Jehnny Beth may have come to prominence as the visceral frontwoman of post-punk quartet Savages – the critically revered, scene-leading group that earned the musician, born Camille Berthomier, two Mercury Prize nominations and a list of subsequent collaborators that reads like a who’s who of alternative music (Gorillaz, Nine Inch Nails, The xx, Primal Scream’s Bobby Gillespie…). But her longest and most fruitful partnership began long before any of this global success, back in France, when she first started to work with musician and artist Nicolas Congé, aka Johnny Hostile.
The pair formed art-rock duo John & Jehn in the mid-’00s, releasing two albums before Savages took hold, but their creative communion has carried on in different forms for the past two decades. Most recently, the partnership yielded Beth’s debut 2020 solo record To Love Is To Live, and now follows its arresting, uncompromising successor You Heartbreaker You: an album that she describes as 'meeting the frustration' of a world in chaos.
The project marks an innovative new step in Beth and Hostile’s collaborative creative practice. Eschewing the larger pool of external artists they’ve brought on board in the past in favour of working rigorously and solely between themselves, they conceptualised the lyrics and the visuals simultaneously, using one medium to encourage the other. 'I think we've always been really shy about thinking of ourselves as visual artists, but for the first time we just assumed that title and it unlocked a lot of things for the music,' Beth explains. 'Music is easy. That was our mantra. Music is easy. Music is joy. Music is life. And if it doesn't give you all of those things, you're probably doing it wrong. And so to make the visuals, it was the same approach.'
'Music is easy. Music is joy. Music is life. And if it doesn't give you all of those things, you're probably doing it wrong. And so to make the visuals, it was the same approach.'
Jehnny Beth
Working in this instinctive, uninhibited way allowed the project to grow in holistic new directions. Album opener ‘Broken Rib’ developed from a T-shirt design of Hostile’s in which the first word is split over two lines (Bro / Ken) on a red background. Beth sang whilst wearing the design and felt her demeanour shift. 'It sounds very simple, but it changed something in me. It's about creating that world and having fun with what you do, and with what you create in different mediums. And those mediums are going to start having conversations together so then suddenly it multiplies the effect and it becomes more and more playful,' she says. 'It’s almost like a pinball.'
For Hostile, who makes all of the original items worn across the project including the selection of cheekily repurposed and altered Adidas sportswear pieces seen in the video for recent single ‘High Resolution Sadness’, this self-sufficiency speaks to a deeper facet of their outlook. 'For me, it’s about reacting and showing that things must change,' he says. 'I taught myself screen printing and sewing, and I pour love into every piece. Clothes say a lot about who you are, and wearing the logo of a corporation owned by the world’s richest shows you’re fine supporting a system that exploits everyone – from the workers making it to the customers buying it.'
Much of their practice involves a sort of internal capture and response; reacting to the process of creation itself as a means to figure out the next step. As Hostile says: 'I care about techniques, processes, and the path you take to create. That’s what sparks ideas.' Yet, for the uncanny video of ‘No Good For People’, in which evocatively-lit close ups are interspersed with controlled explosions – a tidal wave coming up behind the singer, or a deluge of inky black emerging from the doors of a lift – the pair also found inspiration in another outsider artist.
'David Lynch died during that period of time and, in a way, I think the surrealism in his films kind of infused a little bit,' Beth suggests. 'His films are like paintings, and there's really no-one like him in that sense. The no compromise aspect of his films is really interesting, and the distorted realities.'
To make the moving explosions in the piece, Beth and Hostile worked from still images, learning to animate them from Hostile’s original analogue photographs. 'From my analogue photography, we built a universe and a method to turn those images into moving visuals,' he says. 'Jehnny is a skilled editor, and she pushes me to explore everything I’m interested in.'
The cover artwork for the album itself, meanwhile, made an exception to their insular rule. Designed by Brian Roettinger, whose previous work extends from his early days in the West Coast hardcore punk scene to more recent, high profile projects with Mark Ronson and Childish Gambino, it features a black and white portrait of Beth with ‘You Heartbreaker You’ daubed across her face in graphic, violent font. The idea for the text came when Beth stumbled across a car that had been scrawled on by an angry ex-lover. 'Someone had written with their finger [in the dirt], "You cheating bastard, I'm pregnant with your child",' she recalls. 'And then I went online and saw all these other ones with graffiti saying ‘Cheat’, ‘Liar’, ‘Bitch’.'
The cover of You Heartbreaker You
To replicate the idea, she employed friend and artist Alexandra Dezzi to tag Beth’s own car with the titular phrase in pink, its jagged punk lettering nodding to Vivienne Westwood. Roettinger then lifted the text and imposed it over the portrait – notably, the first image that Hostile had taken of Beth at the start of the entire album process.
If the endeavour goes further than most ever would to capture the energy and spirit of an idea ('I was stopped by the police after, and they were asking, "Why is your car pink?"' she laughs), then it’s symptomatic of the total creative universe that Beth and Hostile have concocted for themselves. At the end of ‘You Heartbreaker You’, they wrote a 20-point list of lessons that had emerged during its inception: 'Art is not a bin for your inner turmoil'. 'Remember how it felt when you first started'. Perhaps most telling of their approach is the ever-inquisitive note upon which they leave it: 'Now I’m in the mood to go somewhere I don’t understand.'
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