Don’t touch the bananas. We’re using them in tonight’s show!” the diminutive Canadian orders the six-foot something male who’s eyeing up her backstage rider.
“All of them?”
“Yeah, all of them.”
Four hours later, the same woman, electro-punk prototype Peaches, and a male colleague, are biting into those very bananas on stage and spitting the semi-chewed remains at one another and at those (un)lucky enough to be in the front row of a rammed Temple Bar Music Centre. And that’s only part of a riotous live show that sees one female audience member clambering on stage unsolicited to lick Peaches’ feet, while another male admirer takes over lead vocals for the anthemic ‘Fuck The Pain Away’, from her debut album The Teaches Of Peaches. All in a day’s work for Peaches, the Canadian-born Berlin resident whose fusion of punk, hip-hop and electronica, along with her explicit lyrics and outrageous live show, have polarised public opinion. I’ve never met anyone who’s ambivalent about Peaches: people either love her outspoken boldness or despise everything she stands for.
Surprisingly, Peaches’ first foray into the world of the professional musician was more akin to Jewel than Joan Jett. She initially played acoustic guitar with a folk duo called Mermaid Café, named after a line in Joni Mitchell’s ‘Carey’.
“Actually, I didn’t plan on being a folk musician,” she recalls. “I had an acoustic guitar, as did a friend of mine. We got a gig playing at a venue and it went really well. I’d never played in front of people before and never thought of myself as a musician but the club liked it and a lot of people came out so we got a gig there every week for a year and a half. All of a sudden, it was like ‘I’m a musician’, but I didn’t want to play that music. But because I wasn’t really a musician I had to go through it, teach myself how to play stuff and figure out what I wanted to do. The only people I knew outside that were jazz people so then I started doing a lot of avant singing and weird timing shit, being all arty for the sake of it. I went from folky acoustic guitars to just going crazy.
“Then I got into ‘no wave’ and punk. I really learned how to play guitar and could fake my way through drums and keyboards. Then, a lot of my friends moved away and I still wanted to play music, so I just got a machine and learned to programme, and played just as I would if my friends were there, except I was the drummer and the bass player as well as the guitarist and singer now.”
Having been used to playing with a real band, surely to start using machines must have seemed quite sterile by comparison?
“I wanted to change that image of sterile electronics,” she stresses. “Every electronic band or DJ I saw were so goddamn boring: they were just twiddling knobs and pressing buttons. I wanted to bring a rock ‘n’ roll attitude and show people that electronic music doesn’t have to have this sterile, boring image or presentation. Auditorially, you don’t have to think of it as house or drum ‘n’ bass, which I hate: that is so over-produced, it disgusts my ears. I wanted to bring punk into it.”
All this time, Peaches, or Merrill Nisker as she was better known then, was holding down a day-job, teaching the youth of Canada.
“I developed a programme for kids, teaching music and drama in a very progressive way,” she explains. “It wasn’t a case of dressing the kids in little sailor outfits, putting them on stage and having their parents clap. There were actually no parents there. It was about exploring creativity, because I think kids growing up into adults don’t have a sense of creativity as part of their life. We either think someone is creative or they’re not, which is totally shit, because everyone should be able to feel comfortable with their creativity.
She gets a little defensive at this point: “All the moms loved it. They were saying, ‘I can’t believe you’re gonna stop teaching my kids. You’re so lucky you’re going off to be a rock star’.
“I sing about sex but I think everybody sings about sex,” she continues. “I think I have a refreshing way of singing about it. I’m a big fan of hip-hop. I’m a fan of shitty, macho lyrics. I love them: I think they’re really direct and they hit you in the way that punk music hits you. But I just wanted to switch that around so that I’m singing it, so that people can see it from another side.”
Obviously, just doing what she wants to do provokes a reaction from people, particularly when it comes to the live show. I would imagine that sometimes it incites quite extreme responses. By way of startling confirmation, she peels back her already short pants to reveal a massive purple-black bruise on her right inner thigh.
“That was a full can of beer thrown at me at the Donnington Festival at the weekend. Some drunk fucker really hated me at song two, so I told him to go see Lincoln Park, who were playing at the same time. You don’t come to a show to throw full cans of beer at somebody. But it’s OK,” she sighs. “People stare at me for the first five songs but then I win them over and they’re cheering. It’s depressing in a way because it’s like ‘What am I doing different that people see it as being so shocking?’ I have no idea why people see what I do so differently.
“But on the other side, there are so many people, so many really good musicians, who accept what I’m doing and see it as revolutionary and really exciting. But the best compliment to me is when these people just really like the music, people like Iggy Pop or Queens of the Stone Age.”
The Igster, it seems, is a big fan, even asking Peaches to appear on his last album, Skull Ring. Peaches returned the compliment for one of the highlights from her current opus, Fatherfucker, she and Iggy trading insults on the brilliant ‘Kick It’.
“I love the people who ask me how I got him on my album and how much I paid him to be there,” she grins, “because he actually approached me first. We met and then he came to see me play live and asked to use one of my songs. Then, he wanted to know if I had any more instrumentals that he could sing over.”
Having been a big Stooges fan, she jumped at the chance to work with one of her heroes.
“Iggy’s the real fucking deal. I saw him the last two nights in a row, and he had 300 people up on stage for ‘No Fun’ ‘cos it’s no fun to be alone. What 55 year old rocker who has everything is gonna bother? He has just not given up, in a performance way.”
It’s not just seminal punk rockers, though, who’ve been bitten by the Peaches bug. She has also collaborated with the far less credible Pink.
“Pink emailed me and asked me to rap on a song,” recalls Peaches, “and it was an alright song. I’d never been a rapper on someone’s song so I did it. It was fun and she was really sweet. I was also asked to write for Britney, but I thought, ‘What are they gonna really use?’. Also, I was writing my own album at the time and I’d rather focus on my own thing. Although I could have made a lot of money.”
Peaches has also appeared in a short film, directed by John Malcovic, to showcase a fashion collection by Bella Freud, who doesn’t like the traditional catwalk route.
“Anita Pallenberg is also in the movie,” Peaches recalls. “I was hanging out with her but I didn’t know it was her. She was really cool. But I don’t think it’s a particularly good movie.”
Acting aside, Peaches has toured and collaborated with an eclectic bunch of musicians, everyone from Bjork to Marilyn Manson. I wondered what was the weirdest crowd she has ever played to?
“Manson people,” she laughs. “They think they are black sheep, but they’re really just sheep in black. They are going to see the ‘God of Fuck’, the shocker, and here I was shocking them in the first two minutes.
“When people get offended or shocked I see where they’re at. I see where the mainstream is at,” she says. “I want to be accepted in the mainstream but I don’t want to change anything. I don’t want to water anything down but I want to be accepted. I don’t understand it. Hip-hoppers say way more shit than I do.”
I suppose that goes back to bad old-fashioned sexism. Most hip-hop stars are men, and explicit lyrics are almost expected of them, whereas girls are still supposed to sing about flowers and hearts. Fuck the pain away? God forbid.
“I do really respect a band like La Tigra, but I’m not like them,” she muses. “I don’t go out there saying ‘Let’s erase sexism’ or ‘I’m a feminist’. I’m just saying what I want to say but it [sexism] just rears its ugly head.”
Calling the current album Fatherfucker, was she not worried that certain stores wouldn’t stock it and certain radio stations wouldn’t play anything from it?
“That never stopped Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s album Nigga Please from having a hit song,” she spits. “So that argument is a piece of shit.”
Hmmmm. What about the power then of some retailers to decide what the public should be listening to? After all, this is a world where Wal-Mart can decide not to stock a CD because it contains explicit lyrics.
“That is also something that I don’t wanna associate myself with, just for the sake of watering myself down,” she says. “I’m sure the next album won’t be called Fuck Off Wal-Mart and maybe there won’t be a swear word in the title and everyone will say, ‘Peaches, you sold out’. But this was a good experiment for me. It’s amazing, because I know Wal-Mart carries the American Pimp movie uncut and I know you can get Nigga Please there, so again, it’s a bunch of bullshit. And what about the new guy who’s like the Eminem of the r’n’b world, Eamon? And in my song, I’m saying ‘Shake your dicks’. How many songs do you hear or videos do you see where it’s all shake your tits or shake your ass?”
Aside completely from the righteous indignation she often arouses by asking her audiences to shake their dicks, Peaches has had a big impact on the fringes of popular culture. There are regular Peaches lookalike contests held in various parts of the US, and some of her lyrics are studied as part of university courses in Toronto and Arkansas.
The Fatherfucker tour meanwhile, takes her right through until September, at which point she will have been on the road for a year, after which time she’ll get around to making another album. Does she ever get pissed off with constant touring?
“You just lose it,” she admits. “How can you not? But I don’t have band members so I’ve nobody to blame. I have dancers, though, although the Dublin show is one of only three shows they couldn’t come to, which is a shame, ‘cos they have really nice beards and dildos.”
Having witnessed the Peaches live experience at first hand, I don’t think the beards or dildos were even missed…