THE WORLD catches up to PEACHES
Bold, trailblazing, unapologetic — Peaches carved her own music scene. A new Hot Docs film celebrates the Toronto electro-punk icon
On July 19, 1999, Toronto singersongwriter Howie Beck performed at the Rivoli and invited his friend Merrill Nisker to open the show. By then, she was going by the name Peaches.
In front of a crowd gathered to hear a local artist and his guitar, the 32-year-old set off her Roland MC-505 Groovebox and launched into the first ever performance of what would eventually become her biggest hit. After the show, she paid the sound engineer $5 for the live recording and released the song as is. She called it “F--k the Pain Away.”
If given the choice, Nisker likely would not have hand-picked this folk-loving crowd as her test audience. But Toronto promoters weren’t exactly lining up to book an outside-the-lines electroclash artist who bent gender norms, rocked fuchsia hot pants and body hair, and practised her preach for sexual agency.
“People didn’t understand it,” Nisker said in an interview from her home in Berlin.
“At that time, I really had to carve out my own scene. It wasn’t like there was a scene that I fit into. It felt both isolating and exciting in that way.”
This period of DIY artistryturned-success is captured in a new documentary called “Teaches of Peaches,” screening at this year’s Hot Docs Festival. The film is named after Nisker’s cult-classic 2000 studio album, and toggles between footage from her recent 20th anniversary tour and a trove of personal footage taken between the late ’90s and early aughts.
This is not, Nisker emphasized, a career retrospective. She’s too
young for that.
“I’m only 57. It’s not like I’m dead or dying,” Nisker reasoned.
While it might be too early for a life-spanning biopic, it’s a fitting time to celebrate “The Teaches of Peaches” a near quarter-century after its release. It has been included on international all-time-best lists and won a 2015 Slaight Family Heritage Polaris Prize, but it was conceived in a two-bedroom apartment on Queen Street West that had cockroaches, no air conditioning and the unrelenting sounds of the city buzzing outside the Come as You Are sex shop below.
In the bedroom across the hall was Nisker’s then roommate, Leslie Feist.
“There was something very similar about our personality types,” Nisker said. “We would go into our own rooms and make our music, and we wouldn’t really talk about our own music or development. Once I called her into my room and said ‘Hey, could you sing some backups for me on “Diddle My Skittle?” I wanted a few voices and I didn’t really understand that you could overdub because of the equipment I was using. But we understood each other’s worlds.
“Also, she was a hot item,” Nisker added. “We would both have people coming over all the time. Guys and girls and friends.”
In the film, the pair can be seen cruising around on low-riders, staging home videos and chasing the bohemian dream across Toronto with their fellow art-driven misfits. They called themselves the “Weird Ones Last,” because clubs always pushed them to the very end of the show. (This is partially why Nisker soon moved to the Weird Ones First capital of Berlin.)
It was a period of creative growth, sexploration and affordable rent that seems almost mythical by Toronto’s current standards. But it was also a challenging time for Nisker, who was on the heels of a breakup and thyroid cancer diagnosis.
“The Teaches of Peaches” became a personal refuge for the artist before evolving into a communal one for fans. Its sexual ethos was empowered, explicit, outrageous, queer and entirely on Nisker’s terms.
She was telling you to “Diddle My Skittle” while encouraging women to stay in school and get IUDs. She was objectifying men and providing her counter-offer to male rock ’n’ roll bravado. She was swinging her microphone around like a nunchuck, scaling mezzanines, sporting strap-on dildos and stage outfits made of hair, silicone breasts and vulvas. If you ask someone to recount their experience of a Peaches concert, it will inevitably come out like an urban legend.
“I used to say that I wanted the mainstream to come closer to me, which was an absolute joke in fantasyland. But it actually did,” she considered. “I feel like if you try to explain to a gen-Zer who doesn’t know me that ‘Peaches does sexpositive music with really direct sex lyrics, a minimal electro background and is very performative with costumes,’ they would be like, ‘Who doesn’t?’ ”
An artist’s cultural impact always risks getting diluted by social progress. At a time when “WAP” is a schoolyard singalong and sex positivity is a chart-topping currency, Nisker’s boundary-pushing might appear inevitable in hindsight, especially for younger generations. Of this, she is aware and unbothered. Rather than seeking to collect any “before her time” credits, Nisker just seems relieved that the rest of us have finally caught up with her.
“I love how direct people are,” she said. “People say music is way more cookie-cutter now, but I actually think people are way more direct. It used to be that in a pop sense, people were talking about issues but never putting it in their music, which was always my issue. I feel like now it’s all more cohesive.”
Nisker is currently settled in Berlin with her partner and cats, all of whom make cameos in the documentary and offer a foil to her provocateuse persona.
“The first thing I said when I talked to the producer of this film is that I did not want to look like some woman who used to have a career and is now just a cat lady,” she laughed.
The opposite is the case. “Teaches of Peaches” jumps back and forth through time, often contrasting two Niskers performing the same song 25 years apart.
The younger version might wear a pink tank top with matching briefs and a bare face while the other rocks bleach blond hair with Rapunzel-length extensions and a “Thank God For Abortion” leotard.
But both crowd surf. Both somersault (backwards) across the stage. Both elicit unbridled euphoria from their fans. The consistency feels bolded and underlined.
But when Nisker watches old footage, she sees something different.
“People don’t realize how much they change,” she said. “I think that we all have a number in our head of how old we are. Mine is 28. So when I look back at footage, to think about my level of sassiness, my level of not giving a s--t or being a little more careless with my words, that made a lot of my interviews and made me who I was. But it was more of a ‘Whoa, I am the same person, but I’m not the same person.’ It’s not the same time as it was then, either.”
Nisker is currently preparing the revival of her “Peaches Christ Superstar” production in Berlin, a one-woman show based on Andrew Lloyd Webber’s rock opera.
She’s also noodling her next album. But in the short term, she’s looking forward to her hometown premiere of “Teaches of Peaches.” The city has changed and so has she, but we will always be her first students.
“TEACHES OF PEACHES” SCREENS AT THE HOT DOCS TED ROGERS CINEMA THURSDAY AT 9:15 P.M. AND AT THE TIFF LIGHTBOX FRIDAY AT 1:45 P.M. SEE HOTDOCS.CA FOR INFORMATION.
I feel like if you try to explain to a gen-Zer who doesn’t know me that ‘Peaches does sex-positive music with really direct sex lyrics, a minimal electro background and is very performative with costumes,’ they would be like, ‘Who doesn’t?’ PEACHES