Long before Peaches became an influential figure in electroclash, she was inviting strangers to take the microphone at the Fonda Theatre.
It was 2001, during her first headlining tour, and the musician had developed an unusual ritual for her breakout song, “F**k the Pain Away.” Rather than perform the track herself, she would play the backing music and invite audience members to sing it. A friend captured the nightly experiment on a camcorder as the tour traveled around the world, collecting performances from different cities and audiences along the way.
But of all those recordings, Peaches remembers the Fonda’s as the wildest.
“The Fonda performance of that is the beginning and the end,” Peaches recalled during a recent phone interview. “That was the best one of them all.”
More than two decades later, the memory remains one of many connecting her to the Hollywood theater, where she’ll return Saturday, Oct. 17, as part of its 100th anniversary celebration.
For Peaches, whose career has been defined by theatrical spectacle, humor and a willingness to challenge tradition, the occasion is something of a homecoming.
She’s performed at the Fonda numerous times, including two nights during an anniversary tour celebrating her 2000 debut album, “The Teaches of Peaches.” Yet some of her most cherished memories come from those earliest visits, when she was beginning to discover the creative communities that would help shape her relationship with Los Angeles.
“I remember all the people, the communities that I’d meet,” she said, recalling the artists and musicians who attended her early shows. “They were such a big part of the early punk art scene, and it just felt immediately like I had found my people in L.A.”
The Fonda itself was also part of the attraction. Unlike more conventional concert spaces, the old Hollywood theater offered an atmosphere that invited experimentation.
Originally opened in 1926 as Carter DeHaven’s Music Box, the venue began as a home for theatrical productions and musical revues before undergoing several transformations, including a period as a movie theater. Over the decades, its stage has welcomed artists ranging from Tom Petty and the Rolling Stones to Billie Eilish and Chappell Roan.
For Peaches, however, its appeal has never been limited to the names on the marquee.
“The Fonda is such a good space. It’s like an old theater, but it’s got that fun feeling. It’s like an old theater that could be haunted, you know?” she shared with a chuckle. “You’re not doing a theater production there, so you, in a way, you’re changing the space, or you’re making it a bit wilder with the setting.”
That sense of history, mixed with the freedom to disrupt it, made the room exciting for an artist who has never been content to remain in one place onstage.
Peaches fondly recalled the theater’s side boxes, which she used to climb into during performances. She would even set up lights in those spaces, transforming parts of the auditorium into extensions of her stage. Footage filmed at the Fonda also appeared in a video for a song from her second record, preserving another glimpse of the unconventional performances that became her signature.
Those memories carry additional weight as the Fonda marks a century on Hollywood Boulevard. The theater’s anniversary celebration brings together artists from different generations and genres, honoring a venue that has continued to reinvent itself while remaining a gathering place for live music.
Peaches believes such spaces are increasingly important at a time when creative communities face mounting pressure from commercialization and development.
“Places are being bought up, sanitized, monetized, capitalized without giving space for communities to express themselves, which is the only reason why we got to where we are now,” she said. “So they’re not really being respected. You have these really small clubs, and then you have the place you arrive. You need these spaces.”
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Now more than 25 years into her career, Peaches continues to build performances around surprise, extravagance and moments of raw expression. Her goal, she shared, is to give audiences something that cannot be replicated through a short video or a clip viewed on a phone.
“I want them to feel like they had a reason to come out and not just something they could maybe tune in and see a little clip of. I want them to have an experience,” she said. “The element of surprise and the element of extravagance and the element of rawness, because you can see rawness, but if you’re there, it’s very visceral. And the audiences are a part of the show.”
She often plays with the audience’s perspective, changing where the performance happens and finding unexpected ways to transform the room. The audience, she believes, is as much a part of that experience as the person onstage.
“I like to change where the stage is or the perspective of the audience, or how they view me, or like a surprising revelation, but all in the name of joy and expression,” she said.
Her return to the Fonda comes during another significant chapter in her career. Earlier this year, she released “No Lube So Rude,” her first full-length album in more than a decade. The passing years have also given her a new perspective on her own longevity, something she once marveled at in other performers.
“I remember when I was young, and you’d be like, ‘Whoa, Eartha Kitt is playing, and she’s still around doing that,’” she said. “And then I think, ‘Oh, that’s me now.’”
For the Oct. 17 performance, Peaches will be joined by Gelli Haha, an artist she personally selected for the show after the two connected at a small backyard gathering in Los Angeles. Although she isn’t planning an entirely different production specifically for the centennial, Peaches believes the nature of her live show will make the evening memorable.
And as she prepares to return to a theater where she once watched strangers sing her breakout song and found a community that embraced her unconventional artistry, she hopes audiences leave with a renewed appreciation for the city and its creative spaces.
“I hope that they want to celebrate their city and feel like there are spaces to go,” she said. “That’s what I want them to take. Feel like there are spaces to go and celebrate what you have, you know, because Los Angeles has some amazing, weird, awesome spaces.”
For Peaches, those spaces are worth protecting.
“They need to stay.”