JEHNNY
BETH
JILL OF ALL TRADES
22 illinoisentertainer.com july 2020
By Tom Lanham
photo by Steve Gullick
T
here are Renaissance women,
dream-driven ladies who tirelessly
here are Renaissance women,
dream-driven ladies who tirelessly toil
their way to coveted career kudos like
gaining elite EGOT status by winning
Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony Awards.
There is even a further achievement to
shoot for once that title is secured — the
PEGOT, via the added plaudit of a
Peabody Award, a category currently
shared by Barbra Streisand and Rita
Moreno. And then, of course, there’s the
unstoppable French force of nature Jehnny
Beth, a human dynamo so constantly in
motion that she’s practically a blur on the
showbiz radar screen. We’re talking
whirling-dervish, Tasmanian Devil velocity
here. Minus all the unbecoming slobbery
Taz drool.
This Jill of all trades — born Camille
Berthomier to theater-director parents —
was something of a child prodigy, studying
piano and voice with jazz instructors at
age eight and appearing in her first Ibsen
play by ten. After training in the thespian
arts at the Conservatoire de Poitiers, she
began appearing in films in 2005 while also
assuming her chic sobriquet and forming
the duo John and Jehn with her significant
other, Johnny Hostile (nee Nicolas Conge),
and moving to bustling London. The couple
is still together today. That’s where she
rose to prominence as feral frontwoman
for the all-girl juggernaut, Savages, alongside
guitarist and keyboardist Gemma
Thompson. Acting soon fell by the wayside.
“But I’ve always been seriously interested
in doing a multiplicity of things,” she
says. “And my hero for that is Henry
Rollins because I always felt that he was so
good at being a writer, a radio host, a
comedian, a great punk singer, and a solo
artist. So I like that vision of the artist —
the record is not the only thing that I am
interested in doing. It’s part of this whole
world that gives me inspiration.”
Savages might have gone on hiatus in
2017 after two Mercury-Prize-nominated
records, but that’s when Jehnny Beth came
alive, collaborating with Bobby Gillespie
from Primal Scream, The Gorillaz on “We
Got the Power” from their album Humanz,
onstage with Romy Madley Croft from The
xx, and on her own stunning new solo set,
To Love is to Live. In between? Enough projects
to make Henry Rollins’ studious head
spin, starting with her composing the film
score for XY Chelsea, a recent documentary
on the life of trans soldier Chelsea
Manning. She also contributed music to
the popular English-gangster TV show
Peaky Blinders, whose star Cillian Murphy
appears on “To Love” in the solemn 1:13
soliloquy “A Place Above.”In short order,
Beth has launched her own Beats1 Radio
show Start Making Sense; begun a musicthemed
TV program called Echoes With
Jehnny Beth; returned to the silver screen
with a role in Catherine Corsini’s 2018
movie An Impossible Love, earning a Cesar
nomination for Most Promising Actress;
and joined the cast of director Alexandre
Astier’s upcoming Kaamelott, a continuation
of a popular French Arthurian TV
series in which she sports a monolithic
Mohawk. And while she was carefully
conceiving her solo outing, she penned her
first book of erotic fiction, C.A.L.M.
(“Crimes Against Love Memories”) that’s
being published this month, with photography
by Hostile. “It’s coming out on this
new Hachette imprint called White Rabbit,
and I’m very proud of it,” she says of the
dozen stories. “And I wrote the book in
parallel to the record; in fact — I wrote
them together.”
The album itself is arresting in almost
every respect, starting with its cover shot
— a 3-D computerized, simulated-marble
nude sculpture of the artist in a Rodinthoughtful
pose. She commissioned the
work from red-hot British graphic designer
Tom Hingston, who then — with
Markus Lehtonen — expanded the classical
concept into a full video for her pulsepounding
single “We Will Sin Together,”
which examines male/female identities
through more animated statuary, including
the Virgin Mary, Cupid and Psyche, Pluto
and Proserpina, Michael and Lucifer, and
Satyr and Hermaphroditus. And the team
cobbled together the whole eerie, flickering
footage during the last three months of
lockdown. And that’s just the starting
point, the intellectually-inviting welcome
mat this singer places outside the door as a
caveat for what you’ll hear inside. In short,
lightweight fans of disposable committeewritten
IKEA pop need not request a ticket.
This is a complex record, a challenging
record, the kind of post-punk command
performance that few performers are bothering
to make anymore. Listeners might
marvel at its intricacies and wonder, “Did
she really put that much thought into this?
Or am I just overthinking it?” Yes, she did.
And, no, you’re not. You’re privy to a real
labor of love by an erudite genre-jumping
composer who is quite happy to be still
doing it Matin-Hannett-old school.
Underestimate Jehnny Beth at your peril.
The record opens on a declarative “I
Am,” with Beth’s bass-vocodered voice
murmuring, “I’m the voice no one can
hear/ I am drifting through the years…I’m
burning inside,” as synthesizers undulate
like crashing waves. “Innocence,” a
thumper with more sweeping statements
follows (“I don’t even care about sex no
more/ I wanna do things with innocence”),
which segues into the half-sung,
half-spoken word “Flower,” with tick-tocking
percussion, a huge keyboard-buttressed
chorus, and further physical selfassessments
(“Cold in the daylight/
Burning at night”). “We Will Sin Together”
ensues, then the Murphy monologue. Then
all hell breaks loose on “I’m the Man,” via
a charging, dissonant mix that sounds like
raccoons knocking trashcans over by the
chorus, over which Beth snarls — in her
Gitanes-cool French/English accent —
“I’m the man! I’m the man! Not a pooossy!”
And her pronunciation of pussy is at once
humorous, macho-satirical, and downright
terrifying. It’s one of the most striking
truly rock and roll moments in recent
memory, believe it or not. She’s not kidding
around here. She means every venomous
word.
“I’m the Man” precedes a gentle piano
reprise called “The Rooms,” which then
gives way to the rattlesnake-threatening
“Heroine,” which runs down a Santa-size
wish list of everything honorable that Beth
would like to be — or more correctly, is
programmed by society into THINKING
she should be. “How Could You” follows,
featuring Joe Talbot. The disc then slows to
a close on “The French Countryside” (in
which she mournfully observes, “If I ever
see the French countryside again/ out of
this aeroplane,” a question many of her
countrymen are probably asking these
days), and the six-minute coda “Human”
ends the proceedings in a whirlpool of dissonance
and Beth’s somber conclusion, “I
used to be a human being.” Hey — we all
did, right? Until Covid-19 turned us all
continues on page 26