Red Bull Music Academy left its mark on London earlier this year. But Mexico’s Teri Gender Bender was the act that left a mess.
As PR stunts go, it couldn’t have been planned much better. Teresa Suaréz, aka Teri Gender Bender, the Mexican punk-blues enfant terrible with a sailor’s mouth, a penchant for pigs’ heads and animal entrails in her live shows and a venomous public persona back in her home country, is on the cusp of releasing debut album Sin, Sin, Sin. So we sit for an interview in Christ Church Spitalfields, a white-washed shrine to all that is pure and good in Shoreditch, in the UK capital, London. Oh, the irony.
'I think Omar just thought, "What the f*** is this?"' – Teri Gender Bender
During the two weeks she attended the Red Bull Music Academy in London recently, it was Suaréz who seemed to pop up in every photo, dragging an unsightly smear of red over everyone’s must-see-and-hear lists. Her Cramps-meets-Courtney scuzz-rock informed by the dark, pithy poetics of Sylvia Plath and Simone de Beauvoir might not be revolutionary, but it’s messy, gutsy and a lot of fun.
It’s been entertaining enough to bag her support slots playing to stadiums on the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Mexican tour. It was authentic enough that one of her musical idols, Jack White, extended the same courtesy. And it’s weird enough for Mars Volta and At The Drive-in prog-punk icon Omar Rodriguez-López to have jumped in as producer on her upcoming release. As Rodriguez found out, she will make you listen.
Dan Wilton
“I met Omar at a warehouse venue in Guadalajara,” she says. “We were playing a show and the power went off. So I took my megaphone and took my pig’s head that was onstage, jumped in the crowd and was singing at the top of my lungs, I climbed up a fence and then the fence went over and I sprained my ankle, but in the moment I didn’t even notice because of the adrenaline. I think Omar just thought, ‘What the f*** is this?’”
For all the big entrances and unplanned exits, Suaréz insists there’s actually a method to the madness. Keen to continue the feminist ideals of Kathleen Hanna’s Bikini Kill, and a big fan of perpetual underground cult heroes like Royal Trux’s Jennifer Herrema and the Dead Kennedys, she claims her amalgamation of all those elements, or ‘Butcher Rock’, is the movement she had no choice but to create herself.
“I was born American and lived in Denver until I was 15,” she says, “but I became Mexican because my mother moved there. In Mexico, if you wanna do something artistic, it’s really hard. If you’re applying for art school, richer kids will just pay their way in ahead of you because the system is so corrupt. As clichéd as it sounds, I’ve put my head and heart into doing what I do.”
Find out what else Teri Gender Bender does by reading her full interview with Tom Hall in the new online edition of The Red Bulletin.
For more on the Red Bull Music Academy, swing by redbullmusicacademy.com
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