Peaches Demands Attention At SXSW

Peaches told me she had promised herself she’d never play the South by Southwest music festival again. She turned up in Austin for the shebang a decade ago and wasn’t sure she needed to do it twice. Fortunately the inimitable Canadian/Berliner/Los Angeleno decided to break that promise and put on three shows which were among the most difficult to get into and most remarked upon of this year’s madness. Along with the show at Maggie Mae’s Rooftop on Tuesday 3-15-16, sharing some tequila and getting a chat with the omnivorous artist was a memorable highlight that future SXSW encounters will be measured against…

Peaches’ first album in six years Rub came out in September. It features appearances from Kim Gordon and Feist and may be her peachiest work yet. That is, after starting out making music herself using a groovebox…as she explained…she explored live instruments and having a band. Now, she’s back to doing it herself. Sometimes you have to go away so you can come back. In the interval between 2009’s I Feel Cream and Rub, she ‘got her ya-yas out’ by, for starters, performing a one-woman show version of Jesus Christ Superstar with the delicious title of Peaches Christ Superstar. She also took half a year to become fluent in phonetic Italian so she could sing the lead, surrounded by opera singers, in a production of Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo. Peaches Does Herself – another genius title – was an ‘anti-jukebox musical’ meaning it was based on her contemporary work as opposed to reviving music of yesteryear. It started out as a live show and evolved into a film that played about 70 festivals around the world. Not enough for you? How about a book of photographs by Peaches’ photographer Holger Talinski that captures her performing as well as just living while giving a sense for her remarkable costumes and visual aesthetic. When I asked her if those projects seeped into the latest record or what she’s doing on stage now, she said to my surprise, absolutely not. Perhaps going outside her primary persona helped focus and re-define exactly what Peaches is.