Pope, Peaches pump up Rough Trade biopic
Movie in the works based on legendary rocker’s best-selling memoir
Pope and Peaches are combining to promote a Rough Trade movie. But beyond just fans of the bill featuring the performance artist-DJ and the legendary rocker, it’s Canadian cinema that could benefit most from the event at Toronto’s Wrongbar Saturday night.
Carole Pope and DJ Merrill Beth Nisker, who goes by the stage moniker Peaches, are kicking off a crowdfunding campaign for Rough Trade — the movie. Based on Pope’s best-selling memoir Anti Diva, the project has been in development since producers Jan Nathanson and Andrew Boutilier optioned the rights over seven years ago but is only now getting the big push.
Nathanson says the script is ready, cinematographer Stephanie Anne Weber Biron (Blackbird, Les heures blanches) will take a turn in the director’s chair and Pope’s legacy grows only more impressive as the years tick by.
“Rough Trade really came about at a unique moment ... before AIDS hit. It was that last moment of sexual freedom before music was completely commercialized and when video was becoming this very interesting art form. It was an intense time, and all the comics from Second City were there. So many things were flowering,” she says.
“But that singular moment hasn’t really been recorded on film yet. I mean, people in (Toronto’s upscale) Rosedale were talking about Carole. We celebrate our hockey heroes, but we haven’t made a movie about the woman who brought explicit lesbian lyrics and edgy sexuality into the mainstream.”
Pope says she’s looking forward to seeing the movie, if it sees the light of day, because if one person is going to get credit in the annals of music history for crotch-grabbing, it’s going to be her.
“That’s mine, Madonna. I grabbed my crotch first,” Pope says, speaking from Los Angeles. “I think Rough Trade was ahead of its time, which was part of our problem.”
Pope says she looks back on the birth of the band that rattled the airwaves with High School Confidential in 1981, and is filled with pride as well as a certain sense of frustration.
“I am happy with most of Rough Trade’s music but disappointed we had bad management. I think we influenced a lot of people whether they know it or not.”
Pope says Peaches is the perfect protégé. “Years before she was Peaches, she did a cover of High School Confidential that I just loved,” says Pope, who asked Peaches to collaborate on a new single, Lesbians in the Forest.
“The EP is called Music for Lesbians because lesbians don’t have much of a sense of humour, traditionally speaking,” Pope says.
“We have a habit of taking ourselves pretty seriously. The other single is Francis Bacon, which nobody gets, but is actually about my affair with Dusty Springfield.”
Pope says there’s a lot about her that people may not get — but at this point, she’s used to it.
“I haven’t really mellowed. But as you get older, the less of a f--- you give. You want people to dig it and buy it. But I have no one to answer to, and that is the one thing about aging that is very freeing.”
Nathanson says the part of Carole Pope has yet to be cast, but Pope knows what it will take to get it right. “They definitely need to have an interesting look and an edge, and somebody with a sense of humour, and vulnerability, and whatever else I had going on then,” she says.