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Oct 29, 2013 Savages By Mike Hilleary

Female punk ensemble Savages have premiered a stark new music video for their Silence Yourself closer “Marshal Dear.” According to Matablog (via Pitchfork) the visual was conceptualized by the band’s guitarist Gemma Thompson, collaborating with UK-artist artist Gergely Wootsch. Thompson drew inspiration from a scene in Kurt Vonnegut’s classic novel Slaughterhouse Five, where the story’s protagonist, a disillusioned WWII soldier named Billy feels “‘unstuck in time.’ He turns on the TV and focuses on a scene in a movie about bombers in the Second World War. The aircraft take-off backwards from an airfield, flying backwards over cities in flame. The exploded bombs and shrapnel begin to piece themselves together and rise back into the bellies of the aircraft and the bullets are sucked out of the bodies of the fallen men. The bombs are eventually brought back to the factory in which they were constructed, dismantled and the elements placed back into the earth.”

“This scene would replay in my head and I could imagine it as an animation of lines flowing into each other, much like early hand-drawn animation created to accentuate a musical score,” says Thompson. “I also thought it was beautiful how Billy tries to right the process of destruction and how this echoed the true story of the character in the song ‘Marshal Dear’ - Field Marshal Rommel’s attempted assassination of Hitler to end the Second World War which resulted in him being forced to take his own life to spare those of his family. We worked on bringing the character of the factory worker into the fore so that the animation now focused on the role of the woman working in the factory and the bomb itself as she realises her hand in the destruction.”

(www.savagesband.com)