Juliette Lewis
Borderline, London
30/06/2010

When bluesman Robert Johnson, so legend says, sold his soul to the devil at those dusty crossroads in the deep south, he probably didn’t have much to lose. When Juliette Lewis, iconic actress of our age, sold her soul to rock ’n’ roll, it was a much riskier proposition.

But sell it she clearly did. You can see it from the moment she steps onstage to unadulterated veneration from a crowd. You can see it in the way she shakes her straggly, blue rinsed hairdo – straight from her ‘Whip It’ movie – and the way she eyeballs the crowd. You can see it when her wiry arms spontaneously break into abandoned flailing and she begins to throw herself around the stage like Iggy Pop connected to the mains. You can sense that her press officer isn’t lying when she says Lewis insists on sleeping on the tour bus every night, because, in all the right ways, she looks like she does. “Didn’t we play here before?” she asks. “No!” her audience replies. “Oh,” she responds, sounding as frazzled and vague as any Tarantino stoner anti-hero, “it feels like this has all happened before.”

The fact she’s returning for a new punishing schedule of live dates to support her second album ’Terra Incognito’ should tell you this is no idle hobby. The new tracks she previews, like ‘Suicide Dive Bombers‘ with its echoes of Siouxie Sioux’s vocals and PJ Harvey’s tense, stark arrangements, suggest she’s moving on from the pure AC/DC/Stones rock territory into a wider musical world. But the band are probably at their best when they’re knocking out irresistible metal bubblegum like older single ‘Hot Kiss’, or aping the Pistols and The Stooges by closing with a suitably anarchic rendition of ‘No Fun’.

So while anyone who witnessed Keanu Reeves’ Dog Star performing or has seen Peaches Geldof shamble her way through a DJ set will understandably be suspicious about a Hollywood actress rich enough to never work again deciding she wants to be a pop star. We have to point out – this is different. Hard to believe, but yes, this really is for real.

Ben Willmott