Before the turn of the millennium the electropunk pioneer Peaches was in crisis. The artist and provocateur also known as Merrill Nisker was weathering a bad break-up and a serious illness. “I had an operation – and it was cancer,” she says. “It made me think I need to live my life. I want to be a musician. I want to be creative all the time.”
Working from a mouse- and cockroach-riddled apartment on a Roland MC-505 Groovebox, a combination drum machine and dance-music sequencer, Peaches would bounce back from her thyroid-cancer diagnosis with The Teaches of Peaches, a sexually charged Molotov cocktail of an album. She made it after moving to Berlin in 2000 and signing to the city’s hip Kitty-Yo record label.
“Being from Toronto, the obvious place to move would have been New York or maybe London,” the Canadian says. “But I felt that would cut the life out of me. Berlin was cheap. There was a lot of space. You could do what you wanted – quite literally – because you didn’t need to have a day job. There were opportunities in terms of being open to ideas. That was really special. I had a cheap studio to work out of. I was involved in a lot of very spontaneous parties. It was a different time then. I was very privileged to be there.”
Village Voice, the New York alternative weekly, named The Teaches of Peaches one of the albums of the year. The Guardian included it in its 2007 selection of 1,000 albums to hear before you die, calling it “confrontational and vulgar, perching on the line that separates feminism and filth”.
That’s a big noise for a small Groovebox. “I got the machine originally because I walked into a music shop,” Peaches says. “It was on display, and I just tried it out. I had a lot of friends who I had jammed or made music with who had moved away. This gave me an opportunity to feel like I was a band, because I could make drum beats and bass sounds and synthesisers and guitar riffs and all that stuff. It was definitely primitive. But it wasn’t so limited. I used it to its full capacity. I used it like a punk instrument. If you think about punk, it’s a primitive sound. A punk band is guitar, bass and drums.”
Teaches of Peaches, a new documentary portrait by Philipp Fussenegger and Judy Landkammer that features at next weekend’s Gaze film festival, catches up with the electroclash artist as she prepares for a tour marking 20 years of the eponymous album. Bare-breasted under a platinum mullet, Peaches has lost none of her erotic edge.
“People tend to be something like the polar opposite of how they are on stage,” says her long-time collaborator Chilly Gonzales. “So the crazy musician is probably a fairly uncrazy person. If you’re asking me if there are orgies backstage at Peaches shows because of a superficial, two-dimensional view of her song subject matter, the answer is: only occasionally.”
Peaches is in no mood for easy nostalgia. Throughout the documentary the singer-songwriter behind F**k the Pain Away, Lovertits and Shake Yer Dix remains determined to reinvent and revitalise her best-loved hits, both musically and sexually.
“I wanted to make the show as if the machine jumped out of itself and became a live human in terms of instrumentation and embellishments,” Peaches says. “I wanted the beatbox to break out and dance. From my perspective, performing those tracks has changed. It’s less of a fight and more of a celebration. There’s a lot more unity and understanding.”
The film chronicles Peaches’ evolution from a creative music teacher for kids to an incendiary artist for adults only. She still fondly recalls her time as a teacher. Archive footage shows her teaching through song and rhythm. “And I guess I also started asking myself a lot of questions. There was an emphasis on presentation rather than learning or progression,” she says. “There was no attempt to learn or understand what creativity is. So that’s why I started teaching kids in that way.”
In a late and (understandably) tetchy scene, Peaches – who performs in a “Thank God for abortion” T-shirt – is quizzed about her fiercely pro-choice stance. “Even if it was a personal issue for me, it would still be a political issue,” she says. “I find that question a little bit leading, because it should be a political issue for everybody … You wouldn’t ask that of a man.”
Her understanding of and engagement with patriarchal and repressive structures has long been part of her music. Released within a year of The Teaches of Peaches, Fatherf**ker sought to dismantle the gendered language of pop and rock. As the critic Sasha Geffen notes, 20 years after The Teaches of Peaches “two of popular music’s brightest stars” – Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion – “released a song called Wap, an acronym for a phrase that might be spelled out in full on a Peaches tracklist”.
“The Teaches of Peaches was very much a breakout album,” the singer says. “I think Fatherf**ker pushed it much further, in a far more queer way. Language will always remain a focus for me. It’s still rooted in the patriarchal system. We still have to keep it in check. It was interesting, because for the queer community Fatherf**ker was such a seminal album, but people in the music industry hated it. And that told me that I don’t really care about the industry. And thank you very much for your opinion, but I will continue to do things this way.”
F**k the Pain Away, Peaches’ anthemic 2000 hit, remains a charged spectacle on stage, even if the mainstream has caught up with the sentiment. In Lost in Translation, Sofia Coppola’s 2003 film, Bill Murray mournfully listens to the tune in a Japanese strip club. “I always said I want the mainstream to come closer to me,” Peaches says in the new film. “And I said that, like, ooh, that sounds cool. But I didn’t think it was really going to happen. And it did.” The track has subsequently also featured on South Park, 30 Rock and The Handmaid’s Tale.
“I’m not mad at the big song,” Peaches says. “The big song has kept my career going. I feel very privileged, because F**k the Pain Away has resonated with people so deeply. It has continued to grow and is out there for people to discover, from young people to all the people who have used it in TV and movies in ways that represent what it is about. That is always special.”
Teaches of Peaches is screening on Friday, August 2nd, as part of Gaze International LGBTQIA Festival. Peaches performs with Christeene in The Lion the Witch and the Cobra at the National Concert Hall, Dublin, on Sunday, October 27th
Gaze 2024: Six more to see
All of Us Strangers: The year’s biggest LGBTQ box-office hit, starring Paul Mescal and Andrew Scott, returns to Gaze for a special screening with its director, Andrew Haigh. The film-maker will be in conversation after the screening, hosted by Russell Tovey, with questions from any audience member able to speak through the inevitable sobbing.
The Queen of My Dreams: Fawzia Mirza’s spirited dramedy skips lightly between different periods as its queer Pakistani-Canadian heroine, Azra (Sex Lives of College Girls star Amrit Kaur), returns to her ancestral home and unaccepting mother to attend a family funeral. Bollywood vibes and Technicolor tableaux frame the intergenerational tensions.
Permissible Beauty: Why are some kinds of beauty more highly valued than others? And who decides? The art historian David McAlmont, the acclaimed portrait photographer Robert Taylor and the film-maker Mark Thomas converge in this vital questioning of colonisation and aesthetics, which features interviews, music and photography.
Close to You: The Oscar nominee Elliot Page stars as Sam, a trans man who returns home for his estranged father’s birthday after many years. Along the way Sam encounters his old girlfriend. He’s surprised there is still a romantic spark between them. A welcome return for the Canadian actor.
She Is Conann: The lesbian, feminist revision of Conan the Barbarian you didn’t know you needed. The singular French auteur Bertrand Mandico casts five statuesque female stars in the title role. Expect monochrome glamour and queerness. How queer? The only male role is played by Elina Löwensohn.
Solo: Romantic rivalry! Opera! Chaka Khan! Félix Maritaud, the 120 BPM and Sauvage star, will be in attendance at the Irish premiere of Sophie Dupuis’s drag-themed melodrama. Maritaud has a terrific scene partner in Théodore Pellerin (of Beau Is Afraid) as the actors square up for something like All About Eve with lip-synching.
