Spoken word review: Lydia Lunch

PERHAPS this would have been just any other somewhat melodramatic performance poetry reading, had the crowd not turned out exclusively for the notoriety of the person giving it.

Self-confessed "death-defying murder junkie" and matriarch of the late-70s New York No-Wave scene, Lydia Lunch has made a career out of the frank exploration of sexual, narcotic and mental-health taboos, and a significant proportion of the audience (mostly, but not exclusively, within the female half) greeted her with enthusiastic hollering.

As a performance, it was halfway between the gutter and the stars. Lunch (real name Lydia Koch) was menacingly elegant in a long black dress, and looked much younger and more vibrant than her fiftysomething years. Standing at a lectern with two mics before her, one clear for her spoken words and one heavily reverbed for snatches of song and psychotic intonation, she was backed by a slideshow of sodium-lit parking lots and weird computer-spliced images, and overlaid with a soundtrack of dark, small-hours jazz and ambient soundscapes.

Utterly and refreshingly unashamed in her delivery, Lunch delivered a set of story-poems rich in the imagery of body horror, drug-tinged paranoia and fear of the capitalist superstate.

Almost inevitably these were somewhat hit and miss, but occasionally a quite devastating line or passage would emerge: her imagining handsome teenage soldiers parading in honour of her death; a spitting, furious rail against the neglectful parents of murderers; the razor-blade observation that "we should have armed the women of Afghanistan and Iraq".

Maybe, as she said, she's just seen too many harrowing late-night movies. Or maybe her sharpest insights were worth listening for through the fog of disgust.