Picture this: It’s the late 90s, Toronto. A woman, reeling from a bad breakup and a battle with thyroid cancer, is holed up in her apartment. With a single drum machine, she begins crafting the album that will make her name synonymous with unapologetic, sweat-drenched electroclash: The Teaches of Peaches.
Fast-forward to South by Southwest in 2016. I’m catching up with Peaches, the provocateur herself, for a deep dive into the moments that turned her from a daycare guitar-strummer to a boundary-pushing cultural force.
The Accidental Start
Peaches didn’t plan on making music. Back in Toronto, she was busy corralling kids at a YMCA daycare, strumming an acoustic guitar to keep the chaos in check. A director noticed her knack for engaging young minds and handed her a city-wide music program. “I was doing it for the kids,” she tells me, half-smiling, “but I was also teaching myself how to entertain an audience.”
Things changed when she teamed up with a girlfriend for a small bar gig. The two had just a handful of songs between them, but something clicked. Their weekly set became a local favorite, complete with young fans sneaking in, weeping through performances.
“It was low stakes but high impact,” she says. “That’s when I caught the bug.”
Basements, Joints, and Epiphanies
She wasn’t content to coast on acoustic sets. A chance jam session in a friend’s basement introduced her to drum machines, keyboards, and a scrappy, experimental band setup. “We’d swap instruments—none of us knew what we were doing—and write songs about each other’s sexual tension. It was raw. It was messy. It was perfect.”
From there, she formed The Shit, a no-wave project that paved the way for her later sound. But it wasn’t until her cancer diagnosis that she decided to drop everything and rebuild her life around music.
“That was the moment,” she says bluntly. “I knew I wasn’t going back to daycare or safe gigs. I was going to do this. For real.”
Electroclash and the Revolution
Cue The Teaches of Peaches. Released in 2002, it’s an album that lives somewhere between feminist manifesto and an all-night basement party. Tracks like “Fuck the Pain Away” and “Set It Off” obliterated genre boundaries, giving birth to electroclash and cementing Peaches as a cultural firestarter.
“I wasn’t interested in being the victim,” she explains. “Yes, I had cancer. Yes, I had a shitty breakup. But I wasn’t going to let anyone pigeonhole me. I wanted to burn the house down.”
And burn she did. By the mid-2000s, pop icons like Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, and Pink were citing her as a muse. Even Avril Lavigne gave a nod to Peaches’ influence during her transition from skater girl to full-on punk.
“It’s wild, right?” she laughs. “These girls had the whole machine behind them, and here I am with my beat-up drum machine and thrift-store lingerie, and they’re saying, ‘This is the vibe.’”
The Berlin Reinvention
When Berlin called, Peaches answered. She left Toronto, passed her music program to a young teen mom, and landed in Europe just as the underground electronic scene was exploding. Berlin offered her freedom, she says, but it wasn’t without its challenges.
“Every move I made felt like starting over,” she reflects. “But I knew I had something real.”
And real it was. Word of her anarchic live shows spread like wildfire, and soon even Madonna and the Beastie Boys were singing her praises.
Still Standing
Now, decades later, Peaches is quick to admit it hasn’t always been easy. Critics tried to write her off as a “one-trick pony,” and some albums faced backlash for being “too queer.” But if there’s one thing Peaches doesn’t do, it’s back down.
“That’s the secret,” she says, grinning. “Longevity. You just keep going. Eventually, the world catches up.”
A Legacy of Provocation
From Britney’s “not a girl, not yet a woman” era to Miley’s anything-goes aesthetic, Peaches’ DNA runs deep in pop music’s evolution. “The mainstream is finally talking about all the things I’ve been screaming about since day one,” she says. “Sex, gender, power—it’s all on the table now.”
And as for Peaches herself? She’s still onstage, still experimenting, still unapologetically Peaches.
“This is my life,” she says. “This is what I do. I’m not going anywhere.”
There you have it: the story of an artist who built her empire from scratch, one electrifying beat at a time.
Listen to the interview above and then check out some classics below.
