Noise pioneer, writer, artist and all-round giver-of-good-interviews Lydia Lunch spoke to the LA Record recently.
Among choice quotes about her favourite caves, solar flares as predicted by the Mayans and why "America is fucking stupid", she explained what's lacking in music today and why she had to reform her inimitable 70s no-wavers Teenage Jesus and the Jerks: "There is still not enough women playing ugly fucking music as a counter to all these pop princesses … Somebody's got to be bold enough to go, 'This is fucking ugly. Deal. Deal.'"
She's right. It seems harder than it has in a long time to find any women making the kind of unholy noise that Teenage Jesus and the Jerks did, and it wasn't always like this. When I was at school, I watched Glastonbury on Channel 4 one evening and happened upon PJ Harvey, who looked to me like a shamanic drag queen and sang about drowning her child.
It was mesmerising. Around the same time I saw Hole play Violet on Later with Jools Holland. It was a mess of screaming and noise. These days PJ Harvey is writing piano albums about the Somerset hills and Courtney Love is still tinkering away at a long-promised album that Moby described as sounding like "old Bob Dylan" (the horror).
That's not to say that there aren't any bands fitting into Lunch's "ugly" edict right now: Comanechi, Kasms and Mika Miko play unpalatable punk, while the likes of Crystal Castles and Kap Bambino are aggressive and confrontational. But back then Hole and PJ Harvey were regularly on magazine covers. Now the only thing potentially sloppy and unpredictable about mainstream female performers is their lives, not their music. Unthreatening eccentricity has replaced rage. I miss it.
