“We were outrageous”
Adele Bertei looks back on her time with The Contortions, queer punk-funkers The Bloods, and buying socks for Brian Eno
WHEN Adele Bertei was growing up in Cleveland, seeing David Bowie on the Ziggy Stardust tour was a revelation. “I was 18, maybe 19. I saw such an incredible crowd of kids – you couldn’t tell what gender they were, if they were gay or straight, it didn’t matter. Everybody was in this celebratory mood. It was just the most mesmerising concert because it was the first time I saw theatrics mixed with rock’n’roll.”
Bertei took that moment of inspiration and ran with it, performing alongside Peter Laughner (ex-rocket From The Tombs/pere Ubu) in Peter And The Wolves, in James Chance’s Contortions, and in the all-out, all-woman band The Bloods, before almost fashioning a career as a kind of no wave Madonna. “I don’t think I sound so much like Madonna!” she says with a laugh. Now Bertei has reached back into her childhood with Twist: An American Girl – a tough, heartbreaking memoir in which an abstracted version of the author endures horror at the hands of a paranoid schizophrenic mother, rape at gunpoint, and punishment for “sodomy” at the hands of the sadistic
Sister in one of her temporary homes. Eventually she hitchhikes to Kent
State university, hoping to join the revolution: “A queer, wayward sodomite, walking away across the green and into the next adventure.”
Cleveland, she says, was a broken city. When Laughner died of alcoholism at 24, Bertei honoured the plan they had hatched and moved to New York, “a junkyard paradise” where monthly rent was under $100. The no wave scene was “a dismantling of punk rock”. As organist in the Contortions she was close to the action. “James Chance had a masochistic streak. We’d be playing at Max’s Kansas City and he’d jump into the audience and try to make out with one of the women there. The boyfriend would be incensed. A fight would ensue, then the bass player and myself, we’d jump into the audience – there’d be fisticuffs flying and the rest of the band would be playing.”
It was Bertei who introduced Brian Eno to the no wave scene when working as his personal assistant, taking him to the five-day festival at Artists Space that prompted him to produce the defining 1978 compilation No New York. “I really enjoyed working with Eno. Sometimes he’d have me go out on errands with a stack of money to buy strange combinations of things: magazines of women with huge breasts, voile socks, and an Olivetti typewriter. He was a trickster.”
After leaving The Contortions, Bertei formed The Bloods, which meant confronting the routine homophobia of the music industry. “We were out of the closet, very punk-funk. We were outrageous. We fancied ourselves like the female Rolling Stones in terms of being bad girls – you know, groupies, and we did the drugs. All the insane things the boys would be hailed as heroes for. Because we were gay women we were shut out.” Bertei’s subsequent musical career involved collaborations with Thomas Dolby, Lesley Woods (of Au Pairs) and Green Gartside (of Scritti Politti), and she has new, dance-oriented music coming on Brooklyn-based label Peace Bisquit. But for her second memoir, currently underway, she’s aiming to recapture the vitality of that formative no wave era. “It wasn’t just music. It was women on equal footing with the men, making films, writing poetry and books, playing music. It was incredibly dynamic.”
“A fight would ensue and we’d jump into the audience”