Musical Schizophrenia, The Surveillance State And Pain Over Pleasure

The inimitable Lydia Lunch has for decades now been many things to many people, all while being nobody but herself. Whether inhabiting one of the various guises she’s occupied over the years such as No Wave icon, post-punk prophet or all-round agent provocateur – to name but a few of her vocations over the journey – or just living her life to the fullest (as is her wont), Lunch has always stayed steadfastly true to her self and been guided by her inspiring, idiosyncratic worldview.

"I’m revisiting the madness – as if it ever left! "

As a teenager in the mid-‘70s she absconded to the big smoke of New York City and quickly ensconced herself in the burgeoning No Wave scene, founding the short-lived but seminal Teenage Jesus & The Jerks before embarking on a wildly diverse solo career that has been littered with left-field collaborations with artists from all over the planet. Her current outfit Retrovirus will be performing at the inaugural Supersense shindig, allowing Lunch to present a distilled yet united version of all the music she’s made since bursting onto the scene all those years ago.

“After 37 years of making music I have quite a repertoire,” she offers with a throaty laugh. “What’s exciting about Retrovirus to me is that a lot of these songs were never performed live – a lot of these bands never toured. Most people have never even heard most of my music, so it’s going to be all new for anybody who’s there. It’s interesting to revisit and reinvigorate this material. I think my strong point has always been my musical schizophrenia – when you can make a full circus sideshow out of it it’s a lot of fun. I’m revisiting the madness – as if it ever left!”

Fittingly Lunch as assembled a crack band to help her bring her life’s work alive onstage.

“Weasel Walter is amazing – not only is he one of the best improve guitar players and composers, but he’s basically a drummer; he’s maniacal,” she enthuses. “Then we’ve got Bob Bert who was in Pussy Galore and Sonic Youth and Tim Dahl my bass player who’s played with everyone from Marc Ribot to Yusef Lateef and jazz greats – he’s got a totally different feel and brings bass playing the type of which I’ve never heard before. It’s a small, frenzied, brutal unit – I couldn’t be happier."

It’s not surprising Lunch is embracing the brutal side of her musical vision with her current band; a recurring motif throughout her career has seemed to be a penchant for being combative and confrontational.

"The best way to do that is to put your fucking cock in their face and rock it out! "

“I’m definitely confronting,” she concurs. “I love to confront apathy, laziness, fear. I like to confront the psychotic patriarchal power structure that tries to keep us all in a state of panic and fear. I say the only rebellion against what’s going on right now – and it’s always been going on – is sheer unbridled hedonism and pleasure. An intimate form of pleasure, although it’s hard to get intimacy at a festival but we’ll see what we can do. I think that in these times – which are no different to feudal times, the war is never over to me. There’s a lot of things I’m combating against, and one of them is the surveillance state and mind control and economic control; the bigger picture. The best way to do that is to put your fucking cock in their face and rock it out!

“That explains my own political frenzy – I haven’t lived in America for eight years now; in fact I’m nomadic at the moment – but pleasure is the only real rebellion at this point. And I don’t mean a weekend beer binge, I mean learning to appreciate every little thing in your life and not take anything for granted. I know that might sound bizarre coming from a… whatever you want to call me, but it’s really about reclaiming what’s rightfully ours. We are in the fucking Garden Of Eden; we’ve just turned it into Hell and I’m not facing that fact!”

It does seem in this age of media saturation – much of which veers towards the depressing – that it’s increasingly easy to overlook how good we have things in so many ways.

“It’s very easy because of the campaigning and fear-mongering telling us that we have a lot to be frightened about – especially coming from America. They tell us that we should all be in a state of panic, but I prefer pleasure to panic and there’s nothing they can do about it – a bomb’s not going to drop on my head today and until it does I think it’s time to party. I can’t outgun them but I can out-party them, and I will be the last man standing. It’s too much fun. War will never be over so what can we do? One small woman’s big mouth can’t do anything about it, but at least I can inspire people to do more with their lives than just hiding in the corner. I can be the mouthpiece for people’s frustrations or anger, I can be the embodiment of their sexual zeitgeist, I can hope to represent some kind of figure that is at least not going to take it lying down – unless I’m lying on top!”

“I don’t seem to get tired of the everyday battle that I rage in my everyday life as an ex-American. I don’t know why I’m so concerned – I have my own private utopia and I really don’t need to be – but I’m still obsessed always with injustice, with victimisation, with the misery of people. Maybe it’s because I wish they could be more like me – we have our concerns and we do something about it, which in my case is to never shut up about it. But then in our personal lives we have to claim it back because whether you’re a victim of familial abuse or political abuse or economic or racist or sexist, we’ve all been victimised in one way or another – how are we supposed to live? We have to reclaim ourselves. You have to be all that you can be.

"Everyone needs to tell their story, even if it’s only to your cat or dog."

“I don’t know when I became so fucking positive but I’ve always been the cheerleader for the underground and the underdog, which is why I’ve always collaborated with so many people. People find it really easy to work with me – I’m a conceptualist, so when I decide on a musical concept it’s always ‘What is the best music and who is the best person for it?’ It’s never like, ‘I’d like to work with that person’ – I never thought that ever, it’s not the way I work. The concept comes first. I just look at my career as a 37-year public psychotherapy session that I know other tortured individuals have come to me for some kind of relief – that’s why I still do what I do. With the act of creating and collaborating, I teach a lot of workshops now – I teach a lot of workshops for women writers, teaching them how to get their words off the page and onto the stage. It’s very empowering for women to find their voice because everyone needs to tell their story, even if it’s only to your cat or dog we’ve got to get our stories out. The story circle is our most ancient art-form. All my lyrics are stories, my life is an open book and I’m reading it for you live – you don’t even have to read it!”

Lunch has long surrounded herself with words, and explains that she’s always found it easy to harness their inherent power to use for her own means.

“I started writing at nine – I think of myself first and foremost as a historian of our times, a journalist,” she tells. “I use music as the machine gun to back up the words. Even in my photographs the words are most important, the point is what’s important. And I do feel that I am the tongue for those who have no mouth from which to scream. I feel like it’s my calling, and when I did start to talk about a lot the deeper issues there was nobody really talking about it, and then there were a few of us like Jello Biafra and Henry Rollins and Exene Cervenka and Wanda Coleman who all started coming out with political and personal stories – it all started to blossom at the same time. And I still curate a lot of spoken word shows and events, I still think it’s very important.

“But going back to the surveillance state and technology, what I fear in technology now is forget the surveillance bit – I don’t think they’re looking at me, but if they did they’d be getting a fucking good show and I don’t give a shit there’s six billion other people they can follow – but the other side of technology is that kids’ imaginations are being reduced from the big picture to something that fits in the palm of their hand, and this means that the enemy has won. You’re reducing your vision to something that’s smaller than the palm of your hand and you’re losing the bigger picture. When you’re using 140 characters to communicate with people you’re not talking to them directly, looking them in the face, eye to eye. Even when I’m onstage with however many people before me I’m looking into everbody’s fucking eyes there, because I want to go in and I want you to come in.

"That’s the problem with technology, it falsifies the idea that we have this giant community – it’s a giant community of strangers."

“That’s the problem with technology, it falsifies the idea that we have this giant community – it’s a giant community of strangers, and you don’t know what they look like, you don’t know how they smell. If you can’t smell them you might not know what they’re about – I want to smell my friends as well as my enemies! I don’t do Facebook – you’re not my friend until I look you in the eye, and even then you might not be my friend. That’s just another form of technology designed to keep people away from each other and not with each other – your eyes are electronically hypnotised to something that’s making you not see the bigger picture, and that’s a real danger. Put the mod cons down!”

Lunch sees these rampant changes as symptomatic of a greater societal ‘dumbing down’, but sees a positive in gatherings like Supersense.

“Oh fuck yes, if it gets any dumber I don’t know what we’re going to do!” she thunders. “Could the cultural exports from either of our countries get much dumber than the Kardashians? What, so you’re famous for being famous? And rich? Being famous because you’re rich is what the world is about now – cultural bankruptcy and spiritual disintegration – that’s why festivals like this are so important. Bringing multi-generational artists like John Cale and [Brian] Eno and Jon Spencer is brilliant, I’m really excited about this festival. I think it’s a really good line-up and has good intentions.”

Lunch has a long history with Australia and some of our musical exports, but this trip will be her first foray Down Under since she did toured with her long-time partner-in-crime, the late Rowland S Howard, off the back of their 1991 collaboration album Shotgun Wedding.

“I was trying to remember if I’d been back since then, but I think that was the last one,” she smiles. “I hope to come back soon and get into some art spaces – I’d love to bring my installation of the photographic and archival exhibit and do some spoken-word, so I’m hoping that I get invited back next year. I love Australia – I love the music that’s there and I love the people. I’m doing a Rowland Howard song while I’m there – we’ll be doing Still Burning in the Retrovirus set. It’s very moving for me to do it.”

Lunch built up a strong rapport with whole The Birthday Party crew (for whom Howard played guitar) very early on in the piece.

"I’m not there to bully them, I’m bullying the bullies!"

“Yeah, I was in LA and I heard their first records and then I went to New York and they just happened to be doing their first show there to about 20 people, and I immediately just went up to Rowland and said, ‘Oh my God, I love you!’” she remembers. “And he knew my work which was amazing – he knew Teenage Jesus and [1980 debut solo album] Queen Of Siam – and he immediately proposed to me that we do Some Velvet Morning, and at that point other than us nobody really knew who Lee Hazlewood was. He had a resurgence a few years later when people started to discover who Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra were, but he wasn’t really in vogue at that moment. I said, ‘I’m moving to London’ and that was it – I just decided not to go back to LA and moved to London and worked with Rowland and The Birthday Party. The Birthday Party to me at that time was the best band in the world, and Rowland S Howard was one of the best three guitar players in the world. I brought him to New Orleans to write all of Shotgun Wedding and we toured quite a few times – it was a really beautiful and moving time in my life, with someone who was extremely sensitive and special and talented. I miss him dearly, and I’m so happy that I had the chance to work with him.”

This bond seemed mutual, as Howard seemed to share an equal affinity with Lunch’s work as well.

“We just loved each other dearly,” she continues. “We had such an immediate understanding and connection, and what’s interesting is that he was so sensitive and so sweet and so funny and people just think that I’m like a bull rushing through the china shop, but then to somebody from the outside it’s always the really sensitive and shy guys that aren’t afraid of me because I’m there to protect them. I’m not there to bully them, I’m bullying the bullies! I’m not bullying the average man – the average man doesn’t have enough power for me to worry about threatening, it’s all about the power structure. So my fans are often the sensitive, sweet and shy guys and so are a lot of the musicians I work with – Thurston Moore is really sensitive, so is James Johnston from Gallon Drunk.

“People like to paint their fears of a Kali-esque, articulate war whore upon me, but if they knew me for two minutes – like you’re knowing me now – they’d understand that I love to laugh, I love to encourage people – I want everybody to have a good time – and I really love to be a cheerleader to people. I guess just because I’ve never had any fear or insecurity, I just always knew that what I need to do is what I’m going to do is what I will do is what I shall do. I think there’s a lot of other people like that too, and sometimes they just need that encouragement and push in the morning; ‘Let’s get out there and do it!’ We need to create a sacred space which is art where no bullshit comes in – art is the salve to the universal wound, that’s how I look at it. Here comes the shamans!”

"Did Suicide implant and impregnate me with that musical schizophrenia?’"

In recent years Lunch as been working on the ongoing project The Jeffrey Lee Pierce Sessions Project, which is presenting previously-unreleased work from the much-missed frontman of The Gun Club.

“I had a small affinity with Jeffrey in the time leading up to his death,” she reflects. “Obviously a lot of the people I’ve worked with – contemporaries and people I’ve worked around – have had really serious drug and alcohol problems. I was the suspicious one because I wasn’t a junkie or an addict – so here I am still doing drugs and drinking but I’m not fucked up so I must be the enemy, which is bizarre. And I kind of had that thing with Jeffrey, where he was just so fucked up that it was intolerable to me. I really love Kid Congo [Powers] who was in bands with Jeffrey, he’s one of my oldest friends. But I’ve loved working on the [Jeffrey Lee Pierce] Session Project with Cypress Grove, who used to play a lot with Jeffrey. Cypress and I recently released our own album, A Fistful Of Desert Blues – it’s channeling my inner-Bobby Gentry. It’s really a continuation of the work I did with Rowland – to me it’s a beautiful Sunday afternoon record, just one of my many sides that I mightn’t necessarily show that often. I’m really fond of that album.”

Another prominent band who Lunch has enjoyed a long association is influential electro-punk act Suicide, the New York duo of Alan Vega and Marty Rev who burned so brightly in the late-‘70s and early-‘80s

“It’s funny you should ask me that, because last night at 4am I finished my introduction to a book that the great English music writer

Chris Needs is writing about Suicide,” she gushes. “They were my first friends in New York – they were the first show I saw when I was sixteen and ran away to New York. There were ten people there and they took me in, I was younger than Marty Rev’s son at the time but I just felt at home – I think it was the music that I’d wanted to hear my whole life. Live they were terrifying! Onstage the experience was so intense, but then you go back and what was so contrarian and musically schizophrenic about them – and maybe they’re the ones who embedded it in me – but they’d go from Frankie Teardrop which will scare the pants off of you, to Dream Baby Dream to Johnny to some doo wop and then to some of the newer stuff which is like trance mumbo jumbo. So I’m like, ‘Did Suicide implant and impregnate me with that musical schizophrenia?’

“There are certain tribes that are so outside of everything and everyone that even a coven is too big to call it, and in a sense that was how I felt when I met Suicide. Because there were so few of us – there were me and them, maybe Von LMO – that were so bruisingly harsh but underneath it there was this battered beauty, and I really related to that. It really inspired me, and seeing them at the first show in New York when I was sixteen was one of the most inspiring nights of my life. The last two words I say to them in the book’s intro are ‘thank you’. Last year I got a great opportunity – Alan [Vega] was too sick to do a show, so I got to do a whole Alan Vega show with Mark Hurtado who did has last album! I got to do Harlem and I got to do Dream Baby Dream! So amazing.”

"I was never punk rock. Call me what you will for the way I look."

Lunch became virtually synonymous with New York’s disparate and avant-garde No Wave scene that was flourishing around this same time – could she tell at the time that something special was happening or did it only take on import with the benefit of hindsight?

“Well we felt special because we hated everybody else,” she ponders. “We were really a hateful coven because we were so disappointed in the ‘60s and Nixon and Charles Manson’s ‘Summer Of Hate’ and the Vietnam War and the bankruptcy of New York… although we were victims of political and individual assassination attempts – in that the American political system was trying to stifle anyone with ideas. It was similar in Britain, except that punk reflected the social situation while No Wave reflected the personal insanity of people. And the difference between punk and No Wave is that you know what punk sounded like but No Wave didn’t sound anything like any of itself – it was really a radical break from traditional rock or whatever had influenced us. So it felt special – it’s never a movement unless it’s in retrospect – but I felt always far more dada and surrealist and anti-Warhol. I was never punk rock. Call me what you will for the way I look – you can call me punk or you can call me goth or you can call me the girl I wish lived next door to me, I’m cute and I know it – but [No Wave] was really a cry of personal rebellion and personal insanity, and really diverse people with diverse talents. A lot of them had art backgrounds – a lot of the no wave musicians came out of art school which was interesting, they came with a different perspective.

"The problem with a lot of women in music now – they think they’re beautiful in their leotards as middle-age women walking around pretending that they’re having sex."

“Nobody likes three-chord rock so it made the music a lot more difficult. The audience wasn’t there to pogo and dance and feel like we’re all in this together, we felt like we were all fucking isolated and in this holding pattern in this insane asylum the size of a city. We’re having a time – it might be a good time or a bad time, but let’s just do something. It was exciting. I am 100% No Wave. I’m not the last living survivor, but I’m a big upholder of No Wave which is why Retrovirus is important to me – it’s extremely No Wave. To me it’s related to the absurdism of dada and surrealism and situationist – it’s dissonant, it’s audience un-friendly, it’s extreme, it’s violent and all that makes it a hell of a lot of fun. It’s urgent, and I always tell women that they shouldn’t be afraid to be ugly. This is the problem with a lot of women in music now – they think they’re beautiful in their leotards as middle-age women walking around pretending that they’re having sex but we all know that they hold out, their leotards smell bad and dance music sucks. I don’t get it. Don’t be afraid to be ugly, maybe you’ll make some good music sisters!”

And, fittingly, Lunch has no aspersions about her aspirations and where they might take her – for her it is, and always will be, all about the art and the message.

“Nothing’s been easy for me but it hasn’t stopped me from doing it – I’m not looking for the easy way out,” she fires. “I didn’t start doing music because I thought it was going to be a ticket to buy a fucking house in the country – I started doing it because I had no choice because my blood was burning and if I didn’t I was going to hurt somebody. I didn’t take this as a commercial concept. My line is ‘if you don’t have a vision don’t give it a sound’, and that’s what’s wrong with music nowadays – too much sound and not enough vision.”

Musical Schizophrenia, The Surveillance State And Pain Over Pleasure

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