These days, Peaches hot on the impeachment trail
By Tom Lanham, CONTRIBUTOR



IT WASN'T the usual after-hours party invite she regularly receives in her adopted hometown of Berlin. But techno-punk diva Peaches, intrigued, decided to RSVP anyway. Which is how she wound up onstage at New York's Hammerstein Ballroom on March 20, appearing alongside Michael Stipe, Rufus Wainwright, Margaret Cho, Susan Sarandon and Cindy Sheehan in "Bring'Em Home Now!" a Veterans for Peace benefit concert opposing the war in Iraq. And she prepared something very special for the occasion.
Peaches — once a mild-mannered Toronto music teacher named Merrill Nisker — likens the jaw-dropping response to her "Bring 'Em Home" performance to the gasps Stephen Colbert recently received during his unexpected skewering of President Bush.

The song she'd penned was stamped with her typically ribald wit. Titled "F— or Kill," it objects to soldiers' overseas deployment and ends with her snarling over and over again, "Impeach Bush."

Steve Earle had opened the show with a protest ditty. "And he was so heartwarming," recalls Peaches, who hastily added "F— or Kill" as the opening track of her then-nearly-completed third album, dubbed "Impeach My Bush."

"But that style folks were already used to, in a good way. So I think my message really came through, because no one expected to hear that from me. And no one had ever heard that from me before. But sex is really just a natural, important thing in our lives, and when someone like Bush refuses to fund groups because they use condoms to educate people instead of telling them to abstain from sex, well, that's a person who is helping to spread AIDS."


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