This month infamous writer, poet, singer, speaker and provocateur Lydia Lunch makes her long-awaited return to New Zealand with a trifecta of different events at the Loemis Festival in Wellington in mid June. Performing a tribute set of the songs of Suicide at Meow, Lunch will also be hosting a screening and Q&A for her documentary The War Is Never Over. The icing on the proverbial cake sees her perform one of her unpredictable but always captivating spoken word sessions. With a calendar full of shows and appearances around the globe, Lydia Lunch is still very much in demand, and has no shortage of thought-provoking material to ruminate on and share in her chosen modes.

You must be quite busy at the moment in the lead-up to your tours.

Well, I just got back from Switzerland less than 24 hours ago. I am part of a very big exhibition, which is as if you walked into a bookworm's head. The walls, three floors of walls are covered with words painted on pages, on photographs, on clothing. I had some photographs in there, was showing films, doing a spoken word show and a few other things. It's on for two months. It's called the Kaleidoscope of Nothingness at the Kupper Modern art space in Zurich. There's things online about it. I'll be back there for the closing July 17th. In the meantime I leave for Sao Paulo, Mexico City and Rio de Janeiro this week for a few days. Then I'll be home for a few days, and then I'll leave for LA for a few days, and then I'll be in Australia. Then it goes on and on.

Then you will be in New Zealand for the Lōemis Festival in Wellington. You have quite a full schedule at the moment.

I would say I'm on a roll. I'm in Brooklyn right now, but I'm a nomad. I plan on moving, as soon as my tours are over in July, to Baltimore. Instead of just going on tour from country to country, now I've got to move from city to city. I do that every few years. If you want to move, change your scene. I'm very good at it. I've moved for many different reasons. Sometimes [for] the architecture, or because I don't know anybody there. Sometimes for the economy. I didn't plan to be in New York for this long. I was in Barcelona for eight years and then I was a nomad for four years. I'm not in my 20s any more; what am I doing?! I settled in Brooklyn for a couple of years. Now it's just time to move, get out.

Have you had enough of the big city?

Well, yeah. It's whatever. One of my heroes is still alive — Umar Bin Hassan of The Last Poets. You know, the revolution will not be televised, this is madness. He's still alive in Baltimore. I think I'll just go buddy up to him for a little while, and see what happens. It’s a much cheaper cost of living. I do that often; go to a cheap city for a few years, move to a more expensive one, go back. I'm just fickle that way. Swings and roundabouts really though, isn't it?

It must be quite an ‘interesting’ time to be living in the United States at the moment. You will be doing a screening and Q&A for your documentary The War Is Never Over as part of the Lōemis Festival. The title seems to be very apt at the moment.

Well, I mean, it's been my mantra forever, because as far as politics go I started becoming very political under Ronald Reagan. I originally moved to New York because I wanted to do spoken word, but it didn't really exist. It was post-Beat, post-Patti Smith, pre-slam poetry, so I had to start curating shows. But I could take the stuff I was saying about Ronald Reagan; we're back to not even him… we're back to the 1950s. We're back to the 1940s, we're back to the 1300s, so I'll never run out of topics to talk about. I have my own podcast, The Lydian Spin, which is interviews with artists, filmmakers, writers, et cetera. But it gives me a chance to also do a great condemnation of American politics with every introduction. So that's my free spoken word radicalism to confront the cuckocracy, as we like to say. And so that goes on, and yes, it's outrageously ridiculous. It's just the most horribly grand guignol, badly timed comical insanity, demented, delusional, false religiosity. And part of me just laughs in horror. It's a horror show. And this is why I find that art is the salve to the universal wound; that pleasure is the ultimate rebellion. It's like we can't have their thumbs on our heads 24 hours a day. During the day, I read every newspaper, I watch all the news reports. I laugh, I cry, I want to kill. I never want to commit suicide — only play the music of Suicide. And then at night, I have to enjoy myself. Which is a good thing that I don't have to perform at 9am, although I wouldn't mind. Welcome to my church. There's only one commandment: rebellion from false virtue.

I love it. I recall Jamie Lee Curtis saying that we should have more matinee shows and gigs, because she prefers to be in bed early.

I'm all for that. Well, imagine this: I’m going to São Paulo in a couple of days, and shows are at, like, 1am. I mean, what are we, like teenagers again?

Definitely not; nor would I want to be a teenager again. I’m all for earlier shows.

Well, you're a newbie compared to me, honey.

You were arriving in New York in the late ‘70s, around about the time I entered this mortal coil.

I was already on stage screaming into the void. And the humour is, you know, I think I'm a comedian. Most people are too frightened to laugh. You're not afraid to laugh; you know where I'm coming from. I recently wrote a letter, [entitled] Dear Ivanka. “Dear Ivanka, what the hell is wrong with you? What is wrong with you?” And I list all of her crimes and her father's crimes and, you know, the chorus is, “What the hell is wrong?” And of course the punchline is, “And you can't do the one humanly decent thing, commit patricide? What is wrong with you?” I mean, the problem is you can't take all the corrupt criminals. You can't take all the wannabe tyrants and dictators. You just can't take them all out. My documentary The War Is Never Over is about my personal war, not war in general. But the thing is the war is never over. It's like a virus. It's a virus that just circles the globe over and over again, based on man's greed, God's land or natural resources. And this is the way it's always been, and it's ridiculous. Now that America is, especially with these charlatans pretending to bring God back into the mix, supposed to be the separation of church and state. So I say, welcome to my church, which is such nonsense. Their only God is the God of money. And why don't they just admit it? It's a shit show.

In the documentary someone referred to you as a doctor with your medicine being a punch in the face.

Well, usually I use my tongue, but not always.

It has been a while since you last visited New Zealand. You were here last with Rotavirus in 2015.

I don't know. I don't know all the shows I did this year; they just run together, but I'm always happy to come back to New Zealand and Australia. I just love coming there. I think it's just very, very important to come there. I love the culture, the people, the food, the atmosphere. And I think also the isolation of it, even though they know everything that's going on, kind of gives me a little relief. Like, “Ah, certainly can't catch me now!” Not that they're looking for me. The military industrial complex in America is ridiculous. Let's just go back and read Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell again. He said it all.

It's great that you get to travel to so many places outside of the United States.

I mean, America doesn't support me. I have to go everywhere else, you know, because it just doesn't support me. I mean, Europe always has. And I just somehow knew with Teenage Jesus in ‘77-’78 that I had to go to Europe. And a lot of bands at that point didn't know or didn't figure out how to get there. So I did, because I knew I'd have to keep going back and establish. And it's also a place like Australia, where they accept that you're going to bring something different every time, which I am. I don't make enough money to live if I only played in America. I mean, plus it's so massive. You can only do maximum 10 shows, maybe, if you don’t want to drive long distances. You have to go in small pockets to do shows because everything is too far.

You will be making several appearances at the forthcoming Lōemis Festival with different shows, which means audiences will get the opportunity to see you in different guises and contexts; The War Is Never Over screening and Q&A, the spoken word performance, and finally a set of you performing the songs of Suicide.

Yeah. I’m thrilled for that.

I’m particularly interested in the spoken word session; what can audiences expect to see and hear from you?

Well, you know, it's always somehow political, but it depends on my mood really on the night. Like, what does the room feel like? It could be short song-sized pieces, more like prose, but of course there's going to be politics thrown in there somehow. And, you know, what's beautiful about spoken word is because I have enough material. I'm not improvising. I have a list of what I'm going to do, but it can be more adapted to the atmosphere that the place holds. That makes it all so interesting to me.

Is it like a stream of consciousness?

In a sense, but I have the notes for all of it, so it may be strung together. You know, I have musical schizophrenia; I also have spoken word schizophrenia, so we'll see what comes out on any particular night. It's rarely the same. I have, say, 30 things I might possibly do. I just did two shows in Switzerland, and one night my friend said, “That was so aggressive,” and then the next night he goes, “That was so much calmer.” I said, “What did you expect?” You can't predict what I'm going to do, and by the way, it's still intense. A whisper can be as intense. And look at the pauses. I'm doing it right now. The space between breath is often where people get terrified. It's not about making them nervous, it's about expressing feelings I think everybody has to some degree inside them, you know, that have to come out. So I will be the mouth that lets it out. It's probably burning inside your blood. Somebody's got to say this shit.

The music of Suicide and Alan Vega that you will be performing at another of your shows; will you be doing it with French musician Marc Furtado?

I've been doing it with Marc for quite a while, and that's a much more aggressive version. I think I'm bringing a sexier, more sinister version with Andrew Jones. And the beauty of that music is it allows me a lot of space to say whatever. Of course there are some pieces about war, about Vietnam vets, and just the pathos between kind of a slight doo-wop and then to Frankie Teardrop Harlem. And it allows me a lot of literary freedom, so it's a good soundscape for me.

I love that your sets are so fluid rather than being regimented and repetitive.

It's, like, so tedious. I mean, of course I have bands that had toured a certain amount of music, but that's why doing music with improvisational musicians are always changing it up. It's far more interesting. That's why something like this set of Suicide’s music, it's never going to be the same every night.

Suffice to say, we're ecstatic to have you back in Aotearoa, and very excited for these three special shows as part of the Lōemis Festival. Your voice is so important, both as a visceral punch and as a beacon of hope that we all need.

And humour. If we can't laugh, what's the point? We're dying inside. Please check out The Lydian Spin, my free podcast every week with Tim Dahl. There's a lot of laughter in there. That's for sure.