MELODY MAKER | 28 JULY 1979
THIS IS THE MODERN GIRL
Thoroughly Modern Lydia Lunch is a woman of
many talents. In a break from swallowing razor blades, she tells MARY HARRON
about her weapons collection, writing ambitions, medical history, and why she’s
called a halt to onstage flagellation. She’s also got a new image and plans a
solo album.
IF
MAE West had written The Story of O, then she might have come with a
character like Lydia Lunch. Lydia happens to be the strongest personality among
those New York groups that – much to their disgust – were linked together under
the label “No Wave.” She started Teenage Jesus and the Jerks three years ago,
when she was 17. The music was, to say the least, minimalist – some of her sets
were only seven minutes long. It was the simplest form of music. “It was the
most blunt, aggressive, angry, hostile, brutal – it was me.”
Lydia was sitting in a London café, on a stopover in between Berlin and New
York. She was sporting her new image: a shocking pink mini skirt, black
stockings and white boots, in place of her old black leather. “It’s the new
style” she said with languid irony, “Petula Clark and Nancy Sinatra, roll over.”
Before leaving New York, she had disbanded Teenage Jesus and the Jerks and her
other group, Beirut Slump. “I’ve said my point. You either heard it or you
didn’t. It was more radical than any of this New Wave/No Wave shit, but I never
tried to create anything different. It was my physical expression: Teenage
Jesus. It was my mental expression – Beirut Slump.
She looked into her Coca-cola, pausing for definition. “With Teenage Jesus you
punched people on the head with the sound. The audience is either going to say
UGH and leave quickly, or they’re going to be masochistic and want to be punched
again. Beirut Slump was like The Blob – it oozes under doors and people either
run away fast to avoid it or they like to let this gooey junk surround them.
“And then I have this new style, which is to, like, knock on the door with a
smiling dace and say, ‘Hi! Would you like to buy a Bible?’ This is my new band,
which was more of a selling technique. The undertones – everything sinister,
evil and crazy about it is where you can’t feel it. But it’s a very professional
sound. Some people are going to say it’s a sell-out. It’s not – it’s just
something entirely different, and again, as in the past, it’s something totally
self-indulgent.”
The indulgence is her fantasy of being a girl singer. She is, at the same time,
planning a solo album to be released on Ze Records. “It’s a collaboration with
myself. It’s me playing anybody I ever wanted to once.” The album was originally
conceived as a collection of TV show themes; as it is, four of Lydia’s songs are
– in one of the year’s more unexpected partnerships – arranged by the man who
wrote the music to The Flintstones.
TEENAGE JESUS previously appeared on the “No New York” compilation album,
produced by Brian Eno.
“Eno, the idiot that he is, did a horrendous job – had no sensibility about my
band, and completely misrepresented us.”
I asked Lydia what Eno was like to work with.
“Oh, he’s very smiley and happy, which can be very annoying. He’s very nice,
which does not breed creativity. Niceness breeds tolerance, which breeds
mediocrity. It’s like Eno’s records are an expression of mediocrity, because all
it is is something that just flows and weaves, flows and weaves. So he’s very
smiley and happy and flows and weaves – and it’s kind of nauseating. It’s like
drinking a glass of water. It means nothing, but it’s very smooth going down.
I’d rather drink razor blades.”
She says she finds a lack of intelligence in the New York music scene. “My band
is going to be a fresh and honest attempt at making modern music. None of
this pseudo funk shit that a lot of the New York bands are trying to sink into –
the Contortions, mainly. Fuck is old and funk you should leave to people who are
funky. And I don’t like camp. Like the B-52s, or reviving anything old
like rockability. It’s too easy to resort to your roots. I unfortunately have
none to resort to, which is maybe why my prior attempts at music came out
sounding so offensive to most people.”
Lydia was, at one time, close friends with James Chance of the Contortions – a
friendship partly destroyed by the antagonism between Lydia and James Chance’s
girlfriend and manager, Anya Phillips.
“I think – not to gossip, but to gossip – that James is completely blinded and
manipulated by Anya’s view of what Now Camp is. He’s a brilliant
songwriter and musician, and the Contortions were great at one time. But they’re
turning into the Tubes or something. All those circus antics, throwing himself
off the stage…
“They’ve stolen a lot of my ideas; but I’ve dropped the hostility and the
aggression because I don’t feel it anymore. James can’t get it out of his system
because he’s bound and gagged by Anya; the minute you’re out of those blindfolds
and gags, you’re ready to kick and scream. And that’s his band: he’s kicking and
screaming.
“But I’ve lashed my last whip publicly – all my whipping will be done in private
from now on, and I quite prefer it that way.”
THE move from public to private violence has something to do with her recent
marriage, to a boy she had known for two weeks. Lydia wanted the wedding to take
place on a holiday; she chose Halloween as the most appropriate.
“I have a great marriage, because I’ve finally met my match. I met someone who
is as horrible as I am. I’m completely happy. I hate going out, and now I don’t
have to. We have a great little apartment in the slums, in Manhattan. It’s
horrible, but it’s home to me. I just want to live in my nice little apartment
with my husband who keeps me eternally happy. And unhappy. It’s a brutal and
ugly marriage, just like everything else in my life. I’m not going to explain
all the horribleness and all the physical punishment I’ve had to go through, but
it’s always worth it.”
Lydia is said to have been a groupie when she was 14, in her hometown of
Rochester, New York. In a sense she was one in her early days in New York; but
that word, with its image of passively-adoring femininity, could never quite
apply to Lydia. Now she says she’s completely faithful.
“Why not? Why would I want to fuck around when I have the best fuck at home?
Even before I got married, I decided it was too ridiculous to go out and even
attempt to have sex, because nobody’s going to do it right. I can just stay at
home and do it to myself. Boys are so full and stupid basically – there’s that
whole boring thing of having to waste some time before and after looking at this
idiot I do not like to associate on that level.
She no longer spends her evenings in the New York clubs. “No matter how good or
original other people’s music may be, the bad thing about it is that I know what
they think. So I don’t listen to other bands, I don’t have a record-player, I
don’t care about what’s going on now. I care about the future.
Lydia gave me one of her ironic, calm and exceeding self-possessed stares.
“Actually, I would just as soon settle down and write books, but having started
this irrational move in the music world, I’ll go in that direction for a little
while. And then I’ll write my little books.
What about?
“Love, the New Neurotic Housewife, retardation, insomnia…”
Like in a scientific, academic kinda way?
“Well, of course. I think that everything I do is completely academic. I like
facts, and I like realism. I’m not into fiction, actually.
When she was 14 years old, Lydia thought of herself as a scientist.
“My experiments were human, and I jotted all my research down in books. You
know, I did surveys; I still do, but now my surveys are on a one-to-one basis,
where before I just felt like the constant interviewer.”
I asked what she liked to read, and she laughed.
I have to admit – I read books about health. Not how to have good health, but
health problems and handicaps and deficiencies and starving children and
child-abuse, and all those real good things that concerned movie stars dedicate
their money to. But I like reading old medical books, not modern ones, because
the old medical books are kind of comical. I like humourising these things – I
mean they’re sad, but they’re also comical. The human form is absurd.”
I asked if any of her songs were inspired by her reading.
“Well, I’ve written songs about my physical condition, which you can look up in
any of those books. No names, no names. But you know, I just got out of hospital
in Holland, with a rather serious problem of innards. I’m supposed to be in bed
for five weeks. Bedridden. I had a wheelchair when I was in Holland,
which was really good because I love being carted around. I hate physical
activity, with very few exceptions. But I’m a real trouper – I’m happiest when
I’m sick.”
As her fascination with suffering might suggest, Lydia was and is a Catholic.
“Has it affected me? Well, I have a lot of neat crosses and things in my house.
Church pews. It affects me in the sense that I have some good memorabilia –
religious articles from distant places. And sure, I want to die and go to
heaven. I think I’m setting a real good example, too. I believe in hell, I
guess, more than anything.”
TWO days later she was to head back to her New York, to her apartment in one of
the worst areas of Manhattan – which does not frighten her – and her collection
of weapons.
"We have this axe, and a machete, and these little switchblades with buttons.
And these Chinese throwing stars – I think that’s real fun. I like necessary
weapons for modern survival. I mean, we have the axe above our bed, so if
there’s a fire you can axe your way out of the house. You can buy these things
at the hardware store,” she added helpfully.
And when she goes back to New York, she hopes to bring out an album of both
Teenage Jesus and Beirut Slump, as the final salute to her “primal scream”
period in music.
“It’s not my last attempt at stardom with those bands, because they’re not
very…likeable. I’m putting out an album so that when I’m 30, I can listen to it.
That’s all. That music hurt, not only to listen to but – if you can believe it –
to sing, to play. Sob sob. But it was honest, it was real.
"I make music for myself – I’m not counting on mass appeal. Because I’m not one
of those sweet smiley types – that’s what people want, they want rapport. And
they’re not ever going to get it with me. I mean, do you like eating octopus?
Very few people enjoy it. It’s an acquired taste designed for the very
few.”
Lydia was getting restless. She smiled and yawned and said sarcastically: “Of
course my new band will be so popular and wonderful I might find myself on the
cover of Vogue. I mean, I can be anything for a day. I want to be an actress,
and I can do it on those little records. I am and I am and I am and I will
continue.”
She looked at the tape recorder.
“And I really don’t have anything more to say.”
