Peaches: ‘People Couldn't Tell If I Was A Joke Or If I Was Super Serious’

In the 2000s the Canadian electro-punk Peaches, aka Merrill Nisker, exemplified a new kind of pop star – one who was outrageously queer, provocatively carnal and transgressive in her sexual politics. Now she's celebrating the 20th anniversary of The Teaches Of Peaches, the album that launched her trajectory, with a tour delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic. And Nisker is heralding the show as "a very small microcosm of a much larger universe of past, present and future".

Today Nisker, typically quiet in person, is anything but the raunchy anarchist she is on stage. Rather, Nisker is valiantly Zooming from her Berlin base, camera off, while battling a bug. "Sorry if I sound low-energy," she laments. "I'm just super sick lying in bed, but I'm happy to speak to you." Nisker briefly transplanted to sunny Los Angeles but, she says wryly, Berlin "drew me back in". Regardless, Nisker will soon hit the road again. Next month she's returning to Australia for several dates, including MONA FOMA. Overall, Nisker is upbeat. Indeed, she frequently uses the word "exciting".

Originally a school teacher in Toronto, Nisker pursued music even in the '90s. She gigged in the band The Shit alongside Chilly Gonzales (incidentally, the indie singer-songwriter Feist was her roomie). In 1995 Nisker issued a solo debut, Fancypants Hoodlum, under her own monicker. But, assuming the alter ego Peaches, her breakthrough came in 2000 with The Teaches Of Peaches on Berlin's Kitty-Yo label. The booty-shaking singles Lovertits and Set It Off would be trumped by Fuck The Pain Away, now Peaches' signature anthem. Nisker revelled not only in dirty sex romps, but also in swaggering androgyny – heightened in a live format borrowing from burlesque and performance art.

However, Nisker didn't possess Madonna's blond(e) ambition. Instead she was driven by a modest desire for emotional expression and artistic autonomy – something electronic technologies enabled. In 2007 Nisker told this writer that her aim was to record "party music" she could relate to as a queer woman.

Nisker primarily created The Teaches Of Peaches for herself. "I just recorded it at home myself, whenever I felt like it," she recalls. "So it was just me with my machine. At the time, a lot of friends had moved away and I didn't have anybody to kind of jam with on music, so I bought this machine that was a MC-505 Roland Groovebox [synthesiser].

"So, that way, I could be the drummer, I could be the bass player, I could make weird sounds and could 'make' guitar – they had guitar sample sounds. I had never really made beats before. But, since it was one machine, I thought it'd be really good to do it and use the one machine. It was before people had their own laptops – I surely didn't have one. I was recording on a DAT tape in my bedroom."

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Recovering from a cancer scare, Nisker was feeling emotionally vulnerable during the process. "At that time, I was also going through a massive break-up and was very conscious of not making it a sort of like 'victim' break-up album; feeling sorry for myself. It was a way of helping myself heal and empowerment. I had to start my life over – but I still lived in Toronto, which is where I made the album. [But I had a] newfound sexual freedom.

"And so I was just in my bedroom, smoking weed a lot and having encounters with people and doing whatever the fuck I wanted to do."

Relocating to Berlin, Nisker was swept up in the electroclash movement, which had coalesced around DJ Hell's International Deejay Gigolo Records in the late '90s. Music media types were disdainful of a scene that ironised the New Romantics' theatricality. Electroclash acts similarly defied patriarchal gender roles and sexual codes yet were casually dismissed as poseurs – Fischerspooner particularly scorned. Still, the ever-canny Madonna ventured into electroclash on 2003's American Life. And what was perceived as a transitory trend has endured, conceivably inspiring Pussy Riot. Nisker herself presaged Lady Gaga.

Electroclash pioneers such as (Miss) Kittin have progressively distanced themselves from the phenom – but not Nisker. "I feel like it was very influential – and it still is," she suggests. "[But] I feel like it was also just too queer for the mainstream at that time. That's why it died so quickly. But then it would reform as nu-rave or would reform as all these different things until it became super watered-down and ended up being like EDM, to be honest with you. So I feel like it definitely had a huge impact.

"It was also a time where I think women were really in the forefront of this queer fantastic performative DIY movement – like Le Tigre or Chicks On Speed or Miss Kittin… But it was women at the front, which was really different for a musical movement.

"It was also a very confusing movement for people because of that and because people were just fucking shit up in a punk way – but with electronics and also being very forward with their political ideas and their sexuality."

In 2002 Nisker played the first of many Big Day Outs (she last joined the festival in 2010 with Yo! Majesty rapper Shunda K). "It was amazing," Nisker laughs. "It was very surreal. Also, starting out, you'd be on the same plane as, like, Metallica or The Black Eyed Peas or whatever… So it was really good bonding for the bands."

Switching to XL Recordings, Nisker affirmed her pop status with 2003's Fatherfucker, flaunting an Iggy Pop cameo. Nisker's most recent album, Rub, tracked in an LA garage, dropped in 2015 – Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon guesting on the opener Close Up. In 2023 The Teaches Of Peaches is considered the definitive Peaches release, but is it the closest to her heart? "Well, they're all my babies," Nisker croons. Yet, even for her, The Teaches Of Peaches is significant because of its reverberations.

"I had no idea it would be so influential – and that's really exciting for me, because I had a vision. I had a vision that was very minimal; that was very DIY. I wanted to produce it myself. [Then] I wanted to have lyrics that were very forward; sexual-forward, also forward-thinking in sort of a gender spectrum and forward in not giving a fuck – which is so standard now, which is awesome… It's been a great evolution to see all these artists who are just exploding and, whether they're influenced by me or not, I feel the lineage and it makes me happy."

Prior to Peaches' arrival, female renegades like Millie Jackson, Madonna, Janet Jackson, Salt 'N Pepa and Lil' Kim breached cultural boundaries with a sex positivity symbolic of agency and self-actualisation. But, from the outset, Nisker was radically raw – and her feminism intentionally intersectional. Nowadays she belongs to the same continuum as Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion. "I love all the dirty-down electro-y rap women who are fucking shit up," Nisker enthuses, namechecking Slayyyter, COBRAH and screamo MC Lil Mariko. "They're just like, 'Eat it up – I don't give a shit. I'll say what I want; what I need to say.'"

Nisker admires ROSALÍA as a performer, too. "She cuts her hair every night in honour of Iranian women," the musician says, citing the Spaniard's live rendition of the MOTOMAMI song DIABLO – otherwise about the paradox of fame. "It's amazing how people are not afraid to just show their politics; show their sexuality." By contrast, when Nisker introduced Peaches, any messaging "was not so apparent or understood." "The [electroclash] movement was confusing, but I was extra confusing because I was there alone. I just had my machine and people didn't understand that electronic music was 'music' – and they couldn't know if I was a joke or if I was super serious, if I was angry, if I was a comedian, if I was a performance artist…"

Three decades in and Nisker has established a multi-faceted career encompassing DJing, opera, musical theatre and acting (she presented an idiosyncratic version of Jesus Christ Superstar). Nisker has had overtures for collabs from mainstream figures, appearing on P!nk's Try This and Christina Aguilera's bold, albeit polarising, Bionic. Aptly, she has likewise worked with Yoko Ono – and oddly partnered '80s rapper Tone Lōc on a reimagining of his Wild Thing. Nisker remixed Daft Punk's Technologic.

Nisker's own songs have been covered – Dave Grohl and Greg Kurstin bravely reinterpreting Fuck The Pain Away, although it's difficult to beat Miss Piggy's satirical video take. Additionally, Nisker's compositions can be heard in now classic films and TV series – with Fuck The Pain Away memorably synced for Sofia Coppola's Lost In Translation and Fatherfucker's Operate for the Lindsay Lohan vehicle Mean Girls (tellingly, Taylor Swift's electro missive Look What You Made Me Do referenced Operate). "It was pretty amazing how they used Fuck The Pain Away in [Netflix's British teen comedy drama] Sex Education," Nisker says, noting the unusual choral arrangement, "in what it was about and how they used it and how that song represented the shift in the high school attitudes."

In 2016 Nisker portrayed herself in the cult Canadian sci-fi show Orphan Black, performing Bodyline. She enjoyed the shoot, despite the prevailing cold weather in Toronto on the day. "It was filmed in a club that I used to play in [the Bovine Sex Club], so it was really kind of funny."

In fact, Nisker's persona is such that she has transcended era, let alone scene. But ask where Peaches ends and Merrill Nisker begins and she deflects. "I think that, when you're a performer on stage, it doesn't matter if you've changed your name or not – it's a persona."

Since Rub, Nisker has aired singles like 2021's Pussy Mask. And she's currently planning another LP. What can Nisker tease? "I don't really know," she says elusively. "I'm doing a lot of experimentation – and I'm gonna see… I have a lot of songs, a lot of possibilities, and I'm gonna kind of keep it abstract right now about that."

Probe Nisker on how she's challenging herself – and she reveals a creative dilemma. It transpires that the artist is less interested in reinventing than expanding 'Peaches'. "I'm just challenging myself in, like, how open I am to different music or if I really wanna go [in] different directions for a Peaches album, for instance – you know what I mean? That's why I'm keeping it abstract right now – 'cause I've made a lot of tracks in a lot of different directions, which is exciting. But also, do I want that? Is that a Peaches project? Or is that for something else? So I'm challenging myself to find the ways to express myself that make me happy in projects, I think."

Meanwhile, Nisker is anticipating her Australian run with the spectacle she premiered in Vancouver last May. Nisker will recreate The Teaches Of Peaches accompanied by dancers and musicians. "It's a very good representation of the past, the present and the future of Peaches in ideas and in movement and in musicality and in costume," she states, reiterating the theme.

The countercultural pop star will be decked-out. "There's a lot of archival costumes used that are from past shows, and there's those new costumes that have been made for this that are quite wild." Nisker fancies the concept of "a living archive, instead of like, 'Let's show an archive that's like the Victoria And Albert Museum.'"

Above all, Nisker is owning her legacy – and longevity. "It feels at my shows – especially with this Teaches Of Peaches [show], 'cause I've already done 50 shows for this tour – a lot more celebratory than a fight, which is really exciting, [but] which doesn't make me work less hard. It just makes me feel really emotional. I have to watch out that I don't get emotional on stage, because it's not really part of the program." She pauses to clarify herself. "Well, there is an emotional part, which is cool… But, yeah, it's very exciting."