Sorcha Dallas

It is tea time, (peppermint from the looks of things) and artist, performer and feminist icon Linder is sitting in Sorcha Dallas’ Glasgow gallery. She has just hung her new exhibition, King’s Ransom (Hybrid Tea), at the gallery and comleted a radio interview. As soon as we finish chatting, she’s off to the Arches for a technical meeting about the epic 13-hour live performance The Darktown Cakewalk: Celebrated From The House Of FAME, which she is bringing to the Glasgow International Festival later this week.

Linder, it turns out, is not afraid of hard work. We talk about the notion of labour in both life and art practice. “I grew up in a working-class household, my mum was a cleaner, my dad a builder. The house was always really clean. There was something about hard work: not just doing it, but being seen to do it. My parents came from that generation before the welfare state, they had seen poverty and it really terrified them.”

Linder (real name Linda Sterling) was born in Liverpool 1954, and found herself in the mid-1970s in Manchester, as part of an extraordinary circle of artists, writers and musicians. She lived the early years of Manchester punk and the birth of Factory records, and staged confrontational feminist performances in the legendary Hacienda nightclub. She played with her band Ludus, and founded the fanzine the Secret Public with Jon Savage. Her circle included Howard Devoto of the band Magazine, and Morrissey is on of her closest friends.

In 1976, she went into a newsagent’s shop and bought a selection of top-shelf men’s magazines and women’s glossies. None portrayed the kind of woman she knew she was or might even want to be. She cut them up and fused them together as a satire on the commodification of women that she saw all around her. A particularly striking image, a naked female body with gaping lipsticked mouth collahged over each breast, found itself on the cover of the Buzzcocks’ 1977 record Orgasm Addict.

In fact the collages became part of a brief six-month whirlwind of activity, in what has been a lifetime as an artist. Linder only recently revisited them: her new show includes a recent series of photomontages and a stunning colaboration with the fashion designer Richard Nicoll and photographer Tim Walker which brings together roses in full bloom with fashion models wearing Nicoll’s extraordinary clothes in a kind of parody of the suburban English rose.

Those years at the heart of the Manchester scene helped shape Linder’s fearlessness. “I was with a small group of very brave people and you just have to rise to that,” she says.

She talks about rthe transvestite clubs she photographed. “People had no money; they borrowed clothes from their mums… now it’s what is behind the figures that reality interests me, the backgrounds, the almost Victorian supports.”

Even back then the gay scene in Manchester was really important. “The gay clubs were an absolute sanctuary for us; out on the street we would have been beaten to a pulp.” When punk happened Linder was already on her trajectory. Her life, she says, had been changed by reading Germaine Greer’s book the Female Eunuch. She was aware that she was a rare woman in male environment - there were women on the music scene but she knew few female visual artists.

She laughs as she recalls: “There was only one photocopy shop in Manchester at the time and they thought that what I was doing was obscene. I used to go there in my bondage trousers and try to have an argument with them about it, talking to them ablout the ‘glamour’ calendar they had hanging on the wall.”

These days Linder lives in the village of Heysham in Lancashire. “It’s exactly where I want to be, it’s isolated. I like to keep a distance on things.” That sense of distance and perspective is important. She says she felt she had to sit out the 1990s, the age of irony. These days, the irony exhausted, you can’t help but feel that once again Linder’s time has come.

There has been a series of major exhibitions in the UK and America. She hopes Cakewalk will be seen as a universal piece that could equally be performed in Europe or Tokyo. It is an epic and complex performance working with a corps of six dancers and up to 100 amateur performers from Lindy Hoppers to Northern Sould Dancers, fusing the roots of popular music with a satire on pop culture. “I think the period of pop is completely over,” she says. “It began in 1956, with Elvis’ Heartbreak Hotel and, I’m sorry boys, but it’s over now and we just have to accept that.”

The performance will involve a range of archetypal figures, among them “the star”, the kind of male pop star she has seen rise and fall a thousand times. It is a punishing, liberating process. “One of the dancers was doing some work the other day that involved them breaking down in tears; before she went any further, she shouted, ‘if there’s anybody in the room who might just ever fancy me at some point in the future could they just leave the room now?’ I think that applies to evefry one of us in the group.”

But she’s ploughing on with the 14-hour days regardless. How long has she been preparing? “Probably since 1954.” She’s only partly joking. Linder, it seems, doesn’t do anything by halves.