“I thought you guys were supposed to be wild!” we are being berated, bloodcurdlingly, by the tiny Canadian in the black bra, huge schoolgirl’s knickers, knee pads and, er, brown curly mullet perched atop the amp stack, legs spread wide. And we are wild – that is to say, this is the hottest, sweatiest, most pheromonal gig we’ve been to in years; in a moment, in the first of several similar incidents, a girl will clamber onstage and spontaneously start licking Peaches’ legs – but when you’re hanging with the Fatherfucker, the woman who posed for her last album cover in a beard and pop’s most rabid omnisexual, wildness is relative.
Peaches is a kind of maximum minimalist: she’s a tribute to how much you can get done with just a DIY aesthetic and sheer force of personality. She’s alone tonight, with only her trademark old-school electro-hop backing track and her own debauched yelp for company; and yet the onstage action is transfixing and non-stop. However, for all her famed aggressiveness, she’s surprisingly girly: when she tears across the stage in pink hotpants through a hail of techno percussion and strobe lighting, the effect is half skanky Berlin fetish club, half girls’ gym-class dressing room.
It’s this unexpected fem quality, combined with her deeply bonkers sense of humour, that transports tonight from the too-aggressive, non-funny, deeply unsexy girlsploitation show it would be in anyone else’s hands to the ravenous, fuck-everything pleasuredome atmosphere Peaches creates. It means that whether she’s squirming into yet another of about nine barely-there costumes (all of which look hilariously ad hoc, as if they’ve been assembled out of old tights), brazenly caressing a series of increasingly weird-shaped electric guitars as suggestively as if she were modelling strap-on dildos, duetting with a 15-foot videotaped Iggy Pop during ‘Kick It’, masturbating with a guitar lead, shoving a mic down her pants to have something to jiggle during ‘Shake Yer Dix’, or spewing fake blood over the front row (who, naturally, go mad with delight), it’s all in good obscene fun. By the time she leads us through an smash-and-grab ‘Fuck The Pain Away’, we’re screaming with pleasure instead.