Peaches plays the Phoenix Concert Theatre this Sunday, September 22, with Princess Superstar. Info here.
There’s no new album, no tour: it’s a one-off as part of a series the venue is putting on before it shutters in January. It’s inviting pivotal performers from its past to go out with a blast. No one is likely to do that better than Peaches—in her hometown.
(This week’s live music listings are here.)
Peaches is a central figure in my book Hearts on Fire: Six Years That Changed Canadian Music 2000-05. Peaches was one of the first Canadian artists—alongside Godspeed You Black Emperor and the New Pornographers—who truly kickstarted the era I write about, by convincing the world that Canadians was way weirder (and musically diverse) than our major musical exports would suggest.
The Teaches of Peaches came out in 2000 (preceded by an EP that couldn’t get her arrested in Canada) and remains widely influential to this day. Not just heard in other artists’ work, but the original itself—and I know this because I DJ’ed a party for 25-year-old grad students two years ago where “Fuck the Pain Away” was one of the biggest hits of the night. Those kids weren’t even born when that song came out. Maybe they were born because that song came out.
The Teaches of Peaches is not even her best record—far from it, as they keep getting better—though its raw and direct appeal is undeniable.
Here’s a NSFW trailer for a new documentary that just played at TIFF:
And here is something else entirely: a CBC-TV news clip about her 1990 Indigo Girls-esque band Mermaid Café, a “homemade acoustic pizza” (?!) band who used to pack the Cabana Room with Jewish lesbians from North York and earnest songs about homelessness:
Here’s a clip from the new doc, where she talks about how her best-known recording is lifted from a board tape at the Rivoli, and playing “Fuck the Pain Away” for the very first time:
The chapter in my book about Peaches, Feist and Gonzales is titled “First We Take Berlin”—because that’s where they all had to go to break out of Toronto and find themselves.
When I was in Berlin shortly after Hearts on Fire came out, the Germans I talked to would nod politely when I rattled off the book’s subjects whom I thought they might know.
But as soon as I said the word “Peaches,” their faces would light up. “Peaches, of course!” an editor at Der Spiegel told me. “She’s basically our city mascot here in Berlin.”
Meanwhile, many Canadians who read my book had no idea who she was. Not surprising. What is also not surprising: the sections of the book about Peaches was often their favourite part. (Hi, Dad.)
Here’s how that chapter opens:
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Peaches is an internationally known musician, gender-bending performance artist, sexual pioneer, performance artist and activist, based in Berlin since 2000 and most associated with that city’s cultural scene.
But Merrill Nisker, the woman behind Peaches, is as Canadian as it gets: her high school was named after a member of the Group of Seven (near, uh, Cummer Park) and she worshipped Rough Trade’s Carole Pope. She got her musical start as a folkie in a band named after a Joni Mitchell lyric, who had a weekly gig in the same club that birthed the Rheostatics. She later played in an art-rock band [Fancypants Hoodlum] with the son of renowned CBC personality Peter Gzowski, and is indirectly responsible for the international success of Feist. She’s also the proud inheritor of an avant-garde Toronto tradition that stretches from the filmmaker Michael Snow to the art collective General Idea to SCTV to proto–riot grrrls Fifth Column to porn provocateur Bruce LaBruce. The friend who brought her to Berlin comes from a family who built the CN Tower [Gonzales, Aecon].
Peaches is as Canadian as maple syrup.
To top it off, she grew up around the corner from Rush. “They scared the shit out of me when I was little,” she told Exclaim in 2003. “I used to play British Bulldog and Red Rover with Geddy Lee's brother while Rush were practicing in [Lee's] garage. They all looked like weird wizards.”
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It took a long time to pin down an interview with Peaches—one of the harder gets, which I eventually landed via Three Gut Records’ Tyler Clark Burke (who took the cover photo of Teaches of Peaches, at the 2000 Exclaim! party).
She only gave me a brief window to chat, so I made sure to ask about all the things I couldn’t find in secondary sources, particularly stories about Toronto: Rough Trade, Eva Everything, Mary Margaret O’Hara, doing Zeppelin covers on flute with Big Sugar, horrifying patrons at the Power Ball, Splice This, Anoush Gallery, etc.
For paid subscribers only, this is that conversation:
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