‘This is no time to stop crying’: punk’s high priestess is back – The Sydney Morning Herald

"When Tim is telling this story [in the film] he gets choked up, because he said he'd never seen anything more compassionate," Lunch continues. "It was his friend, who then not only wrote me this incredible letter but also he got sober and has been sober ever since.

"That moment really flips the script of the documentary. It makes you go, 'Well of course, she's f---ing compassionate'."

I am always trying to get to the root of not only my own insanity, but this global and political patriarchal insanity.

Skyping from her Brooklyn apartment, Lunch speaks with the ravaged resonance of a woman who's been shouting all her life. Her musical output is staggering, from her noise-punk debut with Teenage Jesus and the Jerks in 1976 to countless other bands and collaborations (Rowland Howard, Sonic Youth, Die Haut)

Her spoken-word works are no less intense. Daddy Dearest from 1988 contextualises her rage in harrowing detail. The sexual violence began at her house when she was six or seven. She left at 16 and has been flipping that script ever since. The results are not for the faint-hearted.

"My goal has always been to try to make sense of those things that nobody else was talking about," she says, "whether it was familial trauma, imbalance in all power relationships, climate change [since 1984, for the record], the prison-industrial complex when Bill Clinton was president...

Retrovirus featuring Lydia Lunch (left).Credit:Jasmine Hurst

"I am always trying to get to the root of not only my own insanity, but this global and political patriarchal insanity. I still feel like I am the woman on the mountain with a bullhorn. I do feel like the town crier. And this is no time to stop crying," she adds with a dry cackle.

The ever-present gallows humour is one weapon that signifies Lunch's refusal to surrender power alongside the abrasion of her music, the unflinching content of "a pathological f--king truth-teller", and a truly ravenous hedonism.

Her "message of resistance," says Retrovirus guitarist Weasel Walter, is about "turning abuse outward instead of inward." Just don't infer victimhood, and nobody needs to get hurt.

"Oh please. Mine was far from the worst situation," she says. "By the age of nine, I was getting vindictive. I was actually becoming very murderous and having dreams every night of murdering my family."

She started writing at 12, she says, "so that I could actually defend myself. I also realised when I started reading Selby, Miller, Foucault, de Sade when I saw the pattern [of abuse], that it never starts with the person in your house. They had to be polluted by this behaviour. So once I recognised this, not only did that makes sense to me, but then I knew what path I had to take."

The phrase The War Is Never Over is an acknowledgement of eternal vigilance for those who have been on the wrong side of power. When she defines that as "any kind of persecution or abuse or trauma or prejudice or injustice," the size of her mission these last 45 years looms into view.

"Art is a salve to the universal trauma," she says. "If it burns in you, and you have to create, other people are going to be afflicted by the need to see or hear what it is that you're doing. Because people. Burn. Deeply."

Lydia Lunch's Retrovirus is at Melbourne's Corner Hotel on Friday, February 28, then Theatre Royal in Castlemaine on Saturday, and on to the Brisbane Hotel in Hobart on March 1.

Michael Dwyer is an arts and music writer

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'This is no time to stop crying': punk's high priestess is back - The Sydney Morning Herald