Peaches

In a recent Tokyo visit, the former Canadian schoolteacher showed why today’s cock-rockers wear panties

Courtesy of Hostess

Starting with Beyonce and Pink, the contemporary pop landscape isn’t lacking for strong women. But none of them hold a candle to Merrill Nisker, the former Canadian schoolteacher known to the world as Peaches. In an intimate concert at Unit in Daikanyama, Japan recently got its first look at Peaches’ new all-star, all-female band, the Herms, which is currently dropping jaws worldwide.

Clad in silver lamé superhero mini jumpsuits, “Peaches and Herm,” featuring synth wizard J.D. Samson from the group Le Tigre and drummer Samantha Maloney and multi-instrumentalist Radio Sloan from Hole, laid down a devastating assault of electro beats and buzzing, electric saw synth and guitars that had a criminally small but adulatory audience jumping up and down for joy.

Above the fray was a progressively scantier-clad Peaches, shaking her tits and spitting blood as she smashed gender stereotypes to so much powder with table-turning songs like “Two Guys (for every Girl),” off her new album Impeach my Bush, as well as certified classics like “Fuck the Pain Away” (incidentally featured in the strip club scene of Lost in Translation).

But as she sits down for an interview over chamomile tea at a trendy Nakameguro cafe two days after the gig, it’s a surprise to find Peaches so subdued. It’s not that she won’t answer the questions; it’s just that you get the feeling that her music says it all—that’s already quite a mouthful—and talking about it is just, well, talking about it.

So how did Merrill Nisker the Jewish Toronto elementary schoolteacher become Peaches? “I developed a music-and-drama creativity program for kids because I didn’t like the way I was taught creativity,” she recounts. “I felt that it was very restrictive and didn’t help you realize that creativity could be used throughout your life. I wanted kids to have a different experience.”

“Peaches happened simultaneously. I never thought I would have a career in music. I would just do it in my free time, and when I made a little money I was able to buy a tape machine and MC 505 and made an album in my bedroom. Then I got interest from a small Berlin label, and I felt like, ‘Why don’t I just go over there and try something? I can always come back to teaching.’ It just seemed to work out and snowball and more attention came and here I am on album three.”
With the increasing interest that saw her back Nine Inch Nails on their recent summer tour, Peaches, 38, has been able to transform from a one-woman nightclub electro act to the full-fledged rock band that performed at Unit. “It was always a stripped down solo show,” she says. “I would just come out alone, or whoever was there—whether I knew them or not—would join me on stage. It would be spontaneous. With my machine, I could play whatever I wanted at any point, and then I moved into playback and adding instruments, and now with the band it’s a whole new thing. It opens my world up in a very good way, and shows that all those years you thought I was just a performance artist, I am a musician.”

In control at Unit Photo by Kenji Kubo

Peaches’ current tour is a large-scale affair with risers, a proper light show and even a giant, inflatable penis. She’s philosophical about the fact that the still-small size of her Japanese audience dictated that it was a downsized Peaches that toured Japan. “It’s good to do shows without your bag of tricks and realize it doesn’t matter,” she says. “The first part is the music, and that came through. Everything else is icing on the cake.”

You’ve got to hope that Peaches will reach a larger audience here after working with Pink and Iggy Pop and getting feelers from Britney Spears’ “people”. While Japan has plenty of cute girl-rock bands such as Puffy and Shonen Knife and even powerful, arty acts like eX-Girl, it has yet to produce anything like the hyper-sexualized, futuristic female cock-rock of Peaches. When I suggest that her message that “cute needn’t mean passive” might give stale Japanese gender stereotypes a healthy jolt, she agrees.

“That’s part of my whole idea. When I started Peaches, people didn’t find me very feminine. That’s why I decided to start wearing cutesy pink things—so that it would confuse people more. I wasn’t trying to be manly on stage, but I felt there was no room for the kind of performance I was doing. People would complain that I had hairy armpits. That’s why I called the second album Fatherfucker and wore a beard. It was confusing for me, so I thought I would make it confusing for everyone else. This album, I made it more like, ‘Let’s start a revolution and if you’re not in, then censor my pussy or impeach my bush’. In the same way, I got to slip in ‘impeach President Bush’.”Impeach My Bush is available on Hostess Entertainment.


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