Born as Merrill Nisker, Peaches is a woman who has one drum machine (and sometimes an electric guitar) and a lot of curse words and other things that would put the ‘parental advisory: explicit content’ sticker on physical and digital audio recordings. I mean, her first hit is called “Fuck the Pain Away”. The 20th anniversary tour of the eponymous album was documented in the film Teaches of Peaches, which has an incredibly high number of occurrences of the word ‘fuck’. That should give you an idea of how much this movie and its subject are on the same wavelength. These shared attitudes certainly made Judy Landkammer and Philipp Fussenegger part of the Peaches family, granting them what seems like unrestricted backstage access during the tour, as well as access to a wealth of archives dating back to when this musician first started going wild.
Before all that “drinking and drugs” to quote another one of Nisker’s many friends sharing their anecdotes and insight we see Nisker singing a nursery rhyme to kindergarten kids in some very old archive footage. A snippet from another time, another life; when she is not yet the woman with the drum machine and sexually explicit content. From there we almost immediately cut to her first underground shows ridiculously small clubs/venues either in her hometown Toronto or in Berlin where she lived for a few years, prompting her to call this city her other hometown. The interviews accompanying these images are with fellow musicians Chilly Gonzales (who had a band called The Shit with Nisker before her Peaches years) and Feist (who did backing vocals for her under the stage name “Bitch Lap Lap”, and then collaborated with Peaches on “Let It Die”, after having met while touring together; this being also testament to both artists’ versatility since it’s a much softer chamber pop album).
Landkammer and Fussenegger are playing by the book of the retrospective documentary genre. They have their witnesses talk about their time with Peaches, and about how important she is as a remarkable fierce queer female figure that our times desperately need. And they also have Peaches herself tell the stories of her major breakthroughs like when the only recording of “Fuck the Pain Away” was handed out to her on a cassette tape, for five dollars, by the sound engineer of the first show she played that song at; or when the mainstream music industry (in the form of legendary BBC TV show Top of The Pops never broadcasting her performance) and Sony (dropping her after her first music video, obviously too offensive to their eyes) denied her the possibility to reach the next level of stardom. But she remained Peaches, giving raucous genuine energy in bigger venues now just like in those small clubs back then.
As an artist, she expresses herself through the use of vulgar language while wearing inappropriate clothing items such as a silicone vulva hat (or no clothes at all). Her intention is not to provoke others but rather show that there should be no shame in acting this way. This mindset offers new opportunities for Landkammer and Fussenegger who can inject their creativity into otherwise stale forms; they splice footage from Peaches’ tours two decades ago with shots from today when she’s 56 years old creating one long eternal now where times coalesce and different eras mingle uninterruptedly before our eyes while keeping alive those very qualities which make them so rarefied – the energy and refusal to fit any mould.
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