There is a homecoming concert tonight for Peaches, whose abrasively salacious electroclash sound was never going to make her too mainstream, but who needs that anymore? The composer of “Fuck the Pain Away” knows better than to hate on a knock-off like Lady Gaga: “She has television as her outlet, which I don’t,” 43-year-old former folkie Merrill Nisker tells The A.V. Club. “I’m not really invited on TV. I don’t go to awards. I don’t have a large record company that can pay people to put me on TV. They don’t want me on TV because I’m old, I don’t know, I’m weird. But the people are able to see Lady Gaga’s performance on TV — like 12-year-old kids — have an alternative in a very polished diva that exists. That’s cool for 12-year-olds, and when they turn 15, they find Peaches.” Which means she’d best deliver the expected goods for them — that is, if they don’t confuse her with Bob Geldof’s self-destructive celebutard daughter — via the new Peaches album I Feel Cream. A recent two-minute video doc shows who else is paying attention: misfits of all shapes and sizes, so readily titillated by dirty schoolyard words that they can’t stop taking their clothes off. “Usually I have really great audiences,” she says. “A bad crowd to me is when I’m stagediving or doing stuff with the audience, and they take it the wrong way, like try to stick their fingers where they shouldn’t be.”



