Sorcha Dallas

In ‘England’s Lost Eden’, a book about two centuries of utopian spiritualism, Philip Hoare quotes a contemporary account of the antic worship of the Shakers, the sect founded in the 1770s by Manchester born Ann Lee. Devotees are to be heard “groaning most dismally, some trembling extremely; others acting out as though all their nerves were convulsed; others swinging their arms with all vigour”. It’s a vision of austere but unruly energy that fascinates Linder Sterling, an artist, musician and unclassifiable cultural catalyst for whom the hidden history of ecstatic bodies has long been a source of private and political inspiration. Form her earliest interventions on the Manchester punk scene (most famously, her sleeve montage for Buzzcocks’ 1977 single “Orgasm Addict”) to her current obsession with bearded female saints and states of religious transport, she has invented, as Hoare puts it, “a place of memory and mourning, of blood an honey, of salt and water and fire, of hair and skin”.

On a bright, freezing morning in March, Linder (like her friend Morrissey, she knows the ritual import of a single name) is in London for the opening of the Tate Triennial. Her contribution, an expanded restaging of her 2000 performance piece ‘The Working Class Goes To Paradise’, is a month away, but there are camera angles to be considered, archival issues to be settled. Upstairs in her hotel room is the martial arts breastplate that she has been occasionally photographed wearing since the late 70s. She may or may not deploy it today. For the moment, she is eloquently unarmoured and easily animated by the details of a rigorously unpredictable performance. Explaining the ceremonial unfolding of the piece, she briefly executes a few authentic Shaker moves: gestures of offering and inclusion that she is currently training 12 women dancers to carry out. The dancers will join three rock groups in Tate Britain’s biggest space, all playing simultaneously while Linder, possibly in the guise of Ann Lee, considers when and where to join the fray.

Like all her work, the performance starts from a question: “What would happen if…? That question still gets me out of bed most mornings. And in this case it is: what if three rock bands play simultaneously for four hours and you move all of the drummers together and then everyone else arcs out and away from eye contact? What if you take everyday women and give only the most basic dance instruction based upon late 19th century photographs of Shaker dance, and ask them to maintain those movement patterns for four hours too? In the midst of the sonic swirl?”

The piece, she says, “is as much about endurance as it is about spectacle. The audience will only be allowed to stay for the second and third hours. There will be no obvious place for the audience - which might be two or 200 – to sit or stand. All of the musicians are standing in a circle approximately ten feet apart from each other, which also makes eye contact impossible. They’re having to work from an absolute zero position of intuition and empathy. At the same time, these musicians are so accomplished in terms of loud live performance, that I have every confidence they will not be overwhelmed by the space or the 19th century acoustics.” The groups – 3D Tanx, Baby Judas and The Pylon Boys – were all discovered working near her home on the north west coast of England, and they are all, she says, “extraordinarily strong, vivid, determinedly individual bands, who exist within their own highly charged, flourishing network of musicians. Walls move back three feet when they plug in.”

This last sounds an echo, 24 years on, of her most notorious performance. On 5 November 1982, Linder’s group Ludus, their sound by then a beguiling mix of assaultive sonics and wry pop sensibility, played Hacienda in Manchester. The vegetarian singer’s infamous ‘met dress’ – stitched together out of discarded chicken parts from a nearby restaurant – was only the first surprise of the evening. Halfway through the final song, “Too Hot To Handle” – just as she’d finished the couplet “I ask for bread and you give me stones; I need a dress to cover my bones” – Linder whipped aside her fleshy garment to reveal a gleaming black strap-on dildo. The audience, she says, visibly recoiled in shock. But the most notable thing about the extant footage of this legendary post-punk moment is not so much the way Linder gives her alarming appendage the odd playful whack, but the astonishing assurance with which she moves between poised, if provocative, vocals and ecstatic screams (and back again: a polite “thank you” before the crowd’s stunned silence). Looking back, Ludus was some sort of training in the considered use of letting go.

Something similar, she recalls, was happening at the level of composition: “The first Ludus recordings were very carefully constructed sings and even then, in 1978, Ian [Devine, guitarist] and I were experimenting with elongating the possibilities of composition. By 1980 we had dispensed with any structure whatsoever and we played Cabaret Futura [Richard Strange’s venue on London’s Wardour Street] as a three piece. We emptied the club within 15 minutes. The Northern audiences took longer: they’d stay the duration for 45.” At their most accessible, Ludus essayed a scratchy jazz pop; Linder’s lyrics, schooled on prodigious reading of poetry, feminism and psychoanalysis, could be playful or plainly didactic. Or often both. On “Breaking The Rules”, she announces authoritatively: “Let’s go through the various situations, the various combinations, of romance, love and marriage…” “I played with words, making a form of collage, I suppose,” she says. “I would write lines based upon an observation by John Berger and then follow it with a chorus inspired by Stevie Smith or pray Kate Millett might move my pen with Anne Sexton providing the ink flow, Mary Daly is in there somewhere acting as muse, [poet] Penelope Shuttle, [dramatist] Nor Hall and somewhere, too, my own thoughts.” That welter of influence was in the sound of Ludus too, which rapidly advanced through Devine’s highlife-inspired guitar on songs like “The Escape Artist”, through a liberating encounter with free jazz, towards an intermittent abandonment of sung words in favour of Linder’s scat-phatic improvisations.

What strikes her now is the speed with which she had thought, felt and worked herself to that state of artistic dislocation, and at the same time just how localised, how productively restricted, the journey was. She was born in Liverpool in 1954, the child “of war children”, and grew up in Manchester “with warnings about laughing ending in crying, and turning the mirrors against the wall in thunderstorms. Superstition and precaution continuously proscribed our lives. To our parents, the Moor Murders were the ultimate proof of all their warnings. During the summer of 1964, we weren’t allowed beyond the front gate.” Glam rock, and Roxy Music in particular, offered a glimpse of something alluring and odd beyond the post-industrial city of the mid-70s – Linder, in homage, paired a WAAF uniform with red stilettos – but it was punk, she says, that “was for me transformative plumage”. Inspired by the photographic collages of John Heartfield, she had already begun to experiment with combinations of pornographic and advertising images. The famous Buzzcocks sleeve is just one (if especially suggestive) example of a vast body of work that places glistening bodies in sickly proximity to household appliances and outsize food items.

In a sense, Linder’s early visual aesthetic – mixing austerity and sex, iconoclasm and skilful self-mythologising – might be said to have influenced the whole mythic texture of Manchester punk. It suggested that there were secret conduits from the North of England at the end of the 70s back to Warhol’s Factory and the continental avant garde. But of course it was a period too of hectic local collaboration, and her influence is everywhere in the transition from punk to as-yet-unnamed post-punk; in the style and substance, especially, of Magazine and, much later, The Smiths. It was a period, she says, of useful uncertainty: “The gap between the audience and the stage was still small. [The Human League’s] Phil Oakey could be standing next to you at the Factory in Hulme and then walk up three steps and be in front a vocal mic and under a spotlight. The transition from spectator to star did not seem so vast. We were the children of Warhol, after all, and somehow familiar with ambiguous aristocracies.”

The ambiguity of her role in that history (artist? Musician? Theorist? Stylist?) means Linder remains enigmatically placed in relation to both the music and art worlds. Ludus ceased to startle in 1984 – in fact, Linder has already spoken of already feeling, as she stalked the stage of the Hacienda two years earlier, that there was perhaps no next move to make – when she and Devine were invited by Benoit Hennebert of Les Disques Du Crepuscule to take up residence above his bar and club in Brussels, Interference. Songs were written, but the process seemed stalled; as she writes in a new book of her work: “It should have been a time of perfection, but somehow it wasn’t, and that wasn’t anyone’s fault. All were there in good faith, all trying to fulfill Benoit’s vision but, like the name of the club itself, there was some sort of creative interference transmitted. Communications broke down between Ian and me and we left Brussels separately. We didn’t speak again for over a decade. I eventually returned to an England where much had changed and Morrissey was finally, rightfully, at the top of the charts.”

Linder, meanwhile, reinvented herself as bodybuilder, mother and exurban visionary, and began to map a territory that, in her art of the last decade or so, she calls Linderland: “I moved away from Manchester in 2002, exchanging the harsh landscape – psychological and geographic – for the tidal, I now live in a small village, as far away from the centres of cultural production as possible.”

Linder is a necessary presence in a period in which the fluxional heritage of post-punk is being corralled in retrospect as an era enthralled only by angular boys and their choppy guitars. The contemporary art world, at the same time, is weirdly obsessed by the most cliché ridden rock imagery. Linder – whose archive of punk-era photographs, artwork and ephemera, she reckons, is more comprehensive than that of any of her contemporaries – is simply not made for either sort of nostalgia, and is risking instead a sound for which she, as much as her audience, is unprepared. And after Tate Britain, perhaps, there will be more sonic excursions into Linderland. “I’ve started writing again, and recording too,” she says. “Lyrically the songs are far more straightforward, a little more like short stories. I’m working with a young composer, Samuel Nelson Dale. We’re layering my voice and using fairly complicated harmonies. It’s a challenge for me, but the resulting sound is a vocal shimmer that weaves itself amongst strings and the occasional Aeolian harp. I’m still surprised when I listen to playbacks. If we could just find a way to incorporate the three drummers then we would have it made.”