Always on the outside

Spoken-word performer Lydia Lunch is as forthright as ever in condemning the injustice that caused her to forsake America, says Ed Power

LYDIA LUNCH thinks the world is going to hell. She ‘feels’ the flames of perdition licking her toes. “How do you fight the corporations?” the spoken-word performer asks. “That’s the problem afflicting the entire planet at the moment. It’s all about class warfare. The Irish should understand that. Whether the source of the conflict is God, land, oil or class — it’s always the same thing. I come back to that Kafka quote. ‘There is hope, but not for us’.”

A life-long fulminator against the status quo, Lunch is in a characteristically garrulous mood this morning. From her apartment in Barcelona, she cheerfully takes pot-shots at any target you bring up. These include US president Barack Obama (a corporate stooge), Ronald Reagan (destroyer of the free world) and anyone who mythologises 1970s New York, where she cut her teeth as enfant terrible of the downtown ‘no wave’ scene. All of this is as you would expect, if you are familiar with her output. As singer, writer and performance poet, Lunch has raised the anti-establishment diatribe to exquisite heights. She’s the crazy woman on the street corner, shouting about the inequities of the world — if that crazy woman was fearsomely articulate and had glitteringly intelligent things to say.

More of a surprise is her conviviality. While Lunch takes what she says seriously, in casual conversation she’s at pains not to biff you over the head with the message. She strikes you as eccentric and melodramatic but likeable, even if she is one of those Americans who insists, at endless length that Ireland is “in the UK”.

Interviewers always ask Lunch about her early period in New York. She arrived in the city as a teenager, in the mid-1970s, when Manhattan was crumbling away to nothing. Crime was rampant and it wasn’t safe to walk in the parks because of the used syringes. It puzzles her that people look back on that time with fondness.

“It’s quite sickening to me,” she says. “It was very dangerous. It was not an innocent time.”

Lunch says America became trapped in a moral quagmire at the end of the 1960s, as hippy idealism gave way to a corrosive cynicism.

“The Charles Manson murders killed the summer of love,” she says. “Hopes were dashed. Reality hit like a fist in the face. New York became a magnet to every freak at that point. It was so bankrupt and dangerous. Out of the negativity, we somehow had to create. ”

In New York, Lunch was a contemporary of Alan Vega, of the influential band Suicide, novelist Hubert Selby Jr (author of Last Exit to Brooklyn) and Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon, of Sonic Youth.

She was born Lydia Koch and raised in middle-class Rochester, a dormer town in New York state. ‘Lunch’ was a nickname she earned due to her habit of stealing the food of other starving artists in the communal apartment where she lived.

Collectively, the nihilistic movement she participated in was dubbed ‘no wave’. For a while, it was the only truly artistic thing happening in Manhattan.

Early on, Lunch mostly sang and acted (she played a dominatrix in the experimental 1979 movie Black Box). She turned to spoken word in the mid-1980s, feeling there was no other way for her to express the rage she felt towards America.

“I started doing it under Ronald Reagan,” she says. “I couldn’t take it politically any more. At the time, I was criticised for exaggerating reality. Everything I said would happen has come to pass. We’re back in feudal times.”

Eight years ago, Lunch left America, moving to Barcelona. In southern Europe, she has finally become the outsider she always felt like. Spain’s economic turmoil has affected her. But she has been heartened at the way strong social bonds have prevented the country falling utterly asunder.

“Most of the unemployed still live with their parents,” she says. “You don’t feel it in the streets. I’ve lived in ghettos all my life — from New York to Los Angeles to London to Pittsburgh. I worried about it.

“The thing I like about Spain, Barcelona specifically, is that it isn’t angry. It’s not negative or dangerous. It is refreshing not to have to live in a kill-or-be-killed situation.”

Lunch will be in Cork next week for a show to mark the fifth anniversary of Black Mariah, who run the exhibition space at Triskel. She performs a political piece incorporating psycho-ambient music and visual projections. “It deals with a variety of subjects. Life’s hangover, the ghost of dead romance. The ghost of the Spanish civil war dead. It is very political and very personal. Doing something like this lets me showcase the various styles of writing I have,” she says.

Lunch was prompted to quit the US by George W Bush’s re-election. Did she consider returning after Obama came to power? She laughs out loud.

“I know a false prophet when I see one. To quote Mr T, ‘I pity the fool.’ What a mess he has to clean up. I don’t have hope for Obama. He is getting a dirty deal. No matter his intentions, how do you fight the corporations?” she says.

The other reason Lunch refuses to go back to the US is that it’s easier to make a living in Europe. Audiences are more sophisticated, even if she occasionally has to include subtitles for those lacking English as a first language. She is looking forward to visiting Ireland and speaking to people who will, she says, appreciate her dark humour.

“That’s the beauty of Ireland,” she says. “You have such a rich spoken-word tradition. It’s a country where people read as well as write. I think you’ll understand the black humour, the sarcasm, the raunchiness.”

* Lydia Lunch performs at the Triskel Arts Centre, Cork, next Thursday.