NO NEW YORK
Lydia Lunch as kindred spirit
Book excerpt by Adele Bertei
Excerpt selection here and intro below by Brian F. Cousins
(April 2026)
Adele Bertei's vibrant and compelling new memoir No New York revisits a time and energy that no longer exists but yet feels current and familiar.
Serving as both a documentation of the New York's late '70's and early '80's music, art and film creatives and her personal story of love, sexuality and growth this memoir serves as a companion piece to Patti Smith's Just Kids. Just as Smith met all the right people upon arriving in NYC, some ten years later, Bertei treads a similar unfailing path. Lester Bangs, Nan Goldin, Brian Eno, James Chance, Lydia Lunch and Anya Philips are among the artists that her talent and drive connect with.
Her story is truly remarkable, the writing is clear and poetic, her reflections are insightful and nuanced. A timely and necessary document.
You can get the book at Bookshop.org. The book is also available wherever books are sold, so you can order from Amazon and elsewhere.
Lydia Lunch was seventeen when we met, a teenage Anna Magnani in torn black slips and fishnets with a baby face and a take-no-shit attitude. She had run away from home in Rochester, New York and found ways to survive through her street skills and the kindness of strangers the likes of Wayne/Jayne County and Willy DeVille. I loved the music of Mink DeVille. Until I arrived in the East Village, I thought of his Cabretta album and Laura Nyro's Christmas and the Beads of Sweat LP as the ultimate romantic soundtracks of New York City. It was rock gypsy balladeer, smooth Willy, who dubbed Lydia with the Lunch moniker because she'd show up at his band rehearsals with victuals for all. This baby-faced killer was nobody's fool. She knew the right push-up bra, the perfect sneer and a tasty sandwich from Katz's would take her anywhere she needed to go in life. The uber-confident snotty punk boys in the downtown scene went nuts for her bratty, sexy package, while the squeamish ran for their lives.
Lydia was a fighter. Like me, she'd clock any guy in the face who looked at her sideways, an instinct honed from childhood sexual traumas we never discussed. Years later, we'd both unravel the horrors we'd buried, but back then we chased down those very monsters the best way we knew how; in noisy, occasionally bloody public exorcisms. She would grow into an artist I've always admired, a provocatrix and a Sicilian sister I'd keep close - sometimes contentiously, but always beloved throughout the decades.
* * *
Lydia and Bradly put me on the guest list to see her band the next night at Max's Kansas City. The room and stage were a lot smaller than I'd expected but I was thrilled to be at the famous Max's, home of Warhol and the Velvet Underground.
I didn't have a clue about her band, what they might sound like. As far as I knew, Bradly was not a musician nor was he the type to apply himself to months of diligent practice. I imagined their songs to be in line with Lydia's cubby hole playpen, some type of dolly holocaust music, however that might manifest. Maybe Lydia was a baby Patti Smith, but with more of a snarl.
Before the show began, Lydia introduced me to two of her friends; a beautiful Asian girl in liquified Lycra and a cute guy I thought was her boyfriend. The girl was sassy and sharp. A stone-cold fox.
The band came on and Lydia, dressed in a skin-tight vinyl skirt and vest, looked at the crowd as if she'd rather shoot us than give us an inch of entertainment. She had her guitar slung low, with a glass slide on her finger. Bradly was wearing his usual fiendish glare, T-shirt stretched over muscled torso as he sat down in front of a solo snare drum next to a cute Japanese bass player wearing shades and a trench coat. A skinny little guy with an alto sax was with them, all Mick Jagger petulance, shifty little eyes, and a greased pompadour. He sulked and posed, a petite prince of damage in a sharkskin suit. This was James Chance.
Suddenly Lydia screamed at the audience, 'No one here gets out alive!'
In an ear-splitting volume, the bass player started pumping on one note. Bradly began smacking out a single marching beat on that snare like he was beating death into a bunny rabbit. Everyone fell in together; Lydia's warped guitar slice, sax squawk, bass thump and snare smack on the one. Military blasts at an enemy line up - BAM BAM BAM B-B-BAM BAM BAM! - and Lydia started to wail: 'Little orphans running through the bloody snow! Little orphans running through the bloody snow! Little orphans running through the blood through the blood through the-' and she took that glass tube and ran it across the fretboard of her guitar, making it squeal in staccato bursts of pain while the band kept the military beat behind her, emphasizing every word with a sonic blast. This was no baby Patti Smith - more like Medusa resurrected to riot and rip your face off. The music was painful, disturbing, bombastic. And liberating.
I looked around the mesmerized crowd staring at the teenage girl on stage screaming with her guitar and the awkward kid poncing around with his bleating sax. The beautiful Asian girl kept edging her chair closer to mine and I thought, here are the offspring of the broken American dream, picking through the ruins to offer up a new vicious poetry. Shards of sonic glass. Pieces of ache and rage. Belle laide, the French would say. Beautiful ugly. Belle laide.
Any artist Patti Smith mentioned, from Arthur Rimbaud to Vladimir Mayakovsky to Buster Keaton, sent me racing for the library and bookstore. The same had happened when Lester Bangs related his Antonin Artaud story. I hightailed it to the shelves looking for every utterance from Artaud and here on stage was a spectacle he'd predicted in his essays, a phenomenon defined as a 'violent, austere, physical determination to shatter the false reality that lies like a shroud over our perceptions'. Mix with a kind of Dada brutalism, exposing nerves and fascia and you get NO WAVE, a negation of every wave that had come before. And Lydia was its oracle.
The beauty in Lycra tugged lightly on her leather choker, drumming her fingers on my thigh. Beats of empty space were inhaled between the chest-battering hits and then the guitar would suddenly veer off like a car crash with screechy sliding noises, the sound hitting you full throttle. James squawking on his sax, Lydia wringing screams from her guitar . . . The song wasn't even two minutes long and left me gasping for breath. The girl I'd met playing with dollies in her loft bed was this girl on stage screaming an anthem for a scene that would create thunderstorms of artistic rage around the world.
While reveling in the sonic contempt of Teenage Jesus, I whispered in the foxy girl's ear: 'This is the theatre of cruelty.'
She gave me the look. Turned and whispered something to her handsome friend, who asked where I was from. I told him, 'Cleveland, home of the burning river.'
The girl in the Pebbles Flintstone outfit of tied-up Lycra was Anya Phillips. Her escort Diego Cortez grinned, then flashed his camera at the stage.
Lydia screamed in time to her second march: 'Die a thousand times, a crown of thorns, thrown off the shelf, my eyes are burnt . . .'
I had found my way home.
And speaking of Lydia Lunch... see this interview with her, plus an an excerpt from a book about her.
