Lydia Lunch

Lydia Lunch (born Lydia Anne Koch on June 2, 1959 in Rochester, New York) is a controversial American post-punk singer, spoken word artist, poet, writer, photographer, and actress. Her extensive, 40-year-plus body of multimedia work is characterized by its extreme obsessiveness with the darkness of the human psyche, often focusing on nihilism, rage, violence, eroticism, surrealism, and pornographic art as key points of topic. After arriving in New York City at the age of 16, she worked as a bar maid and go-go dancer at the Baby Doll Lounge on White street in Tribeca. Lydia met Alan Vega (who became her first friend in NYC) and Willy DeVille (who gave her the name 'Lunch' because she'd often been stealing lunch for The Dead Boys). Then she moved in for about a year with then-boyfriend James Chance (born James Siegfried) who had come to New York (from Milwaukee) in the last week of 1975. They lived at a funky two-room fifth-floor walk-up apartment on East 2nd street (between Avenue A and B) and at a tiny storefront on Twelfth street. Lunch moved into a large communal household of artists and musicians in NYC, including Kitty Bruce, daughter of Lenny Bruce. After befriending the 'godfathers of punk' Suicide at Max's Kansas City, she founded the short-lived but influential No Wave band Teenage Jesus and the Jerks in 1976 with her artistic partner, James Chance. Both appeared on the seminal No Wave compilation No New York.