Riling up Lydia Lunch

New York No Wave queen Lydia Lunch is currently touring Australia, performing the songs of synth-punk legends Suicide and Suicide frontman Alan Vega. Ahead of the final tour stop at Perth’s Milk Bar on Thursday, June 25—and with tickets on sale now—PAUL DOUGHTY caught up with Lunch to rile her up about the state of the world, talk all things Suicide, and find out why pleasure remains the ultimate act of rebellion.

Morning, how are you doing?

Perfect, I’m still in bed, so I’m fine.

Is this true that this is your first time to Perth?

I don’t know, you would know better than I would. I’ve been to so many places; I have no idea.

Right. Well you’re touring this Alan Vega/Suicide show on the east coast as well as the west.

Yes, with Andrew Coates of Black Cab and doing a few shows. We’ve already done a few with Tex Perkins, spoken word shows with him, doing his solo stuff. And he occasionally has jumped in to do a couple of the Suicide songs.

So are you focusing just on Suicide, or…

There’s some Alan Vega songs in the set, some unknown, some pretty obscure things that we’re pulling out, just to give as wide a range of the type of music they did as possible.

Right. So, for the… the backup band, Martin Rev had his bank of electronics back in the 70s, which was pretty sort of punk in itself. Are you going to have sort of a similar push-the-button vibe on the machine, or are you going to have live musicians or…?

Well, yeah, yeah. We do, but, you know, technology has come a bit further than what it was, so all this is very traditional to the original sound. It’s a bit more… uh, extravagant, shall we say. And that’s Andrew Coates.

Right. Alan certainly liked his rock and roll. You know, he was a bit of an Elvis-esque performer with a bit of blues and dare I say, boogie woogie.

 And dare you say doo-wop?

Yeah! So we’re going to see a bit of that?

You’re going to see a bit of it all! In extremis.

Excellent.

The thing about what’s so great about doing this show is I can take the original lyrics and go further with them. There’s a lot of room for improvisation. And one or two songs don’t even use any of Alan’s original lyrics, but the original intent, and I go further with it, so it’s very exciting to me. It’s not like playing the same songs every night. We’re playing the same songs, but they often have different interpretations.

I recently read Thurston Moore’s [Sonic Youth] memoir, and one of my favourite passages in there was the first time he saw Suicide at Max’s Kansas City, and that is just a great description of a crazy scene with Alan confronting people. Now, you would have been seeing performances like that back in the day when Suicide was first coming up, and I was wondering if that confrontational style…

You don’t even have to finish the question. Of course, that confrontational style has been in just about everything I’ve ever done. And with this, it goes even further than Alan Vega, I think, because I’ve learnt from the expert.

I really enjoyed The War is Never Over documentary [on Lydia Lunch], and you’re starting to, like Thurston, show up and get sprinkled into documentaries as a talking head for this or that artist or performer, which is really kind of a validation of your career and, dare I say, acceptance as a voice for your generation of artists.

Well, “dare you say”… I’m turning up in a lot less than I’m asked to, because I don’t really prefer to be the footnote in other people’s careers. Or as I like to say: don’t blame me for their crimes.

Well, I guess what I’m getting at is, with this sort of validation, how do you square that with your…

You know what? I’m gonna cut you off right there. I don’t give a shit about exceptions or dismissal. I never have. I do what I do. Why anybody comes to any show or what they’re coming for is always a mystery to me. Of course, I’m glad they’re there. It’s always interesting to me when I ask people, not to be too dickish, but, “Oh, I like your music.” Well, what music? What era? What vibe? To kind of give me some idea of why or what they came to me for.

So I don’t care about it. To me, it’s like the audience remains the same. They’ve just been recycled. It’s not any more popular. Really… it’s as popular or unpopular as it’s ever been.

I don’t expect to get any more popular. What I do is not a popular commodity. If I’m name-checked in other people’s careers, oh, thank you very much. I really don’t care, I must say. I’m more interested in impacting the individual. Who comes to the audience, whether or not they do anything creative… I want them to live creatively. That’s what I get off on. Not to be name-checked in somebody else’s frickin’ book. Don’t care.

Good to know.

Not a problem. And I’m glad you’re chuckling because I find a lot of it all ridiculous. I’m an absurdist. I have more in common with the surrealist and the Dada than I do with punk rock or any other, other than out [free] jazz, which I associate with just because of the improvisational nature of what they do.

Well, as I like to say, time is one long second that goes on forever. So, live in the moment. This is why I tell people to put their cameras and cell phones away at my shows. I’m like, this is live. Live now. It’s not to be lived in retrospect.

I’m an ex-American who grew up in Seattle, but I’ve been in Australia for, I don’t know, since the ’90s. Well, in the 90s it was a pretty good place, but I renounced just a few years ago, and well, how do I start this question?

You did the right thing.

It’s like the current political shitshow for the first term of Trump; we thought it was kind of, ‘Oh, this is amusing, this is kind of a joke,’ but what the hell’s going on now? 

It’s a comedy of terror and error. Look, I left the country when Bush stole the second election and moved to Spain for eight years. Now I feel like the liver of America who has to be there. This is why I have a podcast, so that every week I can report on the stupidity, the arrogance, but at the same time, what people need to realise is Trump is a depiction of so much—I’ll say a third, a fourth or a third—of what America really is. Stupid, arrogant, bullies, corrupt, war-loving, violent, sexist assholes. So, actually, all of those things are what America was founded on. We just lied and painted a Hollywood picture of what we wanted to be as an export. Now, the real America is being exported. Not all of America. A big, fat, ugly, dumb chunk of it.

And I get some kind of sadistic…hilarity out of this. I just, I have to say, as I’ve been warmongering, or should I say mongering against the war, since Ronald Reagan, it’s like… it’s the same as it ever was. It’s just now we have 24-hour access to how fucking horrible it is to live under a patriarchy. And that’s not just in America.

The other thing that really pisses me off now, and then we’re going to end this interview pretty soon because you’re riling me up there, Paul, is that: Ukraine, horrible, obviously. Gaza, horrible. Iran, horrible. 94 other countries are in conflict right now. So we focus on these three as a subterfuge to how absolutely unbelievable this world is, always has been, and will probably continue to be until we get rid of God, greed, and stupidity, and look, my Zen Buddhist brother, it ain’t gonna happen tomorrow.

Yeah, well, damn.

What more can I say?

Yeah, I mean, I don’t know what the future is gonna be. I mean, do you think human existence and human society is a kind of brutal, barbaric arrangement at the best of times?

You know, people say how bad it is now. I’m like, what about the 1300s? What about the 1500s, 1700s, 1920s, 30s, 40s? I mean, yeah, it’s a reflection and all the individual can do. And we’ve tried collectively over and over again, and sometimes the terror, the horror, subsides, or the reporting of the horror subsides. But that’s why the individual, if we can’t collectively solve this issue, we have to personally find a way to not have that thumb of abuse on our head every minute of the day.

This is why by day—as not only a musical schizophrenic but perhaps a functioning schizophrenic—by day, I go in and consume as much of war porn reporting as I can. At night: hedonism, enjoyment, friends, fun…because it’s the balance I need to maintain to continue. And don’t ask me why I’m so obsessed with it, though it’s not my war…not my war—and it probably affects me less than anybody because I’m outside of their consciousness, their grid… they don’t know what I do, they’re not going to come after me, they’re not going to censor me. I don’t make enough money.

But for some reason, I have been blessed or cursed with the job of being the mouthpiece for others who are silently screaming inside their head. And that’s a job I accept willingly, because somebody’s gotta fucking do it.

And I guess that would be me. And in the meantime, have as much fun as you can while doing it. And the sound that comes to my mind right now is “nah nah nah nah nah nah”; if you want to go back in time, that’s exactly what every song by Teenage Jesus sounded like. Both middle fingers raised in the air.

Now, I don’t know what else to say, Paul.

No, no, that’s good, that’s good. I mean, of late, I’ve tried to do what a friend does; she said, ‘Okay, I’m just gonna doom scroll at lunchtime, over my lunch.’ And so I dribble crumbs into my computer and doomscroll, and that’s the only time I’m gonna look at the news.

Yeah! Heh.

There is that sort of trade-off. It’s like, our lives are wonderful. We get this, you know, we get one shot at it, and so you don’t want to sort of be miserable the whole time. 

Right, yeah.

So that thing about, like you said, like friends and hedonism, all that stuff in the evening that you do.

Gotta be done. The only rebellion is pleasure. Pleasure is the ultimate rebellion against the warhorse evil orgy. It just is. And the thing is, I mean, I’ll go days without reading one single thing, but there’s also some really good American reporters telling the truth about what exactly is going on. MSNBC, Lawrence O’Donnell, Ari Melber, Nicole Wallace, Casey Hunt on CNN, Raw Story, The Daily Beast, I mean, there’s any number of Chris Hedges, good alternative reporting that tells you the truth, and that gives you hope that at least you’re not the only one who knows how full of shit this all is. I don’t know why, that makes me happy to just say it.

In Australia, we have what’s supposed to be the rise of One Nation, which, of course, is just a party based on a racist platform, which is just incredible that these people would even come out of the woodwork and say that.

Well, yeah, exactly. The arrogance has never been as extreme as it is now, as far as fascism goes. It’s just never been this arrogant, this bold. Well, it has been, that was 1930s and 40s, but not since then have we seen such global arrogant racism. Sexism. Classism. And so here we are, same as it ever was. As much as we’ve learned, we have not. We’re in Orwell’s memory hole.

I wonder what Orwell would think of the UFC spectacle at the White House.

Oh my god! He would say, “I told you so!”

But it’s just kind of like, do we really need to encourage, like, you know, ‘roided-up testosterone young males in our society?

Look, when you’re a frail, fat, fucked-up, demented old grandpa who’s got “dick-tator” obsessions, it makes perfect sense. Really? Come on, he can’t even tie his own shoes… he can’t see past his ankles.

Oh, God. I don’t know how it’s gonna play out.

Anyway, enough about that. It’s my day off. Don’t rile me up, Paul. You’re riling me up!

Okay, well, I mean, you’re coming out to Perth!

Can’t wait. Yeah.

I’ve always thought Perth is like the fingernail of Western civilisation. A claw extending its reach across the globe, and this is where it ends, on the edge of Western Australia.

Yeah. Well, generally, we are on the edge of the Western civilisation. We need a new one. It’s not very civil, is it? No.

Yeah. And do you have sort of an itinerary once you’re here?

Yeah, do the show… Look, I have shows every day. It’s do the show, next show. I think I might have one day off in Perth. I love Australia. I’ve been here five times, and I will continue to come back. I love the people, the music, the food, the architecture… well, the architecture’s so-so in some places… the atmosphere. I like being here. And you feel a bit safer when you’re this far from America. Not that I feel in any danger. I don’t. The world is in danger. I’m just one small blip on the radar screen, talking as loudly as I can and having as much fun as possible as it burns.

Lydia Lunch performing the Songs of Suicide and Alan Vega hits Milk Bar in Perth on Thursday, June 25, 2026. Tickets are on sale now from pressplaypresents.com