“The only hope for rock n roll”, wrote Lester Bangs in 1981, “aside from everybody playing nothing but atonal noise through arbiter distorters, is women.”
He had one particular woman in mind; Lydia Lunch.
“He really loved me,” she laughs. “I’ve no idea why, but he did.”
There were of course, other women on the scene when the 14-year-old Lydia (Koch, as she was then known) hit a feverish New York back in 1973. Indeed, two such grande dames, Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon and the late Plasmatics frontwoman Wendy O. Williams, hail from her hometown of Rochester, New York.
“I don’t know what it was about that place,” she says. “Maybe we were all forged in the love canal. It was the filthiest river in all America.”
There is, however, only one Lydia Lunch, though frequently her schizoid musical output suggests an entire Amazon throng. There’s Lydia, the primal screamer, the instigator who broke through in ’75 with no-wave saboteurs Teenage Jesus And The Jerks, glowered through Stinkfist and spat bullets (alongside Ms. Gordon) on Harry Crews. Then, there’s seedier, jazzier Lady Scarface Lunch, the badder girl cabaret frau of Queen Of Siam, performing moving Lee Hazelwood/Nancy Sinatra duets with ex-Crime and Birthday Party axeman Rowland S. Howard.
Neither Lydia, alas, has been highly visible in recent times. Though even her no-wave beginnings privileged personal fury over the societal anger of British punk, the past decade has seen Ms. Lunch expanding her thesis on the world, through spoken-word performances and academic writing. The brimstone still simmers and spills, but there’s a whole new row of ducks to take aim at.
“I’m horrified at everything that’s going on,” she explains. “I wish you could look at New Orleans and say ‘this is the end’, but we’re besieged by disaster. We play stupid pointless war games with people’s lives and billions of dollars for an obvious profit margin. I mean, I hate to harp on this, but under the patriarchy it’s a given – greed and arrogance are strengths. We should know better by now, but of course we don’t.”
Though she has continued recording music over the past decade and remains a most prolific artist in photography, underground film and installation galleries, last year’s Smoke In The Shadows would prove her first full-length album since 1999. A welcome return to the noir-ish carnality of Queen Of Siam, Smoke is a splendidly spooky affair marrying her characteristic crunching guitar, thwarted Barry Adamson stylings and experimental rap (on Trick Baby) and dub (Sway) sounds.
“It took a really long time to do,” admits Lydia. “It started with me being asked to take part in a Tom Waits tribute record and I worked with Nels Cline on that, whom I adore. There ended up being a lot of delegation between Nels, Len Del Rio and Tommy Grenas to get the album done. I wanted so many concepts that that became a challenge. I wanted a slow, dark poison in there, because I’m a nocturnal person and that’s what I want to listen to. It’s strange as well, because I find so much modern music disagreeable that it can be disheartening, but at the same time it encourages you. If everything sounds awful then you go make the record yourself.”
Lydia’s Smoke In The Shadows tour will grace Dublin this October 2nd and happily, we can expect the full maelstrom. There is, quite literally, nothing to suggest that age has mellowed or tempered her force.
“I feel as a female, because so few of us are confrontational, that what I do is like a social calling. Our duty is to rally against the enemy of the individual that is ultimately the enemy of the people. If you meet me, I’m a very pleasant person to be around, and I never get mad with anyone personally. But there’s so much to be angry about. There’s capitalism and the patriarchy and the entire western way of life to contend with. I don’t think that these grand injustices will get solved in my lifetime but how could I not complain?”