To my right, Chicago’s answer to Beavis and Butthead smirk while cheering their support.
This is business as usual for the woman born Merrill Beth Nisker. Not for nothing did the bisexual star top a list of the Ten Wildest Woman In Music in the New York Daily News, and not for nothing does she count Deborah Harry, Madonna and Christina Aguilera among her fans.Her new album, Impeach My Bush, is so kinky you’d think twice about playing it for guests lest it be thought a preamble to “adult fun”, and listening to songs such as “Tent in Your Pants”, one can only conclude that Peaches’ weekends are not spent watching Little House on the Prairie re-runs.Imagine my disappointment then, when I board her tour bus and find no “adult fun” under way. Showtime has started early for Peaches. As the first layer of a three-band sandwich that sees her followed by Brit-Goths Bauhaus and US tech-rockers Nine Inch Nails, her gig at the Midwest Bank Amphitheatre, Illinois will be done by 7.30pm. Oblivious to any pre-watershed mores, she’s dressed like some kind of porn superhero, her black PVC cape emblazoned with the letters XXX, and the rest just scanty pink undergarments. The Picturehouse tour begins on 17 August ( www.juanamolina www.dominorecordco ). And it’s a decision that she doesn’t regret in the slightest.

“I didn’t want to be an old lady in her bed watching MTV and thinking: ‘I could have done that so much better than her’, and be really angry that I didn’t at least give it a go. All of a sudden I saw the future and was determined that that wouldn’t happen.”‘Son’ is out now on Domino. It’s like the story of the ugly duckling that grows up to be a swan.”Although she took a gamble giving up a highly successful acting career, things finally seem to be taking off, especially in Argentina. “I had a problem at this big folk festival in Seattle when the rented keyboard I was using wouldn’t load my music samples. The audience were waiting a long time and a few yelled out that I should just sing with my guitar, so I started to sing the keyboard parts with the voice, and it sounded great.

So when I returned to the studio I decided that I should sing like the keyboard notes, and that the behaviour of the singing should follow suit. Even if it was out of tempo or didn’t fit with the other notes, I had to sing it. So a new world of de-tuning and out-of-time notes opened up to me. I discovered that the note that didn’t work at the beginning becomes so beautiful that you build everything around it. I think that sometimes I’m quite lucky not to understand the words of songs that I love because they can be really bad, and then you’re in trouble.”She believes that live performances had the biggest impact on the sound of the new album, most notably through newfound singing techniques.

trying to be something that I’m not.”I grew up listening to music I didn’t understand so I’m totally used to enjoying music without understanding the lyrics,” she continues. “I think the whole way I listen to music now has been a little bit deformed by that experience Even in Spanish I don’t really pay attention to the lyrics. “I’ve been realising the importance of language lately,” she muses. “But even though I know people care so much about it I’m not prepared to sing in English, because I wouldn’t feel like myself I’d feel like I was faking something… I think the odd, out-of-synch looping that I do represents a little of that.

Each loop has a mode so it’s like having two different birds singing in time, but ignoring what each other is doing. The disparity is beautiful.”Son has been described as her most accessible work to date, although she is never likely to break into the mainstream, especially as she refuses to sing in anything other than Spanish. You have a beautiful flower and then an earthquake, and the only thing you can do is contemplate the beauty of them.”The artwork (always distinctive on her albums) is a patchwork tapestry woven by her great aunt of her and her sister when were they little girls. “The cover really describes the record because I was very influenced by the randomness in the behaviour of sounds and movement in nature,” she says “It’s like watching fireflies. They look like they’re floating in space, and you can’t follow them because you can’t tell where they’re going. What I’m saying is that if you want to lie you can tell me anything, but make me believe it. Don’t make me doubt you because I don’t mind if it’s true or not.”She says that her lyrics talk about everyday things “Son means a pleasant sound, but it also means ‘they are’.