Philipp Fussenegger and Judy Landkammer’s documentary Teaches of Peaches is conventional to the point of being near antithetical to the artist at its centre. Merrill Nisker, known around the world as Peaches, is a musician, multimedia artist, community creator, sex-positive activist, and queer icon. She pushed against the closed world of her conservative Toronto upbringing by taking risk after risk. Forging a career out of pure unfettered expression; Peaches wasn’t simply a second or third wave ‘punk’ innovator – she was, and is, in your face DIY cabaret.
Passionate, political, provocative; Peaches rails against sexism, queer phobia, and ageism. Electronic anthems of rebellion and pleasure. Hardly the kind of figure to be boxed up neatly in a ‘talking heads’ meets archive footage, meets concert tour documentary where the flair comes from the subject and never the form.
Peaches is about to undertake the 20th anniversary tour for her breakthrough 2002 album The Teaches of Peaches. Concentrating on her time in Berlin (both in 2022 and earlier) Fussenegger and Landkammer begin the documentary in a manner which makes it appear Peaches would rather be taking a nap than celebrating the work.
Some of that has to do with their insistence on having Peaches’ partner Black Cracker (real name Ellison Renee Glen) speak for her. “She often starts as if no one loves her and no one loves her music… it costs her,” he tells the camera. Ellison Renee Glen’s insights take up a lot of space and are often less insights than statements on their current domesticity.
It’s true that any kind of anniversary tour brings with it the artist of ‘then’ and ‘now’. Peaches is fifty-six at the time of filming and doesn’t pretend otherwise. The body of the artist has changed but none of her frankness nor her impact. There is a space where Peaches could speak out how she’s viewed now by certain parts of the media for maintaining her sexual and bodily autonomy as art, but it never gets properly addressed.
Instead, the directors will often show Peaches performing the album in the past and place in next to her performing it now. There are visual statements in the contemporary performances (Peaches coming on stage with a walker and wearing a hat shaped like a vagina) but the radical spirit of “I’m old, so what? I still fuck” needs to also be said.
Tracing back over Peaches’ career with some wonderful archival footage is often the best part of the documentary. We see Merrill in the mid 1990s teaching drama and singing to kids – which somewhat thematically lines up when she’s telling touring her guitarist Bláthin how to capture the crowd and make them beg to applaud her ass. Then it’s Merrill singing with a standard ‘riot grrl pop’ outfit. And later becoming ‘Peaches’ while working with her band ‘The Shit.’
Peaches picked up a keyboard and, along with Chilly Gonzales, headed to Europe and immersed themselves in the queer Berlin nightlife. Berlin wanted whatever Peaches was giving – electro beats and dildos as microphones. Back in Toronto she kept crafting her work, sharing a house with Leslie Feist, and writing the demos for what would be her breakthrough album.
Feist recalls Peaches and her three working boyfriends. Her bong: her American boyfriend, her espresso machine: her Italian boyfriend, and her dildo: her Japanese boyfriend. Back at the turn of the millennium Peaches was preaching her gritty filth – her catalogue of female and queer desire in Toronto clubs or on 8mm short films. Peaches created a collective of artists living in near poverty in terrible rentals. It was the rock and roll lifestyle.
Fussenegger and Landkammer have people worth listening to. Shirley Manson of Garbage speaks of Peaches’ work as “Succinct, clever, dangerous. Expressing pain and shame and darkness in a really celebratory way. I think it’s genius.” Manson is speaking of Peaches’ blistering work ‘Fuck the Pain Away,’ a track which remains ever relevant and can fill a dancefloor or an emotional void with equal power.
Peaches’ little Roland MC-505 that was stuck at 120BPM because she didn’t know how to change the tempo is her constant collaborator. Those beats belonged to Peaches who just picked up a bunch of presets and created magic. The lyrics belong to her too. She stopped singing because she didn’t want to be judged for her voice, “I wanted there to be nowhere to hide from my sentences,” she says of her first album.
The places where the documentary falls apart is in its lack of focus and vision. It takes far too long for the audience to hear specifically from Peaches about her brand of inclusive feminism and how important it is for her to create queer artistic spaces. Anyone who has followed Peaches’ career knows how she was screwed over by Sony or has been accused of not creating her own beats, or the headlines calling her an old woman at thirty-three. NME even ran a headline stating “Granny scares the Kids” after she opened for some boy band somewhere.
Earlier she had spoken in the documentary about how men are free to express desire – lust – and women were not. Yet women did speak about such things, but even with mainstream acts such as Madonna they had to be “flawless” and desirable while doing it to match the male imagination. Peaches was sexy because she was an amalgam of sweat, pubic hair, messy, and androgynous, and as Feist relates taught people, “To not give a fuck. Don’t worry about how you’re perceived.”
Teaches of Peaches is not quite a tour diary and it’s not quite an investigation into who Peaches is now. It’s rich when it opens up the array of her early video and film ephemera (including German TV interviews where she says she doesn’t care if she looks like shit, and also, she stinks). Where the documentary fails the subject is in its lacklustre approach to her, especially in the present.
The concert footage is shot in a fairly perfunctory manner and doesn’t match the intense energy and sense of chaotic fun Peaches brings to her performances. And while it’s great to see Peaches walks the walk in hiring queer crew and creatives and is still scavenging from and creating with Charlie Le Mindu for her fabulously riotous costumes; it is a lot less interesting hearing from Glen talking about how draining touring can be and how it’s getting in the way of their sex life.
Peaches never really expected to become “mainstream” – something which is commented upon. The mainstream flattens people – it needed to bend to her. Yet, even on the margins she was a threat to the straight white cis male order. Even now she’s working in activism for abortion rights with the “Thank God for Abortions” leotard being in full view, she like Kathleen Hanna, Shirley Mason, and many Gen X female presenting musicians, are leading the charge for the generations to come.
While getting ready for a show Peaches is doing an interview and the journalist asks if she is pro-choice as a political issue or a personal issue. Her exhaustion sinks in. She’s pro-choice because it is a human right. Whether or not she has had an abortion is irrelevant. She knocks back at the journalist with a “Not cool, kid.” How do these questions still get asked now she wonders, but then again, how are abortion rights being taken away. How are queer and trans folk being denied health care? Possibly something the documentary could have delved into with more depth – the hard yards put in by Peaches and others to force conversations about bodily autonomy.
Ellison Renee Glen observes that Peaches isn’t the same woman she was twenty years ago, and language, attitudes, and fashion have changed. Peaches worries how she’s going to bring ‘The Teaches of Peaches’ to a new audience. There are young people out there want her to play the album so they can feel the fury and run free with ‘Bubbe Peaches’.* Time goes by but the lessons Peaches was schooling audiences with aren’t going to stop being relevant.
Peaches might like organic wine now more than party drugs, her stomach and ass hang heavier, but she’s still going to walk on the audience, and they will catch her. Merrill Nesker and the talent she’s worked with, learned from, and mentored through her career is the reason to watch Teaches of Peaches. Even a lacklustre presentation from the filmmakers can’t keep mother/fatherf*cking Peaches from kicking collective reactionary ass.
*Peaches isn’t a grandmother – but as she was called one in her early 30s, her now being in her late 50s seemed like a nice ironic flourish.
Teaches of Peaches has already screened at the Melbourne International Film Festival. Wider cinema release in Australia is TBC.
