‘Electroclash pioneer Peaches walked so Kim Petras, Cardi B and Beyoncé could run’

Words: Gary Grimes; pictures: Hadley Hudson

Believe it or not, it’s been over twenty years since Peaches, everyone’s favourite gender-non-conforming electroclash-pioneering rock star, burst onto the scene with her seminal album The Teaches of Peaches. Suffice to say, in the two decades that followed, a lot has changed in pop culture.

When it was released, The Teaches of Peaches was considered to be an outrageous expression of sexuality and gender non-conformity from a type of artist to which the world was not accustomed.

From the moment you heard Peaches smirk her way through the lead single’s now iconic intro (“Suckin’ on my titties like you wanted me, calling me all the time”) it was clear that Peaches was not here to submit to the expectations of how a female musician should sound or behave.

Photo: Hadley Hudson

By today’s standards, much of the record seems relatively tame, but this was a time when Christina Aguilera’s ‘Dirrty’ music video was deemed too racy for children to see and most people’s understanding of queer sexuality came from watching Will & Grace.

Throughout Peaches’ twenty-year career, she has always played something of a dual role in pop culture – one moment she’s the potty-mouthed anarchist instructing her listener to “f**k the pain away”, the next she’s a collaborator to bona fide princesses of pop like the aforementioned Aguilera, and P!nk.

One minute she’s the unruly commander of her mesmerising stage show, surrounded by nude dancers emerging from a paper maché vagina, the next she’s the soundtrack to movie night classics like Mean Girls and Lost In Translation.

Photo: Hadley Hudson

On the night we sat down with Peaches, ahead of one of the last stops on the European leg of her triumphant anniversary tour of The Teaches of Peaches, a performance at the criminally underrated BBK Live festival in Bilbao, she was rooted firmly in the former mode.

Speaking to us beneath the stars on the enchanting mountainside of the Basque Country, before bringing her jaw-dropping show to the festival’s lively Spanish audience, she took a moment to cast her mind back to the early days of her career and the emergence of the electroclash genre she came to define.

“[That time] was like a weird zeitgeist of artists saying let’s queer up electronic music so that it’s not so stiff. You know, not that I don’t love Kraftwerk who are so important in so many ways, but we really wanted to queer it up. It didn’t have to be rocket science, you know, we could have fun with it.”

Photo: Hadley Hudson

Since its conception, electroclash has always been firmly rooted in LGBT culture thanks in large part to the queer, female artists who established the genre such as Le Tigre, Miss Kitten, Chicks On Speed, and, of course, Peaches herself.

“I feel like it’s one of the only music genres that was driven mostly by female-identified artists,” she tells us. “At that time in 2002, the genre wasn’t taken seriously but it just kept creeping up again, each time with more mainstream, watered-down appeal. It eventually became new rave, until it crept up again and turned into EDM which was hilarious.”

When reminiscing about the heady early days of the genre, there’s one breakout queer act that can’t go unmentioned – the Scissor Sisters.

Photo: Hadley Hudson

“I remember being in the club that eventually became Berghain and hearing the Sisters’ version of ‘Comfortably Numb’ and being like ‘What the fuck was that?’. That was cute,’” Peaches recalls.

So where does rapping on tracks for P!nk and Xtina fit into this radical mission to tear up the rule book of electronic music?

“I think for Christina, Britney, Avril Lavigne, P!nk, Peaches was that coming of age music. You know, when they were like ‘I don’t need to be a f**king Disney kid anymore, I’m gonna express myself’. So that’s where our worlds have intersected.”

Photo: Victor Frankowski

The impact of these sex-positive, gender-binary-demolishing artists is painted all over today’s Spotify playlists. After all – there would be no Slut Pop by Kim Petras without The Teaches of Peaches.

Putting this to Peaches, she reacts enthusiastically. “Oh fuck yeah! I know that album. When I heard that I was like ‘Wow. Look what we can do now!’”.

In 2022 there’s a whole plethora of LGBT, sex-forward pop stars enjoying varying levels of mainstream success, not just in spite of but because of the boundary-pushing aspects of their art.

Photo: Victor Frankowski

The reality is that Peaches and her contemporaries walked so that many of these artists could run. With so much to choose from these days, we couldn’t help but wonder who on the modern-day pop landscape is Peaches listening to?

“Well, of course, Arca has paved incredible ways. And SOPHIE, rest in peace, paved f**king incredible ways. Planningtorock is a beautiful artist. There are a lot of incredible people out there… And then there’s a lot of people just doing the same old thing,” she says with a chuckle.

“I love a lot of the new dirty rappers like Kali, Flo Milli, and Rico Nasty. I love how dirty and just f**king out there they are. I love BIA too actually,” she continued. “I mean all those girls, they don’t care. They’re just like ‘Get them, f**king eat my pussy!’, you know, which was weird 20 years ago but now it’s standard, it’s the mainstream.”

Photo: Victor Frankowski

Indeed, in an era when Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion are scoring number one smashes with songs about wet ass pussy, and even pop’s most pristine golden girl Beyoncé is comparing herself to a bag of cocaine on RENAISSANCE, it’s hard to recall a time when tongues were sent wagging by the mention of “sucking on my titties”.

Despite this contrast, the singer is reticent to rejoice at the so-called progress we’ve made over the last two decades as she remembers all too well how easily we can fall backwards.

“It’s an ongoing struggle, and sometimes it’s trendy or sometimes it’s in the mainstream but we have to be careful and understand that it’s not there yet. There’s a lot of work to do,” she says.

Photo: Victor Frankowski

“I remember being interviewed for Rub which came out in 2015. Everyone was like, ‘Oh, what are you gonna do now that Obama’s president and things seem to be going great, like, do you feel like you’re relevant?’. And I’m like, ‘Yeah, I’m relevant because we’re celebrating this win’,” she recalls.

“And then six months later, when I’m still touring that album, people are like, ‘Your job is so important now, oh my god, Trump, blah, blah, blah’… Things definitely can change on a dime and it’s all patriarchy-driven in terms of money and power,” she continues.

“Not that Obama was the best ever but s**t was going well. It’s really, really painful and horrific to think about conservativism and how hard they’re trying to keep this balance of power.”

The Teaches for Peaches album

The artist also declares that she believes the onus lies on us all to help course correct the troubling overturning of Roe vs Wade. “How white women voted for f**king Trump… I’m sorry but if white women don’t f**king get it together in America and vote these abortion laws out it’s over.

“With Biden who, like, reads off a paper and obviously is half in the grave, okay he’s giving some executive order but even with that, everybody needs to vote, there’s nothing else you can do. So get it together people.”

Later on that night, we watch Peaches perform to a truly raucous crowd, one of the largest in BBK Live’s fifteen-year history.

You only need to take a quick glance around at the truly diverse crowd of eager fans, old and young, to see that this artist’s legacy lives not just through the young musicians for whom she helped pave the way, but also in the legions of queer fans who found empowerment in her lyrics and, from their chants it would seem, in f**cking the pain away.

Peaches spoke to us ahead of her performance at Bilbao BBK Live 2022. Learn more about The Teaches of Peaches Tour on her official website.

The Attitude September/October issue is out now.