Words by Emma Warren

Peaches’ studio is currently ‘discombobulated’. This is because she’s about to embark on the Teaches of Peaches 20th Anniversary Tour – and because post-tour she’ll be building a whole new studio. “Everything is ripped up and pulled into different configurations,” she says from her Berlin home, although she’s quick to add that it won’t make much difference to her music-making either way. “I just wanna be honest. They’re fun to have there. They’re good ideas for me. I’m sure that’s horrifying for a lot of people to hear. In the end, they’re good tools for ideas and they look great. They’re inspiring just by being there.”

The iconic artist likes to work fast – and that’s not an approach that lends itself to spending endless hours nerding out over software or hardware. Instead, she prefers to work with someone for whom nerd hours are a joy. “I’m excited when I get results and I also like things to happen quickly. I’m a little impatient – which is why I like to work with someone.” She’s working frequently with her partner and multi-disciplinary artist Black Cracker, whose latest work is a VR ballet as part of the Berlin Konzerthaus’ double centenary celebrations. 

Her forthcoming tour marks a different anniversary: twenty years since Peaches – real name Merrill Nisker – released The Teaches of Peaches, becoming an iconic musician, producer and performer in the process. Songs from the album have been synced to key moments in cult films and TV including Mean Girls, The Handmaid’s Tale, Whip It, as well as a memorable season finale for Sex Education’s third season which culminated with ‘Fuck The Pain Away'. She can also claim a hand in the success of other powerful artists too: Feist worked backstage at early Peaches shows, whilst M.I.A was making an on-tour video for Peaches when she realised that she could – and would – make music, too.

The Teaches of Peaches was written and produced using a Roland MC-505 Groovebox, in a super-simple one-machine, bedroom set-up. It wasn’t even just a bedroom set-up, she says. “It was anywhere I could find a plug… I wasn’t really interested in the traditional, layered ways of composing. I was more interested in a punk way, using electronics, but saying ‘this is the bass, this is the guitar, these are the drums. That’s your instruments and they all have their place. They all get heard’. I just wanted to make sure that the one sound is just slamming and it’s direct and it hits you between the eyes.”

She recently revisited this process in an Instagram post showing how she used the Groovebox to make Hot Rod, noting how different it felt to use something that offers such limited options when she’s now used to making music in Ableton or using Maschine. 

“I liked to use it back then because I would find very direct sounds I really liked,” she says, “probably sounds Kraftwerk used [laughs]. I looked at the name of one of the sounds I used a lot, and it was the sine tone. Literally the sine tone. I would slightly manipulate it, but I thought it was so direct and it had such a perfect place in what I was doing.”

On tour, she’ll be playing Lovertits live with the MC505. “It’s one sound. In the bridge I played three different notes from the same sound and to change to a new part I filtered it a bit and that makes a new part. Then it stays in that filter and it makes a new sound but it’s still the same sound. Then I pitch it up another octave for a new sound. I want to do a tutorial on that song because it’s just one sound. It’s crazy.”

This brings to mind Viv Albertine from punk band The Slits who in the early days, supporting The Clash, didn’t realise that shouting ‘1, 2, 3, 4’ at the start of a song dictated the pace. She just thought it was something you did. Trusting intuition over training contributed to Peaches’ distinctive creative style – and specifically in terms of not knowing about ‘the one’. “I’d just go, ‘start now’ but it’d be in the middle. It made for really good breaks and things that couldn’t have happened on the one in terms of those programming patterns.” 

This was particularly true when Peaches was making Set It Off. “It all stops for a second, and that creates this little tense moment that, to me, makes the song. That was only because I put the one in the wrong place and when the pattern came to the end of the pattern, it literally stopped every sound. When I played it back I liked the way it had this split in the middle of the four-bar loop, which in my pattern was the end of the loop. These mistakes created new parts, very subtly, and very simply, but made a big difference.”

The Groovebox helped her create the sounds she wanted. On stage, however, she wanted something different. “I realised that I was not bound to the machine. The first few times I played live I was behind it, playing it. Then I was like ‘Why? Push it to the side’. This was a way of showing and expressing that this machine could give you the freedom to move and perform and not be hidden behind it. I was interested in being independent.”

Recently, Peaches was behind two ads, one for Meta – following in the footsteps of Grace Jones who voiced their last ad promoting small business ads (‘It’s a very meta idea, for Meta’) – and the other for Skyn condoms. “I just got a new vocal mic, the TLM 103, and I noticed quite an incredible brightness compared to the SM7 which I was using because [puts on voice] it’s the Michael Jackson microphone. It was really nice to hear all the extra brightness and actually, it helped me to relax in my vocalisation.”

Are there any advertisers who are on your ‘refuse’ list, I ask? “Yeah, if I feel like I can’t do it. I’m sure there are, a lot…This Meta ad is quite queer. I remember having the meeting – I’m really proud of how queer this is. They were like, ‘yep, that’s what we want’. I’m not going to change, of course.”

She’s composed music for her own art projects including 2019 Whose Jizz Is This? at the Kunstverein in Hamburg. Intricate animatronics and sculptures depicted sentient sex toys and the 15 channels of location-specific sound would change depending on where you were standing. “One object would bring out the bass, another would bring out the high-end percussive sounds. It made a whole track but you never heard all the sounds together.” She likes using Maschine because of its tactility – ‘I find it really helpful in terms of organising ideas and making a palette’ – but doesn’t like to spend too long sweating a sound: “I’m too impatient for that.”

There have also been remixes recently, including an ‘extreme club track’ featuring the voice of long-departed cult performance artist Leigh Bowery. She’s also completed a composition for visual artist and filmmaker Rosa Barba based on piano pieces the artist provided, which Peaches set up in Maschine and manipulated. Peaches is well known for pushing powerfully against societal taboos, especially through the lens of queerness, feminism and sex-positivity – her pandemic response was a new track ‘Pussy Mask’ – but it’s her album Fatherfucker that remains most powerfully charged, nineteen years after she first released it. 

“To me, that is the most underrated album in terms of impact, and what it did for the people who are fans, or became fans. It is the strongest statement. It was almost too much for the next step. Teaches of Peaches is quite palatable because it’s sexy. It’s one girl’s journey into herself. Fatherfucker is ‘what if we examine the other side’?”

Back in 2003, there was a lack of vocabulary, she says. “That’s why I came up with certain phrases. Now we have more useful terms in terms of spectrum or gender fluidity which didn’t exist then. When you listen back I wish I had that vocabulary or understood what was coming. Some of it sounds binary: ‘shake your dick or shake your tits’ – those are your options. Or even wearing a beard. Now you’d think ‘there is a spectrum’.”

The forthcoming 28-date anniversary tour covers the US, Canada and multiple European stops, and contains what she calls ‘an archival aspect’. “Using the [Roland MC] 505, understanding the beginnings. There will be new costumes and old costumes from those times. Just to bring them out and let people be like ‘I remember that!’ rather than waiting for them to be in the Victoria & Albert. It’s fun to bring it out and use it on the tour, even if nobody notices.”

She’ll be joined on stage by two dancers. “The two dancers I’ve picked come from a more durational aspect. They’re not ‘I’m so high energy!’ No one’s under 35 on the tour. Actually the guitarist, but she’s quite mature. Having guitars and live drums on some tracks, mixing it up with playback or Maschine or dancers.”

All of this will be facilitated by the currently dissembled home studio. “The rig is so gorgeous and made so simply and beautifully so it can be plug and play. We won’t be setting up for hours because it’s already set up. That’s with the help of the technology but also understanding how to make it work together.”

Even Peaches, though, has to deal with self-doubt. What are you realising from spending all this time with your old self, I ask her. “Not to care so much… I have to remember, you don’t have to love it, and that’s OK. Or you love it already – that’s OK too.”

Get your tickets to The Teaches of Peaches Anniversary Tour here.

Peaches is also part of Grace Jones' Meltdown find out more here.