Ono Yōko - What Else Is in the Teaches of Peaches

To my sister Suri,now you have visuals to go with all my storiesPEACHES ____________________ To the girlI am looking forward to growing old with, IsabellHOLGER _____________ Peaches & Mathias Brendel, La Cigale, Paris, France, January 23, 2009 _____________ Tour Bus, Zofingen, Switzerland, August 2010 _____________ Ancienne Belgique, Brussels, Belgium, May 5, 2009 _____________ Paradiso, Amsterdam, Netherlands, December 10, 2009 _____________ Budapest, Hungary, August 2010 _____________ Festival Woodstower, Lyon, France, August 29, 2009 _____________ Le Zoo, Geneva, Switzerland, October 8, 2009 FOREWORD PEACHES By 2008 I had been recording and performing for eight years and I had just finished my fourth album, I Feel Cream. I was getting my new band Sweet Machine ready for our upcoming tour when photographer Holger Talinski reached out and said that he wanted to do a photo documentation of me. Great timing. I had always documented my tours as well as I could (mostly because I couldnt believe they were actually happening), and I had racked up around two thousand hours of video footage by that time. To have a photographer interested in capturing my travels in music and performance was a dream come true, especially since the I Feel Cream tour was my most ambitious tour to date. I didnt know Holger or his work at all, so of course there would be a trial period.

I had no idea that it would end up being a six-year project. I had always combined raw stage shows, performance art, and great musicianship, but it was reaching a whole new level with Sweet Machine. We had keytars and a Doepfer rod that had MIDI-controlled LED lights, and one little laser that could also be controlled by MIDI. Images of myself singing backup were projected onto my winged sleeves when I lifted my arms. There were costume changes galore where I would start with huge outfits and slowly, during the show, strip down layer by layer like a Russian matryoshka doll. Holger found a way to present every part of the show without ever getting in the way.

This was still a family operation. Fubbi Karlsson took care of the visual special effects. Vaughan Alexander, John Renaud, Jutta Pfeifer, and Charlie Le Mindu handled the costumes. Conner Rapp (also the bands keyboardist and bass player) managed all the musical programmingand now Holger would capture everything with his cameras. It turned out that Holger was very easygoinghe was invited on many subsequent tours and quickly became part of our family. The I Feel Cream tour ended up lasting eighteen months, and we created three completely different live shows: the Main Show, the Wheelchair Show, and the Laser Show.

The Main Show was just that, and included our usual performance elements. The Wheelchair Show, which lasted a month, happened spontaneously after I broke my ankle during a performance and had to construct a new approach, which included my old performance collaborator Mignon as the fake Peaches, my niece and budding rock star Simonne Jones as my shadow, and Danni Daniels as the naked-nurse wheelchair driver. The concept for the Laser Show came about when Vice Media asked me to do a collaborative project with their art and technology platform, the Creators Project. Essentially, they gave me a bunch of cash to do whatever I wanted. With this, I had three laser harps built. Sweet Machine and I learned how to control them, and we constructed a show solely playing lasers.

It looked awesome and was a thrill! I was planning to take a break after this very intense tour, at which point Holgers documentation would come to an end. Yet the break instead evolved into even more new projects. In 2010, Matthias Lilienthal, the artistic director of an innovative theater in Berlin called HAU (Hebbel am Ufer), asked me to stage my own production. What immediately shot out of my mouth was that I wanted to do Jesus Christ Superstar as a one-woman show with a piano player. Matthias responded, Yes, but I want you to do a bigger production later on, we have funding. When I told my close friend Chilly Gonzales about my plan for Peaches Christ Superstar, it turned out that he was also a fan of the musical, and he promptly volunteered to be the pianist for the show.

Chilly and I had done so many crazy performances together in the early 2000s, so I knew this new collaboration would flip people out. Those who remembered us as a rap duo would see a whole new side: Chilly is a phenomenal pianist, and no one was aware of my true vocal range. We did two runs and they were extremely successful. Then came the bigger production. I decided to use this show to celebrate my ten-year anniversary as Peaches and to write an original electrorock opera called Peaches Does Herself. The story was to be told through song alone, with material selected from my four albums arranged as a narrative. It ended up being an incredibly huge, labor-intensive project and brought the family together again, but this time as a much larger extended family.

The stage show ran in October 2010. What a rush! I asked videographer Robin Thomson to document it just for kicks, and when we watched the footage we realized that it could actually be turned into a movie. For the second run, in March 2011, we planned better filming angles during the show and also ran certain scenes the day before the shows so that we could show close-up shots during the performances. Conner Rapp recorded the shows live every night, and later turned his apartment into a surround-sound studio to begin working on the movie. I also changed the ending of the play to better suit the filming, which helped transform the footage into a real movie. There were 1,500 edits.

Color correction was a bitch, but we finally had Peaches Does Herself ready for premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) in September 2012. (The movie was well received and ended up traveling the globe to around seventy film festivals in 2013.) In 2012, the HAU theater asked me to take part in a new production. This time I would not direct but was given the lead role of LOrfeo in the original opera of the same name. I would sing the Italian male leading role with five other trained opera singers, along with the incredible soloist ensemble Kaleidoskop as the orchestra. I did not know how to read sheet music and I could not speak Italian, so I trained with Timo Kreuser for six months to learn the melodies. Another landmark experience.

I had also been getting many requests to DJ. Its an easy enough thing to do, but I always found that people were not quite satisfied seeing me spin tracks without singing. I found it increasingly frustrating to deflect these fans so I created a hybrid DJ/MC show and called it