Savages' Jehnny Beth and Ayse Hassan Cook Up A Murder Mystery Playlist
by Rico Gagliano and Brendan Newnam
January 20, 2016
Jehnny Beth and Ayşe Hassan are two of the four members that make up the London-based band Savages. Their debut album of ferocious post-punk was shortlisted for the UK’s prestigious Mercury Prize. Their follow-up, called, “Adore Life,” comes out this week. Here they are to set the mood for a party full of candelabras, corpses, and lentils.
Jehnny Beth: Hey, this is Jehnny Beth from Savages. I’m sitting across a table… a dinner table, with my friend, Ayşe Hassan from Savages, too. Hi, Ayşe!
Ayşe Hassan: Hello, Jenny.
Jehnny Beth: Ready for this dinner?
Ayşe Hassan: Yep.
Jehnny Beth: Let’s go for it. This is our dinner party soundtrack.
Kite Base – “Dadum”
Jehnny Beth: What should we start with, Ayşe?
Ayşe Hassan: Ummm…
Jehnny Beth: What about this project you’ve been doing?
Ayşe Hassan: Yeah, the project is Kite Base. And the song is “Dadum.”
Ayşe Hassan: When we were touring, I was squirreled away in my room working on Kite Base. It’s two bass players, which is myself and Kendra Frost.
Jehnny Beth: Have you kind of modeled it from something else you’ve seen, or can you–
Ayşe Hassan: To be honest, I was listening a lot to the Stranglers. And we kind of just wanted to have a track that merged our love of industrial music and pop music and made you want to dance.
Jehnny Beth: I’d like you to serve me your favorite meal, your own meal. Your homemade meal.
Ayşe Hassan: Ooh.
Jehnny Beth: What do you have?
Ayşe Hassan: What do I have? It’s got lots of lentils in it.
Jehnny Beth: [Laughs.] Oh, yeah, you’re vegan. Ugh.
Ayşe Hassan: Yeah.
Jehnny Beth: One thing I like about vegan food is that everybody can eat it.
Ayşe Hassan: Yeah. And it’s generally quite good for you. As long as you stay away from the sweet stuff.
Jehnny Beth: Yeah.
Trentemøller – “River Of Life (feat. Ghost Society)”
Ayşe Hassan: So, the next song that we would play at our dinner party is a song by Anders Trentemøller. It’s off the album “Lost.” And it’s called, “The River of Life.”
Jehnny Beth: Anders is an electronic artist. He’s from Copenhagen.
Ayşe Hassan: And he mixed our record.
When I think of this song, it makes me picture a candelabra that we have here at our dinner party because the song is quite dark and makes me think of something quite gothic.
Jehnny Beth: Also, Anders is a very lively character in the sense of, if you go out to dinner with him, you know you’d have a really good time, really good food. Do you like to share food, Ayşe? Because I hate sharing my food.
Ayşe Hassan: No, I don’t mind.
Jehnny Beth: God, I really need to work on myself.
Ayşe Hassan: What I struggle with is what we’re going to drink at our party.
Jehnny Beth: Yeah, because you don’t drink alcohol. And I don’t drink alcohol.
Ayşe Hassan: No.
Jehnny Beth: Do you know what? I think people should bring their own drinks.
Ayşe Hassan: But what we could do, we could put some jugs of some hot water.
Jehnny Beth: Hot water is our favorite.
Ayşe Hassan: And something exciting, like some juice or something. Let’s go wild on juice! [Laughs.]
Lescop – “La Forêt”
Jehnny Beth: So, I wanted to play a French track. It’s an artist called Lescop. The track is called “La Forêt,” which means “the forest.”
Jehnny Beth: The whole track is about this kind of fantasy of a dangerous woman, a woman that’s going to lead you to the forest and kill you. It’s a bit like The Cure, that kind of vibe. Like danc-ey, but dark.
Jehnny Beth: This is turning into a murder-mystery party.
Ayşe Hassan: Cluedo. [Ed. note: North Americans know this as the game Clue.]
Jehnny Beth: You know, Cluedo is like, at a dinner party, someone disappears, and then you realize someone has died, and we need to find who killed him.
Ayşe Hassan: But can we do that after dessert?
Jehnny Beth: Yeah, let’s have dessert!
Savages – “Surrender”
Jehnny Beth: So, all our guests are gone now, but the last thing you want to do at that point is to wash the dishes. So, Ayşe, which song do you think we should choose to wash the dishes?
Ayşe Hassan: I think we’re going to have to go with “Surrender.”
Ayşe Hassan: So, if there are only two of us left, does that mean one of us did it?
Jehnny Beth: Did what?
Ayşe Hassan: The murder.
Jehnny Beth: Oh.
Ayşe Hassan: Because I didn’t do it.
Jehnny Beth: I didn’t do it either. [Whispers] Who did it?
This interview originally aired and published on Jan. 14, 2016, by Dinner Party Download from American Public Media.