What’s the most chaotic thing that’s ever happened to you on stage?
I’m still waiting for that. Maybe it’s the most chaotic thing I’ve ever put forth from the stage. Once a quite drunken man called out a rather rude remark for me to suck his you-can-imagine-what, so I invited him up to the stage and cracked him in the neck with a blackjack [club]. He fell to his knees and I told him to suck it himself. I’m always prepared!
You’re in Australia to perform the songs of Suicide. Can you tell me about the impact Alan Vega had on you as a performer?
They were one of the first concerts I saw when I arrived in New York at the age of 16. I think it was the mania and musical schizophrenia from one song to another, from Cheree to Dream Baby Dream to Frankie Teardrop. I liked that confusion of emotion. Also, that thousand-yard stare that Alan Vega had, screaming into the void as he did. They sounded like no one else.
You’re also playing a series of shows with [Beasts of Bourbon and the Cruel Sea frontman] Tex Perkins. How did you first connect with him?
I don’t really remember when I met him, but I was always a fan of the Beasts of Bourbon, and when we did the Shotgun Wedding tour [in 1994, with Rowland S Howard] we covered Hard for You, which Tex and I might do on this tour. I just find him adorably funny, sexy, raunchy, everything rock’n’roll should be.
You have a long history with that lineage of Australian rock performers, Rowland most notably. What do you miss most about him?
Look, missing people who have left so much in their wake is just a western form of selfish greed. As opposed to missing, how about celebrating what there was? I’m just glad I got to celebrate his life with him. Most people don’t get that much of an opportunity. We only are greedy for more for ourselves. The dead don’t give a shit.
He has a laneway in St Kilda named after him now, as does another of your Australian associates, Spencer P Jones. What do you think of this trend of posthumously naming places after musicians who may not have received much material reward in their lifetimes?
Well, they might not even receive it postmortem – think of someone like [novelists] Hubert Selby Jr or Henry Miller or any number of dead geniuses. But it’s better than having a fucking hamburger named after you.
OK, since you mention it, if you were to have a sandwich named after you, what would be in it?
Well, first of all I don’t like sandwiches at all, so I would never allow a sandwich to be named after me. I think that bread is a trick on poor people, unless it’s highly nutritious or Danish. So perhaps it would be a sandwich with no bread, but a divine interior. Something meaty, juicy, big and bouncy, just like me.
You’ve built a career on the art of shock and provocation. What’s your most controversial pop culture opinion?
Well, excu-uuse me! I wish you’d rephrase that, because I don’t find anything I’ve done shocking, but I’ve got no opinion about pop culture. It’s an existential vacuum that sucks everything into it that has not a brain cell left for itself. The internet wants other people to air their dirty laundry, as if it was some kind of sacred sacrament? I don’t pay attention to that shit.
One of the early records I owned was Drunk on the Pope’s Blood, your split EP with the Birthday Party. What have you made of Nick Cave’s transformation into the world’s greatest agony uncle via The Red Hand Files?
NO COMMENT!
Could we see Lydia Lunch become the world’s greatest agony aunt? I would pay for this.
I do write a column for the Idler, a British magazine. But back when the internet used to pay for you to write, I had a sex advice column called Tough Love, where I used to write both the questions and the answers. There was one that went: Dear Lydia, I’m making Thanksgiving dinner for friends, and I’m wondering if I could get salmonella if I ejaculated into the turkey. I don’t remember what the answer was, but the question was certainly delightful.
You said before that the dead don’t give a shit but, if you’re going to have one, what song do you want played at your funeral?
There won’t be a funeral. You’ll never find my body. When I’m ready to take myself out, I’ll be gone in a flash. I will not die in my sleep – that’s an absolutely horrible way to go, if you ask me. I’ll just evaporate somewhere, hidden away from all eyes, watching as my body goes back to wherever it once came from, which is the ether.
