What Else Is in the Teaches of Peaches. Peaches

      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 couldn’t 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 didn’t 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 band’s keyboardist and bass player) managed all the musical programming—and now Holger would capture everything with his cameras.

      It turned out that Holger was very easygoing—he 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 Holger’s 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

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