Always on the outside
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.
