It’s hard to think of a performer who makes it clearer that you shouldn’t mess with them than Lydia Lunch. With a mouth like a sailor who just stubbed a toe, and a heart colder and blacker than onyx, Lunch walks on stage, sips from a large glass of white wine and throws up devil’s horns with ineffable nonchalance. Moments later she’s stabbing the air as if her microphone were a dagger, and grabbing punters’ heads in a manner suggesting she were anointing them, or possibly about to twist them clean off. “Do you know what raunch is?” she snarls. “You’re getting a fuckin’ lesson tonight.”
Lunch helped pioneer no wave at the dawn of the 80s with the slashing din of Teenage Jesus and the Jerks and has remained a caustic presence in the punk-rock firmament ever since. Big Sexy Noise unites her with guitarist James Johnston and drummer Ian White of guttural London greasers Gallon Drunk for the most joyfully bawdy music of her career, stripping bare the bluesy brawn of 70s heavy-rock and inverting its every cock-rock cliche to Lunch’s delight. White’s limber shuffle injects sinful grace into what could have been Neanderthal sludge, while Johnston stirs up the din of an entire band with his single guitar, hurtling between bone-simple, seamy riffs and blasts of inchoate noise.
Johnston, the Joe Perry to Lunch’s Steven Tyler, is a silver-haired rag-doll being hurled about the stage by his own instrument, crumpling at her feet, always subservient to her blistering, sardonic ire. Lunch, meanwhile, is gleefully, pungently abrasive. Your Love Don’t Pay My Rent, a lacerating, hilarious assault on fragile male egos, could doubtless incite baseless accusations of misandry from humourless men’s rights activists, but there’s no doubt Lunch would savour the delicious tears she’d provoke. Lunch clearly has the patience of a trigger-happy mugger, and her swagger is empowering, infectious. Announcing she won’t indulge the pantomime of strolling off and then back on stage before the encore, she also forbiddingly demands a moment of silence, “because I don’t need any shit”. The audience comply, of course. Lunch’s ferocity is a thrill to witness, but you wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end.
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