Peaches: ‘I want to show my body even more now it’s older’

Portrait by Suki Dhanda

In a world where women over 45 are presented as problems to be solved by hormone replacement therapy, tweakments and wild swimming, Peaches, 59, operates in a different arena. I meet the Canadian singer-performer in a freezing photo studio in east London, where she is rolling on the icy floor dressed in a rubber and mesh leotard, plus floaty mesh cloak. Her hair, a combination of bleached and blackened buzzcut and curls, is like three styles in one. She has silver tears dripping from each heavily kohl-lined eye. Campy and imperious, she gazes directly into the camera, her lipsticked mouth in a smile-snarl. “It’s important to me to have both humour and power,” says Peaches.

It has been 26 years since the release of her first album, The Teaches of Peaches. An electro-clash classic, mixing 1980s synth-punk sounds with sex-positive spoken lyrics, it ushered in what is now called indie sleaze and boasted, in its first track, Fuck the Pain Away, an unexpected generational anthem. Peaches’s subsequent LPs – Fatherfucker, Impeach My Bush, I Feel Cream and Rub, released between 2003 and 2015 – experimented with punk, rock’n’roll, electro, glam and house, while lyrically taking on sexual and gender norms, from body image to sex roles.

More performance artist than straightforward pop singer, she has, over the years, branched out from music. Among other things, she has performed Jesus Christ Superstar in its entirety, solo; written and toured an electro opera, Peaches Does Herself; appeared in a fashion film directed by John Malkovich; performed Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece, with the artist’s blessing;  collaborated with Iggy Pop, Christina Aguilera, Kim Gordon and REM; and attempted to write songs with Kelis – a difficult encounter that ended when Peaches walked into a glass door and bust her own nose. “I went boom into the glass, and then I went to the bathroom and saw the blood and was, like: ‘Sorry Kelis, I’m going to go home.’”

Her work – confrontational, sexual, funny, ludicrous – can make Peaches (real name Merrill Nisker, under which she released the 1995 album Fancypants Hoodlum) seem intimidating, though, actually, she’s a sweetheart – smaller than you might expect and easy to talk to. Born in Toronto, she’s lived in Berlin for more than 20 years and gets her phone out to show me photos of German male carpenters in traditional outfits that wear kick flares with button waistcoats and top hats. “Look!” she says delightedly. “They turn up to work like that!” Photoshoot over, she’s changed into her own clothes: a black knee-length hoodie, leather trousers and flatforms so high she looks like she’s wearing breeze blocks strapped to her shoes. We repair to a comfortable hotel bar. Please imagine the following discussion with soft piano jazz piped underneath.

No Lube So Rude, Peaches’s first album in more than 10 years, is released in February, with the singles Not in Your Mouth None of Your Business, Fuck Your Face and the title track already out. Why lube, Peaches?

“If you think about the world now, its irritation and friction between people,” she says. “We need something to help smooth things out between us. And I think lube will do that. Everybody needs lube – it’s not just for menopausal dry vaginas. Everybody has to use it and not be embarrassed by it and not have shame. Don’t turn up to a party without your lube. You wouldn’t show up without a mouthguard or a condom. Bring the necessary equipment.”

Peaches’s parties might not be the same as the ones I go to (a bottle of prosecco is usually enough), but her video for No Lube So Rude makes them look fun. In it, she strides around a trailer park in a hot pink boiler suit, before stripping off to cavort with people of varying ages in a caravan. There’s much brandishing of fists and nethers, bumping and humping. Peaches’s expression is often outre Kenneth Williams, and the overall effect is funny and lascivious (also very German, somehow). Plus, the song is unbelievably catchy.

She can make singalong bangers without seeming to try. There’s another one on her new LP: Hanging Titties, a celebration of the ageing mammary gland. “Titties hang for everybody,” she says cheerfully. “The juice is coming out, they’re more stringy and it’s kind of fun. It’s reality.” You think of how often she ends up topless on stage, fearless and scary sexy on her own terms.

We chat about what she’s been up to in the decade since her last album. Two documentaries have been made about her, Teaches of Peaches and Peaches Goes Bananas, both of which she was very involved in. She toured Rub for three years, played the lead role in Bertolt Brecht’s The Seven Deadly Sins in Stuttgart, staged an anniversary tour for The Teaches of Peaches and co-curated a photobook of her life. She also made art involving her lyrics and music, “but without me there”, at her first solo exhibition, Whose Jizz Is This?, shown at Hamburg’s Kunstverein art centre.

This included an installation of animatronic sex toys she called “fleshies”. “Double masturbators emancipating themselves,” she explains, “saying: ‘Fuck humans, we have the apparati to enjoy ourselves with each other, we no longer have to be tools.’” To celebrate this liberation, she adds, there was a huge fleshie fountain, and also a therapy group, “where they talked about how they’d been left on the floor and never washed. And at the end of each act, there were three fleshies that sang to you about their various stages of struggle.”

In late 2020, during this same period, Peaches’s much-loved older sister died of cancer, and since then, her mother has suffered a stroke. So, in reality, we’re lucky to get another album from Peaches, who is always busy and always fielding requests (“I rarely say no when I’m asked”). Given that her creative approach is experimental and unprecious – she’s an extrovert who likes collaboration – does she ever fancy staying in and slowing down? “Actually, I have started asking myself to be OK with sad times, with slower times. It’s hard for me because I’m used to going out and being social. Really being alone with yourself, going into those feelings ... I could work on that more.”

Her new LP, which features more live sounds than her usual minimal synths (there’s a horn section) was made with a new producer, a mysterious figure known as the Squirt Deluxe. She refuses to identify them, instead calling them “a spirit that came to me”. Her obfuscation makes me wonder if it’s Peaches herself – she says no – or maybe her long-term partner, Black Cracker (real name Ellison Renee Glenn), an MC, poet, producer, visual artist, performer and publisher. Glenn features in the Teaches of Peaches documentary and the track title Not in Your Mouth None of Your Business comes from a brilliant speech he makes in the film. Peaches is pleased I spotted it.Glenn, who is trans, says that Peaches is always being asked how she identifies: is she queer, is she a lesbian, what? “But it doesn’t matter,” he says in the documentary. “We are together, we love each other. I don’t think our genitalia or the function of our genitalia defines either of us, or the quality of our love. If you’re sucking on it, then it’s relevant. If it’s not in your mouth, it’s not your business.”

Anyway, they seem delightfully devoted to one another, living together in a two-floor rented apartment in Prenzlauer Berg in east Berlin, where Peaches keeps all her old costumes made by Vaughan Alexander, Charlie Le Mindu, and John Renaud, stuff such as her vulva hat, multi-boob bra, pink hot pants, Cousin Itt wig, and her “prolapsed organs” rubber outfit, enormous Rapunzel braid dress, her hairy sex-Sasquatch body suit. “All made by people around me, the community I’m in. And all stored, ready to come alive like the Muppets!”

Peaches grew up in Toronto, the youngest of three. She flailed a little in her 20s, playing in folk group Mermaid Cafe and later creating a band called the Shit, with Chilly Gonzales and others. She also worked as a music teacher for young children: “If we were doing Peter Pan, and seven kids wanted to be Captain Hook, one Wendy, and no one wanted to be Peter Pan, then cool.” She refused to instil in them the idea of being “good” at singing or performing, remembering when she was young, “and I had a big part in a school play, and all of a sudden that was taken off me and I had the smallest part. They didn’t like the way I was [doing it]”.

She was 33 when The Teaches of Peaches came out, after a long-term relationship ended and she had an operation to remove her thyroid cancer: “The best cancer,” she shrugs now. “It woke me up – like, while I’m healthy, I must do what I need to do.” She wrote the album solo on a Roland MC-505 Groovebox while she was living with singer-songwriter Feist in a flat above Come As You Are, a queer sex shop in Toronto.

She could have stayed on pop’s edges, if it wasn’t for her performance of Fuck the Pain Away at local club the Rialto, “to around 10 people”. At the time, Peaches was still working out how the song hung together; where the chorus went, where the verse was. So she was grateful when, after the gig, “a soundwoman named Marleen came up to me, and said: ‘I made a tape, a board mix.’” The single is that same board mix. It proved an underground hit, loved from the start, as were Peaches’s live shows. Journalist Alex Needham, who worked at T the Face magazine at the time, recalled her, in her hot pants with her body hair poking out as the epitome of “this sexual rock ‘n’’n’roll. And also, the gender fluidity that we take for granted now.” In 2003, she supported Marilyn Manson to an indifferent crowd and literally kicked the front row into enjoying her gig.

When she thinks about that time now, she says: “I don’t want to say I was possessed, but I needed to get it out.” She didn’t want to lean into her hard times – “those victim tropes,” she says. “And I didn’t want to sing on The Teaches of Peaches because I didn’t want to be judged on the way I sing. I wanted the message to be direct and not about my past.” It was like a starting gun being fired; she’s gone in and out of favour, but hasn’t stopped since.

From the beginning, Peaches challenged accepted notions of beauty and gender. “If your eyelashes are long, then you are beautiful, if your hair is long too. But if your pubic hairs are long, that isn’t beautiful. Or if you have hair under your arms. But it’s all hair,” she says now. She feels like attitudes around hair have changed a bit; less so questions about how we think about ageing, especially female ageing.

Famously, the NME titled its review of one of her first UK gigs “Grandma, you’re scaring the kids”, and more than a decade later Pitchfork published an unbelievably patronising review of Rub: “There is now plenty of reason to believe that [Peaches] may have the skills and vision necessary to produce interesting, emotionally affecting work well beyond menopause.” Peaches doesn’t care. “I want to show my body out even more now it’s older,” she says with relish. “Here ya go!”

She’s operated outside the mainstream for years and feels now, finally, that it’s moving towards her. She loves Charli XCX – “Her stage show was so good” – and admires Billie Eilish for “calling out the billionaires”.

“I think about Doechii’s song Nissan Altima. It has that line in it – ‘get your dicks up’ – and you’re just like, yes!”

Peaches’s Dick in the Air did the same thing as Nissan Altima more than a decade ago, but there’s no time to acknowledge this: she’s too busy hyping up those who have come after her.

“Billie Eilish, Chappell Roan; these are massive pop stars who are outwardly queer and singing about being outwardly queer, not just like: ‘Oh, they’re queer, shhh,’” she says. “And Lorde! I was taken to see her show and she was amazing. Not boring and also not pandering, taking her pants [trousers] off for one song and then just putting them back on. It was a very non-binary sexuality. Really sexual, but not gendered. Inspiring.”

Yes. You know, like Peaches.

No Lube So Rude is out on Kill Rock Stars on 20 February