Issue 73 / Dec 2016/Jan 2017

32
Bido Lito! Dec 2016/Jan 2017 Reviews
Peaches (John Johnson / johnjohnson-photography.com)
PEACHES
EVOL @ Invisible Wind Factory
It begins with our heroine dressed as a
vagina and goes upwards from there. It begins
in a safe space for all, a blank canvas about to
be filled gratefully by those dressed as that
heroine, or parts of her, and those not as brave,
all of whom have waited a lifetime for this act
to tour this town. It begins with a promise of
something special and still gives you more than
you dare expect.
It could only be here, in this particular
mood, that we’re looking to PEACHES
for a response to the personal and political
energy lacking in others. Not answers so much as
another reality, and it takes a proper artist to offer
that. It’s embodied straight off in Rub, inspiring
and unleashing a million responses. Peaches’
haircut alone has more charisma tonight than
most acts, and there are copycat versions
reflected back at her along with variants on her
‘organic’ stage threads and props. It’s the kind
of scene that has birthed pop’s best subcultures,
the ones that kept the flame alive in dark times,
of which the present is one. IWF’s location is
probably a boon here because, far from the fries
and happy burgers, from the nightmares of Lime
Street, people have really brought their A-game
costume-wise and stated whom and just how
dishonestly our as-yet-oblivious jailers are
misrepresenting. Those Kazimier peeps knew
what they were onto, didn’t they? Their exile
here is revealed on nights like this as a liberation.
Such baggage can be borne only because the
tracks carry the visuals and the visuals transport
the tracks; the message is the medium, not vice
versa, and few pop practitioners today are as
playful or humorous as this in riding it out to and
past your city’s limits. It isn’t the wisdom so much
as the wit of Vaginoplasty that gets her past the
door attendants of our minds. The rhythms and
tones of How You Like My Cut, and of the lyrics
in general (regardless of content) against beats
alternately swaggering and hammering are the
persuasive elements tonight and allow her to
endure as, say, a feminist of her sphere. Face
it, there’s almost nothing legal left that in that
sphere hasn’t been passed off as feminist or
flipped from patriarchy to subversion in a physical
form that happens to comply with the status quo
– as Peaches has put it previously: threatening
nudity and saying nothing, whereas she’d rather
get butt-naked, which she and her dancers are
here, long before the feigned sex show (so graphic
yet so non-gratuitous) of a furious, audienceled
Fuck The Pain Away. It’s not for me to purport
to mansplain feminism, or sexuality or body
image, but it does no harm for a figurehead
to keep suggesting and ridiculing what it
perhaps isn’t. Peaches could reasonably argue
she’s just a magnet for confrontation because
she’s sane and they out there are all mad. The
recognition here at IWF – the power here – speaks
for itself.
Either that or you can’t beat crowdsurfing inside
a giant inflatable phallus, squirting something
liquidy out of the end, for winning over a crowd.
Just genuine, irreverent, unexploitative mischief,
which is in as short supply in accessible music
(which this is) as reason is in politics at the
moment. When a birthday cake arrives on stage,
we’ve somehow forgotten the world outside.
Here is Liverpool at its defiant best, the gig-going
ritual at its most meaningful, the live spectacle
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