(Credits: Johnny Hostile)
Sat 6 September 2025 9:00, UK
Starting out as a band is never easy, and unless you’ve got some sort of super-rich connections, you’re going to have to begin at the bottom and play gigs you have no desire to do. Jehnny Beth knows all too well about this.
She may have had moderate success with her first project in France, the duo John and Jehn, but moving to a new country and forming a new project meant starting again from scratch, and this meant having to go through the rigmarole of playing in tiny venues up and down the length of the UK. While playing to tiny audiences can be fun, sometimes, especially if you’re a support band, you’re faced with audiences who really aren’t there for you, and couldn’t care less that you’ve poured everything into your performance.
However, having once been around the block with another project, you’d think that would have prepared Beth for any issues thrown at her, and being the consummate professional that she is, she would have been able to handle any negatives that came her way. Unfortunately, nothing in the world could prepare her and the rest of Savages for playing in the northeasterly coastal town of Bridlington as openers for The Vaccines.
Having formed the post-punk outfit in 2011, not long after she’d moved to London, they were instantly surrounded by buzz, but they still had to work hard to achieve the levels of success they desired, and that meant accepting gigs that they would probably otherwise never have desired to do. With The Vaccines also being a buzz band at the time, choosing to embark on a tour with them around the country would have undoubtedly been an exciting prospect, given how it would have offered them the opportunity to expose themselves to a wider audience.
On the other hand, fans of the ‘If You Wanna’ band weren’t exactly open to the idea of an all-female gothic rock and post-punk act, and with their main demographic being pissed-up indie lads, they began to hurl a torrent of abuse at Beth and her band; something that she is still reliving in her mind.
She would later revisit the events that unfolded on that evening in a poem that she recited during a talk with Poet Laureate Simon Armitage in 2018, as part of the Poetry and Lyrics festival at King’s Place, London. Speaking about the miserable atmosphere of the town, its decrepit streets and the less-than–welcoming audience she was faced with, she didn’t hold back when it came to sharing her thoughts on the Yorkshire resort. “When I was in Bridlington, I thought of death,” read the first line of the poem. While there are no full transcripts of the poem available, this gives enough of a picture of how Beth felt about her visit to the town.
While many bands have harrowing experiences early on in their careers that can often make or break them as individuals, this is the sort of thing that staves you off ever returning to a place, and unsurprisingly, neither Savages nor Beth ever returned to the Humberside shores for another show.
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