The Lives And Loves Of A She-Devil!

THE LOWER I sink, the better the sound is. Lydia Lunch is referring to her mobile phone connection, but she could be delivering a critique of her 20-year career as a singer, writer, performance artist, pro-pornographer, anti-censorship activist and cultural terrorist.
As we speak, Lunch (born Lydia Koch in 1959 in Rochester, New York) is in London to play a gig at The Garage with an ensemble that includes Tindersticks and Gallon Drunk collaborator Terry Edwards. The show coincides with the New Millennium Communications re-release of her voodoo blues classic Shotgun Wedding, a record she made in 1991 with ex-Birthday Party guitarist Rowland S. Howard. The new version is re-titled Shotgun Wedding Special, and features an equally fiery live CD into the bargain.
I m just thrilled to have that out again, Lunch declares. Rowland Howard is such an unsung hero of not only the guitar, but songwriting. I mean, he s a genius, and eventually perhaps he might be recognised, he might not, but . . . I love him!
In the liner notes to last year s essential Lunch anthology Widowspeak (also on NMC), Biba Kopf of The Wire employed Sartre s dictum Hell is other people in documenting the many collaborative projects the New Yorker has pursued over the course of her career. And true enough, from her days with seminal (no pun intended) No Wave noiseniks Teenage Jesus And The Jerks, through further hook-ups with Beirut Slump, 8-Eyed Spy, The Birthday Party, Sonic Youth, Clint Ruin, Die Haut, Henry Rollins, Jim Thirlwell, Lucy Hamilton, Billy Ver Plank, Einsturzende Neubauten and cast of literally hundreds, she has spun from one circle of hellacious humanity down to the next.
I have fond memories of all my collaborations, the singer considers. To me they re just historical bookmarks of where I was at the time and how I was relating and seeing things, what was affecting me at the moment.
Lunch s two-decade odyssey has been continually characterised by violent jump-cuts from one genre to another. In 1980, directly after her Beirut Slump phase, she made her first full album, the Queen Of Siam, for the Was brothers Ze label. On these recordings, the queen of sleaze switched from torture-monger to torch-songstress, a role she carried off surprisingly convincingly.
Originally when I started doing music during the Teenage Jesus/Beirut Slump phase, my goal was to rebel against the traditional music that had inspired me, she explains. And then I began rebelling against my own music by consistently wanting to invent something that was the diametric opposite of what had come before. So, obsessing on cartoons and the music of cartoons just drew me to the music of Billy Ver Plank, which was amazing, to just ask the man that he would do it. He wasn t happy with the results he thought we slaughtered his music, he thought Bob Quine and I just killed it. Which was fine, I mean . . . whatever, we didn t make the album to please him, nor anyone else. But I don t see why people are such specialists, why they continue to release the same record year after year after year. I guess if you have one concept, you tend to stick to it. I mean, I have a concept that s good until it s documented and then I need to begin the rebellion.
The next stage of that rebellion was the beleaguered Honeymoon In Red album, much of which was recorded with various members of The Birthday Party in 1982 in Berlin. Lunch became bewitched by the band after hearing Prayers On Fire the previous year, and moved to London with the express purpose of working with the ex-pat Aussies, not to mention bedding Nick Cave. She ended up sharing space with the band on a 4AD EP entitled Drunk On The Pope s Blood and also spent an intense two weeks co-writing a series of 50 one-act plays with their singer, not to mention recording a version of the Lee Hazelwood/Nancy Sinatra hit Some Velvet Morning with Roland S. Howard. Still Howard excepted her relationship with the Birthday boys was always strained, and Cave and Mick Harvey asked for their names to be removed from the Honeymoon album when it was eventually released in 1988.
That was at a very bizarre time, Lunch remembers. Someone had approached us with the money to do a record, we got a few tracks done, the money fell out, the man disappeared. We did a few more tracks a few years later, but the tapes were lost for years, and much interpersonal controversy had gone on through that period, one of the facts being that Rowland left The Birthday Party, where he was completely under-appreciated anyway.
Finally I got the tapes back and I decided that we could, as a document, rescue however many tracks are on that record, and I guess Nick and Mick Harvey weren t too happy with the end results. I don t know what their beef was really, it still hasn t been figured out all these years later. I speak to Nick occasionally, I had it out with him a few years ago. I feel that, other than Rowland, they never really got me anyway. I think part of it is just that my aggressive nature was terrifying, especially (with them) being good public school Australian boys. Rowland was never scared, he got it.
For his part, in Ian Johnston s Nick Cave biography Bad Seed, Mick Harvey maintained, We d worked on 10 or 11 songs and the only reason five remained untouched was because they couldn t find the multitracks. The six tracks they got their hands on were completely mutilated and changed from anything vaguely resembling what we d started doing. I didn t see any justification for putting our names on it, we had nothing to do with what happened to the recording. Lydia s initial idea was to put on the cover a sticker, Recorded with The Birthday Party in 1982 , which was untrue because it was never recorded with all the band playing, ever. We would have been happy to have had our names on it in places . . . but we knew if we gave her any licence to use our names she would misuse our names.

After the impoverished squalor of London, Lunch returned to the equally impoverished squalor of New York in 1983 to work with Jim Thirlwell of Scraping Foetus Off The Wheel. The two became bedmates as well as musical partners, producing the Stinkfist record and an instrumental sortie, The Drowning Of Lucy Hamilton, in conjunction with the former Mars member of the title. The rest of the 80s were distinguished by partnerships with various members of Sonic Youth, including Thurston Moore (the In Limbo mini-album), Lee Renaldo (the hi-attitudinal No Excuse ), and Kim Gordon (the Harry Crews project an homage to the hard-bitten Florida novelist). It all culminated with the classic Death Valley 69 off the Youth s Bad Moon Rising, a squalling, deadly meditation on late 60s death culture and the Manson murders.
Definitely, (that was) drawing on the 60s to 80s emotional landslide that was LA, Lunch confirms. Going from the Summer of Love into the Manson culture and then into the Night Stalker and all of the incredible contradiction of a place that seems so easy to live in, so beautiful, so architecturally luscious, (but also) the crime and violence. So really, quite a contradiction in existence, Los Angeles. And certainly between 13:13 (the 1982 album on Ruby) and Sonic Youth we were trying to corner that.
These were obsessions Lunch would share with Henry Rollins, perhaps the only artist who can match her in terms of productivity in a multiplicity of disciplines (which, in Lydia s case, have included off-Broadway Theatre, spoken word, lecturing, photography, body sculpture and voodoo memory boxes). Indeed, the two hooked up together in Los Angles in the 80s, sharing a fascination with the incorporation of terror tactics into live performance, documented in James Parker s Rollins biography Turned On. Parker maintains that Lunch educated the hardcore troubadour in literature, introducing him to the work of Hubert Selby Junior, Henry Miller and Louis-Ferdinand Celine, not to mention testing Rollins vow of celibacy on several occasions. But while Hank has had Gap ads and major labels to help finance his projects, Lunch has done it all largely on a shoestring. So how does she account for her ferocious work rate?
Caffeine! she laughs. I don t know, it s like, why doesn t everyone else create at a faster speed? I m also utilising a lot of collaborators who create a third element that wouldn t exist if either of you were creating on your own. But I create at my own pace, and also because I m not in a hostage situation with a major label, never have been and probably never will be, I m not forced to only create one album a year. I see no slowing up. I see no acceleration either, but please, let s be reasonable!
I mean, the difference between me and a lot of other artists is that I just don t suffer from artistic angst, she continues. I do a lot of pacing, that s almost how the writing gets done, it s all very natural to me. I don t slave over anything, I don t edit things, I didn t edit my book. It s very conversational, and because all of what I create is far more spontaneous, I m not looking to create the perfect song, the perfect concept, and in that sense I think other people really torture themselves, they re probably just far more perfectionist than I am. It s like, when Selby tells me he had the germ of his last book for 16 years, I m like, That s like birthing a child . I don t understand it. The concept or the format arises, the documentation occurs and then I move on, it s as simple as that. There s very little torture involved except for once it s released, and then the audience gets to suffer!

Despite the dizzying disparity of the material that comprises Lunch s back catalogue, all her landmark works are distinguished by one defining characteristic: a prevailing sense of place. The artist has constantly felt a gravitational pull toward the intense humming of evil stemming from territories such as New York, Los Angeles and Berlin, and once entrenched in these cultures, her brain begins transposing this geographical sickness into sound. Just as much of the material collected on Hysterie restored the voodoo dread to Creedence and Willie Dixon songs bled dry by countless hack bar-bands ( I think that music is very evocative of that part of America, without being a cliche, or too kitsch, ), Shotgun Wedding was recorded in New Orleans, and is saturated by the muggy, claustrophobic atmosphere of gris-gris central.
There are certain cities which are fevered or twisted and conducive to many elements and energies just frothing over, she indicates. And those are many of the cities I ve chosen to live in at one point or another. Just to be in touch with the other elements is very important as a writer especially.
The whole world is a haunted ruin at this point anyway. Any city you re bound to step in if you re open and ready to accept the undercurrent and the history of what goes on can have an influence on you.
In modern times, with the bombardment of chronic electricity and sounds and noise and other people, we re trained to tune out. I go in the opposite direction I m trained to tune in. You have to know what level you want to rise or sink to. If you move to New Orleans, you re already three feet below sea level, so you re about as low as you can go. Your feet are already considered the graveyard. Sometimes I try to fight against it, of course, go in the opposite direction; that s why I spent the last four years until two months ago living in Pittsburgh. Living there helped me develop my photography, write Paradoxia and work on Mantrakamantra, so definitely, region influences what I m doing. I ve just moved back to Los Angeles now, which is a very unlikely city for me to live in, especially going back to a city I ve lived in before. But now I m there for the literary connotations, both the past of what exists there, the noir that came out of there, and the present writers like Hubert Selby who I ve just performed with a month ago.
Indeed, the Last Exit To Brooklyn author provides the foreword to Lunch s Paradoxia, a nasty little book which drags its belly through every form of sexual degradation known to man, woman or beast. Here is a frequently sickening saga of psycho-sexual depravity, 153 pages of lucid, lurid, livid prose in which a boyfriend contracts canine syphilis after fucking a dog for a bet, coke bottles are rammed between lips for which they were never intended, a beast-man humps the floorboards betwixt mounds of his own excrement, horny surf Nazis get caught up in voodoo hexes in N Awlins . . . you get the picture. This autobiography represents a violent disgorging of misanthropic tendencies which are often mistaken for misogyny.
Why can t we just say I hate everyone equally! Lunch exclaims. Misogyny . . . interesting. The thing is, I have yet to begin my dissertations against the female of the species, as I ve been concentrating on the men for the past two decades. Believe me, the women are coming next! Although the women have never started a world war, we ve never ended one either, but we can no longer remain passive victims of this global slaughter, we just can t.
I think the individual is an endangered species right now, she continues. As a populace who should have a majority vote, we allow it to go to this handful of individuals: the rich, the powerful, the mighty, the men, to decide and design exactly where we re headed, which is towards global catastrophe, and I can t help but feel as if I m one of the few remaining town criers.

Incredibly, the conclusion of Lunch s book finds the writer having attained some sort of equilibrium after long years of seeking painful pleasure through the seduction of others and the debasing of the self. Mind you, this sense of levity occurs a mere two or three pages from the end, a flimsy postscript to three decades spent in the belly of the beast.
Yeah, well, my goal has never been happiness, she reasons. I mean, we ve been trained, especially as women, to look and wait for this ideal, this perfect man, this knight in shining armour, this ideal happiness, and that has never been my goal. My goal has always been to be satisfied. And I am very satisfied in my life, I m at a point where I am very compassionate, very empathetic about the condition of the world, but I can t let it bombard me every single second. And though I don t feel calmer, I don t feel as irritable as I was. I was like a colicky baby I guess, and that s how I began the colicky primal scream.
Almost inevitably, it transpires that Lunch was sexually abused by her father from a young age, documented in Daddy Dearest from The Uncensored Lydia Lunch. The degree to which her predatory sexual appetites were informed by this experience is not something she dwells on either in Paradoxia or in conversation. She rationalises it thus:
We all endure it in one format or another, whether it s psychological, religious, societal, class-based or sexual abuse. I mean, thinking and sensitive individuals are gonna feel the injustice of the world, whether it s directly in their living room or whether it s on the grand stage that we call this planet. As a sensitive individual, I have taken that on from the father, to God the father, to the father of my country and every asshole in between.
Lunch observed media coverage of the recent Colorado Columbine High School massacre and the subsequent demonising of Marilyn Manson with a characteristically sceptical eye. And, bearing in mind that this is an artist who once released a cassette and booklet of chronic case histories entitled The Intimate Diaries Of the Sexually Insane, it follows that much of her work would be deemed obscene under any return to 1950s values. So what does she make of proposed legislature recommending that age restrictions be applied to rock concerts and records in the US?
It doesn t fucking matter to me one bit, she scoffs. We ll go back to the pornography debate to deal with this issue. Pornography is a symptom of our society. Women were tortured and murdered for thousands of years before pornography came into the picture, so it s really not a valid excuse for anyone. The same with heavy metal music, the same with rap music, the same with dark-core techno. If we tallied the number of people who had actually seen Natural Born Killers and we ll just use that as the extreme they like to throw in our faces it would probably be about 200 million, with a half or a quarter of those people seeing it twice or three times. Three people in the last year have blamed that film for their acts of violence. That s a pretty small minority compared to how many have witnessed it. It s a cheap excuse.
So, to what does she attribute the perceived increase in teenage violence?
The problem is the abolition of the individual, neglect in the home, she ventures. When we were teenagers it was a badge of honour to be a rebel, an outcast, an outsider. Now, with everyone with Nike on their t-shirts, with the greed and the need to succeed, with the homogenisation of everything from music to media, with the propagation of sexist symbols to sell everything yet denying any discourse about what sex really is, with the hero worship of Rambo, of John Wayne, the fact that we (America) are the biggest war-wagers in the fucking world we were founded on war is always overlooked. It s white kids. It s white kids, that s why it s an issue. How many kids are dying in the inner city from gang violence or drug abuse? They have to sell drugs because of a lack of education, a lack of jobs, because there s no supermarkets in the fucking inner city.
Furthermore, Lunch believes that the Y generation s appetite for destruction stems not from the influence of violent video games or shlock-rock, but a fundamental inability to conform to or participate in the American Dream.
A lot of it has to do with kids that have been bullied and ostracised, she maintains. They don t have a suitable outlet. The need to succeed is so fucking grand and the individual has no place of worship. Even within the so-called alternative it s one clique or another go to a Marilyn Manson concert and everyone looks exactly the fucking same. Where is the individual? They re being ostracised because they re not jock enough to be jock, not weird enough to be goth, and there s no-one encouraging them to pick up a book or a guitar or a paint brush. No wonder they feel as if they re on the endangered species list. And if they re going out, they re going to take some other assholes out with them it s completely understandable to me.
In America, crime has dropped by 10 to 60 per cent in most major cities, yet the reporting of crime has tripled in the media. The amount of teenagers is greater than it s ever been. Proportionate to that, we re making a big fucking deal over nothing. We need to investigate what the youth violence statistics really are, not just white suburban kids who decide to shoot six, 12, 14 kids. I m sorry for the lost lives, I m sure they didn t deserve to die, but let s look at the greater fucking picture. I just can t wait to get into the college stage in the fall, because I ve got a few things to say. n
Shotgun Wedding Special is released on the New Millennium Communications label on June 28th. Paradoxia is available from Creation Books this July.