The inevitable relationship that we have with pain because we choose to welcome love into our lives. It’s an obsession I’ve had since Adore Life with Savages, we started talking about those ideas, even the idea of love and death, they’re quite connected, and so how do we manage all these grand emotions. I guess what I want to do is talk about love in a way that we don’t generally hear, especially in pop music. I can’t relate to a love song if it’s written in the pop world. Maybe I’m not the only one. But I feel the need then to write a song like Obsession, for instance, that talks about love in a way that feels more true. Because I think that people who are in love it’s almost like an illness, people love love but not necessarily the person. There’s a lot of bull**** around falling in love that we rarely address in a song, we mainly push the bull**** forward and I’m kind of sick of that. That’s not what I want to hear.”

Jehnny Beth and her long-time partner Johnny Hostile prefer to work by a set of rules. “We’ve been collaborators for 20 years now​​​​​​​ in different forms and shapes, because he was the producer of Savages and before we had a band we were writing songs together, so going back to the studio we need to not repeat the past​​​​​​​, and how can the music be different is how we’re going to behave differently as well. One of the set of rules was if it’s boring delete, which is very radical but it’s painfully true. Sometimes you just have to admit it’s boring.

“But also, one of the rules was not to be negative towards reach other. Because we have a tendency, maybe because we are French, to be ‘oh this guitar is s*** or this vocal is’. It has this tendency to be very radical, because we have to be, but it’s about treating that with more kindness. That generated more trust and we were able to go further.”

To mark the 10th anniversary of their second album Adore Life, post-punk band Savages recently shared two previously unreleased tracks from their 2015 sessions – one of which was a cover of the Black Sabbath song Paranoid. Jehnny Beth says it was her suggestion. “We were doing a re-shaping of the contract we had with Matador and we started a conversation with them, but always when I do as concert as Jehnny Beth sometimes Savages fans come and talk to me after a show or on social media, so I thought we would do something for them as a present.

“The girls were keen to look at stuff so we started looking at archives. It was interesting to look back, actually. We have so much that was filmed. It’s important ot me that Savages is remembered because it’s a band that had its importance when it happened and it influenced a lot of bands today...and it just makes sense to me that it’s not completely forgotten because I think there was a beauty in what we did.

“I remember when Savages was formed (in 2011) thinking that the London scene was quite boring at the time. The only band that I really loved was a Japanese band called Bo Ningen. I used to go to see all of their shows and take photos of them, I was obsessed with them. But they would be the only band that you would be scared when you went to see them, Yuki (Tsujii) was swinging his guitar around. There was actually something happening and they were like a Japanese Dada punk band which was really exciting. But they were the only ones, so Savages was created for me from that impulse to do a band that I couldn’t see at the time. And it was a time that people said that rock music was dead as well, so I think we held the flame for a while and we did it well.”

Meanwhile, Jehnny Beth’s acting career continues in parallel with her music. Last year she appeared in the Netflix mini series Hostages, with Suranne Jones and Julie Delpy, as well as the French film Différente. “I did my first movie when I was 17 and that did quite well, but then I just wanted to do music and focus on that, so I put that part of my creativity – you might say – behind me. Then when I moved to Paris eight years ago someone contacted me to say ‘We’re thinkking of you for this role, would you like to try a casting?’ and I said, why not because I was out of Savages at the time and I was keen to do other experiences and then it started this thing.

“To be honest, it’s just directors who I couldn’t say not to, like Jacques Audiard or Justine Triet. They were people I admired and I love the work of, so it felt natural for me to go and be in their world for a while. I love acting, I think it’s part of who I am because I grew up with it and I’ve taken acting lessons again, I’ve really re-explored that part of my creative world and I enjoy it. I did a movie last year in Brazil and I’ve just finished shooting for another movie in France, and I’ve got another one in June.”

You Heartbreaker, You is out now. Jehnny Beth plays at Boom in Leeds on March 21.