Peaches' Personal Best

BEST FIT: At the risk of sounding naïve, I ventured onto Urban Dictionary to try and figure out what ‘tombstone’ meant in this context, and that was pretty eye opening… What’s the story with this song, and what earns it a place in this list?

PEACHES: The day I wrote this song was a really, really dark day in Berlin. I was in my studio in Tacheles, which is an old squat, and I was feeling that darkness but also had a little snap in my step, if you know what I mean. Like I was skipping through a graveyard or something. I was also thinking about bands like Suicide and The Cramps, because that’s what I was listening to a lot at the time, and “Tombstone, Baby” just kind of came out in that way. It’s an electronic sound but then it’s punctuated with guitar at the end, and it has this kind of slapback-y Cramps, Alan Vega, maybe even an Elvis-y voice.

I like how poetic the song is. I think it evokes this full image of, like I said, skipping through a graveyard. It’s reckoning with the Berlin-in-the-middle-of-winter feeling but loving the darkness and having a positivity about it. The lyrics are sort of like a warm breakfast, you know? “I’m the French toast, give me syrup,” “Coffee with your cream” – to me that just trying to get something out of all the darkness. Putting in more sugar and more cream because you don’t want it to be bitter. You’re just trying to find something to fill you up in that way.

I'm just really happy to see a song from Fatherfucker from here. I feel like that album of yours deserves more love generally. How has your relationship to it changed over the years?

It's very interesting, because when that album came out, people in music circles were critical and very disappointed, even though “Operate” was a hit – it was used in Mean Girls – and “Kick It” with Iggy Pop was quite popular too. But people were very, very upset. For me, though, I love this album so much because I took the concept even further. The Teaches of Peaches was sort of like a sexy, woman coming of age kind of thing, and Fatherfucker was like a twisted version of that.

It was the first time that I was really twisting things and opening up all the queer valves. So you have songs like “Shake Yer Dix”, which sounds pretty binary right now so it could be “Shake Yer Bits”. You have “I U She”, which I now sing always as “I U she, I U he, he I they.” And you have the song “Rock 'N' Roll” which is a kind of sarcastic take on being a big macho rock star but I’m just singing “Rock and roll” over and over again. So, the conceptual element was even larger on Fatherfucker, which of course is a play on ‘motherfucker,’ and I feel like, for the queer community, this is the album that really resonated with them.

Also, on that tour, I just really cemented my understanding of how important it is to be inclusive and how important it is to speak to your community. So, even though musically it wasn’t very well received, in terms of how I was building community and how I was building my art and my audience, I think it was very successful.

As a queer person, I totally agree. I revisited some of the reviews recently and I was like, “What the hell are these people listening to? A completely different album?”

Well, I guess it was just too much. The Teaches of Peaches was still seductive enough, but once I started to break the gender valves open, it was too much. It wasn’t time. People were not ready for that, musically, and that’s fine because it didn’t matter. Fatherfucker wasn’t about getting ahead in the music industry. I wasn’t trying to build myself up into somebody who could headline Glastonbury or anything like that.