Experimental punk artist’s latest band headlines Great Northern

SAN FRANCISCO — A noted noise-punk pioneer and writer returns to the Bay Area with her latest music project when the Lydia Lunch Retrovirus headlines the Great Northern Thursday night.

Writer, musician and punk provocateur Lydia Lunch got her start as the guitarist and singer of pioneering NYC noise/no wave band Teenage Jesus and the Jerks — a group she started with James Chance, who would later form the Contortions and James White and the Blacks — Lunch was at the epicenter of the city’s underground experimental music scene in the late ’70s.  She would also become the frequent subject of no-wave documentary and avant-garde filmmakers Vivienne Dick and Scott B and Beth B.

Lunch would go on to release a string of solo recordings, collaborating with the likes of Nick Cave and the Birthday Party, LA-based punk band the Weirdos, Swans guitarist Michael Gira and members of Sonic Youth, as well as establishing herself as a writer, poet and an important figure on New York’s spoken word and performance art landscape.

While Lunch has focused more of her later career on spoken word and writing, She returned to music with a vengeance in the past decade when she started fronting her all-star aggregation Lydia Lunch Retrovirus. Featuring powerhouse drummer Bob Bert (Pussy Galore, Chrome Cranks Sonic Youth), bassist Tim Dahl of the NYC experimental noise and free jazz/noise guitarist Weasel Walter (The Flying Luttenbachers, Burmese, Cellular Chaos), the high-octane group has toured on both sides of the Atlantic to great acclaim and released several live recordings. The current line-up of the band has improv/experimental jazz drummer Kevin Shea (Storm and Stress, Coptic Light) performing in Bert’s stead.

Lunch was also the subject of the recent documentary film Lydia Lunch: The War Is Never Over directed by Beth B that came out last year. An unflinching look at Lunch’s full career of incendiary art — and the childhood traumas that helped inspire her creations — the film is essential viewing for anyone interested in the groundbreaking NYC scene of the late ’70s. Lunch visited San Francisco last summer to appear at a Roxy Theater screening for the film as well as a spoken word engagement at the Make-Out Room with author and Oxbow frontman Eugene Robinson and Bay Area author Bob Calhoun, returning in the fall with the Retrovirus for an explosive headlining set at the Great American Music Hall with Oxbow and Victims Family. 

For this performance at the Great Northern on Thursday night, Lunch and company will be joined by a pair of local bands. Eclectic singer Fois Gras has run the gamut from lo-fi gothic country to abrasive noise-rock to the pulsing electro/industrial sounds of her 2019 effort Holy Hell with Dandelion Gold main man, producer Johnny Goss. Queer post-punk band Lolly Gaggers opens the show with their brand of snarling deathrock.

Lydia Lunch Retrovirus with Fois Gras and Lolly Gaggers
Thursday, June 23, 9 p.m. $20
The Great Northern