7th November 2012, Gorilla
8/10
I’m about to make two statements from which you can draw your own conclusions. Savages are a group of young women playing incredibly raucous rock music who performed on Later…with Jools Holland a few weeks ago. Their show at Gorilla seemed to be attended primarily by middle-aged men. Are their genders and the average age of the audience connected? Who knows (probably). Would all those men have been there if it had been four fat guys playing loud music? Who knows (probably not). Regardless, Savages played the absolute hell out of that venue, performing with significantly bigger balls than many male musicians I’ve seen lately.
Despite the number of people who were seemed to be there out of curiosity, or to show that they’re still cool, Savages really seemed to connect with the audience. From the word go, they were giving it absolutely everything they had, while still managing to look impossibly cool. It reminded me of the kinds of shows I used to go to when I was fifteen, where my friends and I would go absolutely batshit crazy just because we could, and there seemed to be quite a bit of that going on at the front.
There were some moments that could have been awkward, but singer Jehnny Beth managed to smooth them over. One of those was the theft of a 12” from the merch stand, prompting her to shoot the crowd with an incredibly intense glare while half singing, half chanting “There’s a thief in the room”. Which begs the question, why would anyone want to steal from someone so utterly terrifying? They closed their show with the same track they performed on Jools, ‘Husbands’, which was one of the most raucous, rousing performances I’ve seen in a long time, ending a genuinely mind-blowing show.
