“Let me tell you something about getting tear-gassed,” Djamila Boden Azzouz tells us. “It turns out that shit is really painful.” Djamila knows this because she and the rest of Ithaca got a face full of it from the French police during a stop on their recent European tour. Walking the streets of Dijon before that night’s show, the band turned a corner to find themselves in the middle of one of the country’s admirably aggy protests against plans to raise the pension age. They arrived just in time for the plod to start deploying into the air what amounts to rubbing chilli in your eyes. Coughing and spluttering, face streaming like a burst water main, the singer thought: “This surely has to be it.” This was, in fact, the third incident on the tour that’s so ban...