If you haven’t seen Peaches before, it can be a shock, especially if you aren’t that familiar with her music or persona. We managed to catch her for a little while at Free Press Summer Fest back in June, but were so far back that we feel that we missed being in the heart of the insanity that is a Peaches show. We’ve been casual fans for a long long time, but it was this last week at Numbers night club that sealed the deal for us.
Opener Christine was a bit more of a shock than the main event. Masked, dirty, costumed (and then scantily clad men) chanted about peeing in buttholes and ranted about living in the moment. In a way, it was so bad and shocking, you couldn’t help but cheer and laugh about the whole situation. However, this is exactly what the crowd needed to warm everyone up for the main event. Plus, it made her and her team seemed even moreso polished and put together.
By the time Peaches hit the stage, Numbers was incredibly packed with some incredibly enthusiastic, but incredibly polite fans. Originally belting out the title track from her newest album, Rub, wearing a plushy high necked cape, the crowd was immediately enamored as she changed from outfit to outfit. The outfits were on point as always, from a mono-kini with a scowling face, to a black sparkly vagina collar, and a see through outfit with embroidered hands in strategic places. However, they simply took a back seat to the lovable raunchy antics of her and her 2 dancers. We were treated to Peaches walking on the crowd’s hands, her singing Dick in the Air inside a giant inflatable penis, to her cracking jokes about which bathroom her stage crew/dancing vagina team was going to use (both a male and female dancer were hopping around on stage waving their incredibly anatomically correct vagina costumes). Throughout the night, we heard about half of her new album, which was incredibly danceable electro-pop, plus some favorites like Fuck the Pain Away and I Feel Cream.
You might not think you know her, but her music has really snuck into popular culture, and has probably made it into at least one of your favorite DJ’s sets. It’s raunchy and gender-bending, hilarious and serious, and at the same time, incredibly well produced and danceable. Not bad for a former Hebrew school music teacher from Canada!
Journalist/blogger since 2009 and music lover since 1980. Bex now travels the world and writes and takes photos of dance events, creates art in various media, sings quietly to her cat in the shower, and occasionally builds something that tends to involve a blowtorch. She can usually be seen hiding behind some sort of camera rig.
