When musician and performance artist Peaches released her turn-of-the-millennium breakthrough album Teaches of Peaches, she boldly stated she would not be moving towards the mainstream – she wanted the mainstream to come to her. It seemed an incredibly unlikely scenario. Canadian-born Merrill Nisker was an entirely new type of pop star : unapologetically feminist, queer and sex positive; musically grimy and minimal; lyrically absurdist, funny and filthy, with a style that challenged gender norms.
Peaches would perform aggressively in a bra and ripped fishnets with unshaven armpits and fake pubic hair protruding from her crotch; the cover of Teaches of Peaches was a close-up photo of her crotch in pink hotpants. Her signature tune was, and remains, 00’s “F**k the Pain Away”, a primitive eruption of harsh electronics and unrestrained sexual energy that contains an opening line for the ages: “Suckin’ on my titties like you wanted me/ Callin’ me all the time like Blondie/ Check out my Chrissie behind..
.” And like all groundbreaking artists, Peaches had the shock of the new. She was an underground sensation for coming-of-age queer women, hip clubbers and fashionistas.
“Some people were really having these crazy awakenings because they’d never realised they could express those things, or that it could be a possibility for them,” Nisker tells me over video call from her home in Berlin. But that inevitably came with confusion and hostility elsewhere. A 2001 NME .