Watch Le Tigre reunite for their first show in over a decade

Le Tigre, a dance punk group featuring Kathleen Hanna, Johanna Fateman, and JD Samson, reunited for the first time in 11 years over the weekend – check out footage below.

• READ MORE: Soundtrack Of My Life – Kathleen Hanna

The band appeared at the Saturday (27 August) of This Ain’t No Picnic festival before headliners LCD Soundsystem.

Le Tigre started their first gig since 2011 with 1999’s ‘The The Empty’. The 16-song set saw the group also perform ‘Hot Topic’, ‘Phanta’, ‘TKO’ and ‘Deceptacon’. Check out footage below:

Le Tigre played:

‘The The Empty’
‘TKO’
‘Hot Topic’
‘My My Metrocard’
‘FYR’
‘Mediocrity Rules’
‘On The Verge’
‘Seconds’
‘Viz’
‘What’s Yr Take On Cassavetes’
‘Punker Plus’
‘Shred A’
‘Eau d’Bedroom Dancing’
‘Keep On Livin’’
‘Phanta’
‘Deceptacon’

According to Samson, Le Tigre were asked to reunite for the 2020 edition of This Ain’t No Picnic, before it was cancelled due to COVID. Speaking to Spin, Samson said: “We felt that it was really important for us to reunite prior to the 2020 election. We felt the relevance of our music would really stir up something important within our community. And obviously that was cancelled because of COVID. We just continued to want to present the material again.”

“We went in really different directions after we stopped playing shows in 2005. JD has become a professor. I’m an art critic. Kathleen has done various nonprofit work, and then she did the Julie Ruin and then Bikini Kill reunited,” Fateman added. “We had more than a decade to just be individuals again, and then come back together, bringing more to the project.”

There’s apparently no further reunion shows planned but both Samson and Fateman are “open” to the possibility.

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A post shared by Kathleen Hanna (@mskathleenhanna)

In a separate interview with the LA Times, Hanna said the decision to reunite Le Tigre came about because she was “finally having fun” touring with Bikini Kill. “I remember playing a really bad show in Paris with Le Tigre. So now I’m like, I need to play Paris again and have it be a good show. It’s literally something that will keep me awake.”

“When I first got into being onstage, a lot of it was: I didn’t get love as a child, and I was looking for love in all the wrong places. I wanted anonymous strangers to applaud me,” she continued. “That was the difference between Bikini Kill and Le Tigre. In Le Tigre it was about me outperforming myself rather than pleasing the audience. I wasn’t looking for them to validate me. I knew what I was doing was good. So when I say I need to go back to Paris and fix it, it’s not because I give a shit that Paris hates me. It’s that I know I didn’t do my best.”

The inaugural This Ain’t A Picnic festival was headlined by The Strokes and LCD Soundsystem, with Phoebe Bridgers, IDLES, Wet Leg, Courtney Barnett, Turnstile and Caroline Polachek also appearing.

The post Watch Le Tigre reunite for their first show in over a decade appeared first on NME.