If Meat Is Murder, When Is Intellectual Property Theft? - Getting Close to The Bone With Linder, Lady Gaga and Co

Line #3

It feels like Linder is everywhere just now. The opening of Danger Came Smiling, the punk sired artist’s big retrospective at the Hayward Gallery in London, has put her back catalogue of zine-styled photo-montages made across almost half a century at the centre of pop culture on a grand scale. Probably the most famous of these, a Frankenstein’s mistress of a nude female torso with an iron for a head, was originally used on the cover of Buzzcocks’ first major label single, ‘Orgasm Addict’ (1977). For the Hayward it can be seen on the poster for Danger Came Smiling.

A lavish new catalogue has been produced for the exhibition, along with postcards, the above mentioned poster, a t-shirt and badge as well as assorted prints. Such user friendly merch is only fitting for an artist who came out of a musical moment, both with record cover art - for Magazine’s debut album, Real Life (1978) as well as ‘Orgasm Addict’ - and with her own band, Ludus.

It was through both of these that I first came to Sterling’s work. I asked for and got a copy of the band’s first EP, The Visit, for what I think was my 16th birthday.

This was before I ever saw Ludus live, which I did twice, once opening for The Durutti Column in 1981 at a night called Plato’s Ballroom, then headlining a gig with an expanded line-up at Liverpool Warehouse in 1983.

Inbetween, Ludus played what has probably been the band’s most historicised gig, when they did a show at the Hacienda a few months after the Manchester club opened in 1982. This saw Linder perform wearing a dress made of meat, which she opened at the show’s climax to reveal a large black dildo.

A video of the gig has been seen over the years at various exhibitions. In 2016 I saw it projected against the wall next to the unisex toilets of the Cooper Gallery at Duncan of Jordanstone College in Dundee. This was as part of a group show called Of Other Spaces: Where does gesture become event? More recently, the video was shown as part of Tate Britain’s exhibition, Women in Revolt! Art and Activism in the UK 1970-1990 (2024), which toured to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art’s Modern Two space. Both exhibitions were sprawling histories of feminist art, much of which adopted a DIY cut-and-paste aesthetic.

Beyond Ludus, Linder went on to do her own thing as an artist, both in photomontage and performance. For the former, there were shows with galleries including Sorcha Dallas in Glasgow, and a banner for Glasgow Women’s Library. For the latter, performances included The Working Class Goes to Paradise (2000/2006) in Manchester and later London. At the Arches in Glasgow there was The Darktown Cakewalk: Celebrated from the House of FAME (2010). These cross-artform collisions were essentially collages made flesh on a grand scale.

There was Children of the Mantic Stain (2016), which saw dancers from Northern Ballet perform with a rug designed by Sterling inspired by surrealist artist Ithell Colquhoun, and solo exhibitions at the Hepworth Wakefield, Tate St Ives and Nottingham Contemporary. There was an 85 metre photomontage at Southwark Underground station and an accompanying tube map, and a 2020 retrospective at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge.

A not so meaty joy for me at least came in 2009, when a reformed and reignited Magazine used artwork drawn from Sterling’s cover image for Real Life as the backdrop of their live show, so it covered the whole of the back wall as they played.

After all that, this. I haven’t seen Danger Came Smiling yet, though it is about to open in Edinburgh at the Royal Botanic Garden, and in August will form part of Edinburgh Art Festival. Prior to that, Linder will perform in June in Mount Stuart at some point in June.

In March, Sterling dropped in to Edinburgh College of Art as part of their Monday Lecture series.*** I snagged a ticket, and as much Danger Came Smiling merch as I probably can’t afford. This haul will sit alongside the Ludus records and assorted books and catalogues of Sterling’s work currently archived in boxes following a flat move awaiting shelf space.

All of which is a long-winded fan-boy way of introducing my two Linder archive pieces pasted below. I meant to put them out when Women in Revolt! was still on, but thought I’d hold on till now, so it looked like I know what I’m doing.

The first piece, If Meat is Murder, When is Intellectual Property Theft? - Getting Close to the Bone with Linder, Lady Gaga and Co (2011), is an updated version of a piece I did for the Frame edition of Line. This was the magazine set up by Scottish Art News editor and Craigmillar Now founder Rachael Cloughton and her mates when they were still students at Edinburgh College of Art, for which Rachael got me to do stuff.

I’ve written more about Line in Line #1https://neilcooper.substack.com/p/line-1-introducing?utm_source=publication-search

Line #2 is a lengthy piece on cartoon noise making boy, Gerald McBoing Boing. This was the first thing I did for Line. https://neilcooper.substack.com/p/line-2-hey-hey-whats-that-sound

This post is Line #3.

If Meat is Murder, When is Intellectual Property Theft? uses Lady Gaga’s MTV awards meat dress as an excuse to write about Ludus’ Hacienda gig. This in turn was used as an excuse for me to write about Plato’s Ballroom. This was an irregular club/gig night/arts lab/Happening that ran in Liverpool over ten nights in an old cabaret club in 1981,and which had a profound influence on 16-year-old me that continues today.

I’ve written about Plato’s Ballroom a lot, so apologies if I’m repeating myself in this piece. Then again, when I did it it in 2011 I’d probably not written about it that much, so I was clearly just off-loading. Whatever, I’ll almost certainly write about Plato’s Ballroom again.

The title of If Meat is Murder, When is Intellectual Property Theft? is deliberately cheeky, and doesn’t really have much to do with anything that follows, if I’m honest, but I thought it was a good line, so it stays.

As well as If Meat is Murder…, I’ve also put a short second piece in at the bottom. This is a Q&A with Linder going all the way back to 2007. This was done for the sadly missed MAP magazine, and was my not terribly successful attempt to emulate the NME’s old Portrait of the Artist as a Consumer column, in which parallel universe pop stars of the day did lists of their favourite records, books and so on. This gave those of us reading it a whole new set of pop cultural references to listen to, watch, read or just name drop to show off.

I think we tried a few of these with MAP, although in terms of format they didn’t actually resemble the NME thing in the slightest. Regardless of that, they would only work if you got good answers. Linder’s answers were superb, despite my smartarsey way of framing my questions, which she gamely indulged by email without comment. If I were her I would have got someone to slap me for being an arse.

Linder’s answers were also something of an education. I had never heard - or heard of - the Kew.Rhone album until Linder mentioned it, and I ordered a copy not long after. She was right. Kew.Rhone is more interesting than Never Mind the Bollocks, which was released the same day. While it suggests some of the musical roots of Linder’s adventures with Ludus, it also pointed me in the direction of that Henry Cow/Slapp Happy related axis that I continue to explore today. Thank you for that, Linder.

I’ll probably do something else about all this somewhere or other prior to the Edinburgh Art Festival show. In the meantime, putting these two very different pieces four years apart together like this probably doesn’t make much sense. But then, as Sterling says in MAP looking back, it’s all collage.

***At Linder’s ECA talk, a brief discussion with the audience ensued on what it would take to shock nowadays. As I sat listening, some kind of answer appeared to be happening in real time on my phone.

I had put up this post that morning prior to the event, and used the image used as the cover for ‘Orgasm Addict’ alongside one from Ludus’ Hacienda gig as the cover. As usual, after it had been e-mailed out to my subscribers at a set time, I went about sharing it across various social media channels.

Within seconds of posting on Facebook, however, and before I could get round the other channels, an email arrived to say my post had been removed. This was apparently after violating Facebook’s code of conduct in respect to nudity and sexual activity.

Nudity, yes, albeit as part of a photomontage, but sexual activity, very definitely no. Facebook had clearly missed the point, and seemed to be identifying Linder’s artistic critique of a macho porn based world as actual porn.

I’d never been censored by Facebook before, and was slightly - yes - shocked. While I kept the same images for the top of the article itself, which no social media bot seemed that bothered about, to get it back on Facebook and one of the others that had also zapped me with what amounted to a cease and desist email, I changed the cover images.

Instead of the ‘Orgasm Addict’ image, I substituted the SheShe one from the cover of the booklet that came with the ‘Breaking the Rules’ (ha!) single. To be on the safe side, I also put in a picture of the cover of the London Underground map Linder had done.

Facebook removing my post was the social media equivalent of putting a hardcore magazine in a brown paper bag in a way that only hinted at the offending image beyond. You’d see magazines lined up like this in the sort of book shops that only exist in old episodes of Budgie, where it might well be kept behind the counter and out of view entirely. If Facebook was the Vice Squad, I’d just been nicked. Obscenity knocks.

Linder: Danger Came Smiling, Hayward Gallery, London until May 5th 2025 - https://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/whats-on/linder-danger-came-smiling/ Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh, May 23rd-October 19th 2025.

Monday Talk with Linder, Edinburgh College of Art, E22 Lecture Theatre, Lauriston Place, March 10th 2025, 4.30-6pm. https://www.eca.ed.ac.uk/event/school-art-monday-lecture-series-linder

A new project by Linder in collaboration with Edinburgh Art Festival will take place at Mount Stuart, Isle of Bute in June 2025, then in Edinburgh in August 2025. Full announcement forthcoming soon…

If Meat Is Murder, When Is Intellectual Property Theft? - Getting Close to The Bone With Linder, Lady Gaga and Co

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When Lady Gaga strutted onstage at the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards clad in a dress made of meat, in an industry presumed to be unshockable, it briefly caused outrage. Not since Madonna and Britney Spears swapped saliva onstage has a latter-day diva made such a statement, feminist or otherwise.

As was reported widely at the time, in an interview with Ellen DeGeneres after the show, Gaga explained that she had come to the ceremony with four former servicemen and women. All four had been forced to leave the military because they were gay and unwilling to hide the fact, as the US Army’s unspoken code dictates.

“If we don’t stand up for what we believe in,” Gaga emoted, “if we don’t fight for our rights, pretty soon we’re going to have as many rights as the meat on our bones.”

Adding a flourish to her argument, she picked up a copy of Japanese Vogue magazine and pointed at the cover. “I am not a piece of meat,” she said conclusively.

Here, then, was a perfect example of performance art iconography infiltrating the mainstream and putting it back into the frame that its inspiration so radically burst from. Too messy to be formal theatre in any kind of traditional sense, the flesh and blood show presented by the artist formerly known as Stefani Germanotta itself had history.

Rewind to the 1940s, and fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli, who fell under the influence of Salvador Dali and Jean Cocteau, constructed a bespoke lamb cutlet hat with Dali.

Flash forward to 1964, and American artist Carolee Schneeman was creating Meat Joy, in which eight partially nude figures rolled around a floor awash with wet paint, sausage, raw fish, scraps of paper, and raw chickens in a typically sixties version of a freeform Dionysian rite.

The most striking pre-cursor to Lady Gaga’s butchering of the past, however, is with what was ostensibly a rock gig that took place in Manchester’s Hacienda club on November 5th 1982. And yes, there were fireworks. Ludus was the band fronted by Linder, whose early photomontages graced the record sleeves of contemporaries such as Buzzcocks and Magazine.

Ludus – the word comes from the Latin for play – was the physical manifestation of Linder’s practice. This was played out across an EP, The Visit (1980), and albums The Seduction (1981) and Danger Came Smiling (1982). There was a cassette package, Pickpocket (1981) and singles ‘My Cherry is in Cherry’/ ‘Anatomy is Not Destiny’ (1980), ‘Mother’s Hour’/’Patient’ and ‘Breaking the Rules’/’Little Girls’ (1983). All except ‘Breaking the Rules’ were released by Manchester’s unsung New Hormones label, which had been behind Buzzcocks’ debut EP, Spiral Scratch (1977).

Ludus records were a Pandora’s Box of cocktail jazz guitar stylings, primal screams and blood and lipstick lyrical fragments. The words took a hard line on sexual politics seemingly at odds with the musical backdrop’s deceptively soft centre.

By the time of ‘Breaking The Rules’ - a pan sexual orgy of cross-gender, multiple-partnered earthly delights in just under three-minutes - Ludus, now fleshed out to a seven-piece, sounded both commercial and subversive. Released on French artist Jean-Pierre Turmel’s extravagantly conceptual Sordide Sentimentale label, the single came with an accompanying booklet of images and an essay by Throbbing Gristle’s Genesis P Orridge, an adventurer in artistic outrage whose group was named after northern English slang for an erect penis.

While live appearances by Ludus were fleeting, the Hacienda show would become the stuff of legend. Factory Records had opened the club in May 1982 with the aim of creating a glossy fun palace for Manchester youth. While primarily a self-consciously style heavy gig venue prior to the rave era phenomenon it became, it was apparently commonplace to show pornography on the still half empty club’s video screens.

Taking umbrage with this mix of unreconstructed misogyny and post-modern fetishism, Linder and her cohorts Cath Miles and Liz Naylor - then the gobby enfants terrible behind Manchester scene gossip sheet zine City Fun and their own band The Glass Animals - devised the ultimate cunning stunt to accompany what would be one of Ludus’s most memorable of shows.

This was documented in Shadowplayers (2010), LTM Records boss James Nice's exhaustive history of Factory Records. Prior to the gig, each table in the club was laid out with paper plates littered with stubbed-out cigarettes and what appeared to be a used blood-red tampon. By all accounts, Factory co-founder, mouthpiece and TV talking head Tony Wilson became uncharacteristically explosive and had the objets d’art removed. As he was about to discover, however, he and the other Factory boys had seen nothing yet.

For the event, guitarist Ian Devine sported gender-bending stiletto high-heel shoes to accompany his baggy suit. This was nothing, however, to Linder’s show-stealing grand entrance. Bedecked in an extravagant dress made of leftover chicken entrails acquired from a Chinese restaurant and sewn onto black netting, Linder and the band went through their set as the bloodied juices of what was part couture, part haute cuisine, dripped under the stage lights and onto the club floor. Both audience and club management may have been shocked, but the piece de resistance was yet to come.

The year before, squeaky-clean boy/girl vocal quartet Buck’s Fizz had won the Eurovision Song Contest for Great Britain via the anodyne chirpiness of their song, ‘Making Your Mind Up’. With its traditional take on sexual politics, the song climaxed with the two men in the group whipping off the over-the-knee skirts of the two women as they sang the line ‘If you wanna see some more…’ to reveal micro-minis beneath.

At the Hacienda, Linder took things several stages further. As Ludus played their final song, the perfectly named ‘Too Hot To Handle’, Linder parted the curtains of netting and dripping chicken of her dress, revealing the large strap-on black dildo she was wearing. From Linder’s eye-view, the audience visibly took a horrified leap backwards as the fourth wall framework of the Hacienda stage was penetrated while they gagged.


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Long after Ludus caused fireworks, the Hacienda was the venue where a still unknown Madonna would make her low-key UK TV debut. This came in January 1984 in a special Hacienda edition of Channel Four’s Friday teatime music show, The Tube, broadcast live from the club. With the Hacienda still finding its dancing feet, it was a long way off from the Madchester years to come. Then, the spectacle would happen on a now democratised dancefloor where distance between performer and audience was blurred into a mess of gyrating bodies that suggested Meat Joy reborn in day-glo colours and school-of-hard-knocks Manc swagger. Only the irresistible rise of the superstar DJ would make clubbing an us-and-them experience once more.

A precursor to Ludus’ Hacienda appearance occurred the year before at the other end of the M6 in Liverpool. Plato’s Ballroom was a monthly night that took place in a faux Dickensian chicken-in-a-basket dive called Mr Pickwicks. Mr Pickwicks had what was then the biggest dancefloor in town, and, in its heyday, was the sort of place you could imagine cabaret turns who weren’t good enough to be Petula Clark belting out Clark’s Tony Hatch penned smash hit, ‘Downtown’.

Mr Pickwick’s was a weekend favourite for what were dubbed grab-a-granny meat markets, and was nicknamed by some as Pick-a-Dicks. With Wednesday nights available for hire, Plato’s announced its arrival in by January 1981 via a series of oversize screen-printed posters emblazoned with images from the artistic avant-garde. The posters were classicist in style, and totally different from the scrappy handbills of other venues. Headliners were New Order, then still finding their feet for what was their eighth gig with the new name following the suicide of Joy Division singer Ian Curtis in May the previous year. Support acts were Blackpool-based Factory runts Section 25 and the funereally named Send No Flowers.

Even more intriguing on the posters were the promising headlines of ‘ART’, ‘PERFORMANCE’ and something called a ‘videoteque.’ On the night, the place was packed with local scenesters who watched the bands play to backdrops of Surrealist films of the likes of Un Chien Andalou and L’Age D’Or or else reel after reel of homo-erotic Kenneth Anger shorts or David Lynch’s feature debut, Eraserhead.

A solo turn called Badger Badgeroo and the Badgerettes – aka future La’s founder Mike Badger – read poetry, while, opening the show on the semi-circular wooden sprung dancefloor more used to last dance smooching was a piece of performance art.
This took place at the centre of the semi-circular dancefloor, where a coffin-size wooden box was carried on. As a recording of a voice repeated the words, ‘Man…Box…Box…Man…’ the box began to move as whatever was inside it attempted a break for freedom, like some showbiz escapologist had been buried alive.

As the recorded voice continued, ‘Box…Man…Man…Box…’ the box in question began to rock and shake until the lid began to give and vampire-like fingers appeared, followed by a hand, then a second. The performer who emerged from the box had broken his own frame, able to walk away from the mess he’d just made, free at last.

The artist behind it was Mick Aslin, who was also responsible for the posters, and was part of something called the Situationalist Youth Collective. It was this ambitiously named alliance that was behind Plato’s Ballroom.


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The idea of Plato’s Ballroom was to take art out of the galleries that framed, contained and restrained it, and to put bands in more interesting environment than the bog-standard black box pub toilet circuit that prevailed. Most vocal of the Situationalist Youth Collective was Nathan McGough.

McGough’s assorted musical adventures included playing bass with The Royal Family and the Poor, whose twelve-inch EP, Art - Dream - Dominion, was released on Factory Records. The EP’s lead track, ‘Art on 45’ saw vocalist/poet Arthur McDonald recount a litany of pop cultural barbs that at one point name-checked Plato’s Ballroom over a primitive electronic backbeat provided by collaborator Mike Keane and others.

McGough would go on to manage and play percussion with the Pale Fountains. A few years later he would become manager of Happy Mondays, the band most instrumental in breaking the Hacienda’s frame and democratising the dancefloor as figureheads of the drug-fuelled hedonism of what became known as Madchester.

McGough looked after his unruly charges as their assorted exploits descended into a tabloid friendly chaos of crashed hire cars, stolen master tapes, re-hab, Gunchester and beyond. As the band’s cartoonish double act of vocalist Shaun Ryder and pop-eyed dancer Bez grew into a very twenty-first century kind of fame, they went back in the box via I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here and Celebrity Big Brother respectively.

Prior to this, Plato’s Ballroom looked both to the Dadaists’ original Cabaret Voltaire nightclub in Zurich and to Andy Warhol’s other Factory. Other fellow travellers included Manchester’s similarly short-lived Beach club, which mixed things up in similar fashion. Also working in a similar field was Cabaret Futura, former Doctors of Madness frontman Richard Strange’s London based nouveau art cabaret, where boundaries between form, content and execution were increasingly blurred.

Over the ten nights during the eight months or so Plato’s Ballroom existed, headline acts included the crème de la crème of the post-punk avant-garde. A Certain Ratio played twice at their most exploratory percussive best. Cabaret Voltaire the band, who were one of the first acts of their era to utilise visual material into their sets, played when still a trio. A post Public Image Limited Jah Wobble debuted his new, still nameless instrumental band that would become Ker-ang, then the Human Condition.

Throbbing Gristle were supposed to play, but terminated their mission before they could take the trip. On a bill headlined by a solo Vini Reilly as the Durutti Column, meanwhile, first support was Ludus. Then a trio, without a dildo or a chicken carcass in sight, Linder and co had yet to poke through the invisible wall as they would a year later.

Beyond the bands, Plato’s Ballroom featured another piece of performance art involving its creator undressing on Mr Pickwicks’ wooden dancefloor on a folded out sheet, then dipping his head in a bucket-full of coloured paint and other sticky substances before getting dressed in a brand new set of clothes.

A Wild West show stepped straight out of the circus with a cowboy and Indian knife-throwing routine. Black dance troupe the Jazz Defektors threw shapes dressed in austerity-chic tank tops that a couple of years later would give way to B-Boy street gear, as seen when they appeared on the same Hacienda edition of The Tube as Madonna. Plato’s Ballroom, it seems, was a place where top light entertainment really could be seen as art and vice versa.

The Royal Family and the Poor were one of the final headliners of Plato’s’ first run of shows. ‘Art on 45’ took its name from ‘Stars on 45’, the then ubiquitous series of pop singles made up of show-band medleys of other hits and served up in bite-size chunks of disco pap. In its own way, the ‘Stars on 45’ series was as much about sampling and collage as the twelve-inch import of ‘The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel’ that was played at Plato’s. The only other records I remember being played at Plato’s Ballroom were The Pop Group’s incendiary single, ‘She is Beyond Good and Evil’ and the angular punk-funk yelp of Manicured Noise’s ‘Faith’. Not a bad playlist.


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Fast forward to the 2010 edition of Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art, and in the cavernous, womb-like expanse of The Arches venue, Linder is both overseeing and performing in a large-scale work called The Darktown Cakewalk – Celebrated From the House of FAME. Inspired by the grand spectacle appropriated from negro servants by their white masters, The Darktown Cakewalk was a thirteen hour semi-improvised promenade performance epic that in part looked at the nature of pop stardom, as it charted the rise and fall of a gold lamé jacketed icon tempted into the dark side and away from his dancing Muse.

Also incorporated into the piece were assorted celebrations of various dance cultures, including jumping jive and northern soul, which became little performances in themselves as the assorted dancers did their turn.

Again, as with rave and Madchester, this was the dancefloor being democratised in a way that put the ‘audience’ centre-stage. As they acted out little rituals in a sprawling flesh and blood collage of sound and vision, the show culminated in a parade where fashion week catwalk met civic pride.

Linder had done something similar in 2001 with The Working Class Goes To Paradise, in which Shaker rituals were re-enacted as three indie-rock bands played simultaneously while Linder donned the spaghetti western guise of Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name. As was apparent when the piece was restaged in 2006 at Tate Britain in London, rather than be squeezed into rows of seats, the audience were all but spilling into the action, while the performers wove their way among them. A black box framework this wasn’t.


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Linder isn’t alone in taking performance art into a musical arena that is arguably its natural home rather than studio theatre spaces. Alison Goldfrapp’s penchant for dressing-up-box spectacle is as apparent as the sources of her and musical partner in Goldfrapp Will Gregory’s pick and mix musical collages. For the elaborate stage shows that accompanied their third album, the tripped-out waftiness of Seventh Tree (2008), Goldfrapp fused ancient Pagan rites with pole dancing just as their music plundered and fused Krautrock, electro-disco-kitsch and acoustic psychedelic whimsy. Even Alison Goldfrapp’s outfit seemed to serve several functions, from a Sunday best choir-girl smock to a straitjacket or a shroud.

PJ Harvey too is a mistress of reinvention. From her austere blues-based beginnings, Harvey has moved with a shapeshifting wilfulness. Her 2009 collaboration with guitarist John Parrish, A Woman A Man Walked By, saw her playing character roles more explicitly than ever. On the tour that accompanied the album, each song was like an acting masterclass, with Harvey adopting personas and different voices for each song, crawling about the stage, or else leaping off it sprite-like to do a hippy shake among the audience. The spectacle was as equally provocative if infinitely more joyful than Linder putting the willies up the Hacienda crowd twenty-seven years earlier.

Which brings us full circle and right back to Lady Gaga. Mixing bad-girl attitude and showbiz chutzpah, Lady Gaga may have adorned herself with the trappings of avant-schlock when she put on her meat dress, but she retains the commercial clout of Barbra Streisand. Lady Gaga’s first album, The Fame (2008) was reissued a year later as The Fame Monster. She didn’t wear a gold lamé jacket or a meat dress then, but as with Linder’s House of FAME and Ludus, umbilical links were everywhere, with plenty left to chew on.

An earlier version of this was first published in Line magazine issue 4, winter 2011

Linder - Portrait of the Artist as a Consumer

Linder Sterling’s early photomontages were published in collaboration with journalist Jon Savage in The Secret Public, and she designed record sleeves for Buzzcocks, Magazine, and her own band, Ludus.

Sterling designed a menstrual egg-timer for Factory Records, and performed at the Hacienda covered in meat and wearing a strap-on dildo.

In 1991 Sterling published ‘Morrissey Shot,’ a book of photographs of her friend Morrissey.

Sterling’s early solo exhibitions include ‘What Did You Do In the Punk War, Mummy?’ at the Cleveland Gallery, London, and ‘The Return Of Linderland’ at Cornerhouse, Manchester.

Performances include ‘The Working Class Goes To Paradise’ in Manchester and London.

In 2006 a monograph edited by Lionel Bovier was published by JRP/Ringier.

Linder showed her ‘Pretty Girls’ series at Baltic, Newcastle, shows new work at Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London, from November 16-December 21st 2011, and as part of Re-Make/Re-Model at Sorcha Dallas, Glasgow, from December 8th 2011-January 21 2012.

You’re about to open at Stuart Shave and Sorcha Dallas. So, what’s the buzz, cock?

(Buzzcocks and Magazine vocalist) Howard Devoto got the name for Buzzcocks from an article in Time Out about 'Rock Follies’, the 1970s television series. This featured The Little Ladies, a hard rockin' trio of feisty girls managed by a man wearing a white fedora hat called 'Hyper' Huggins. For the hat alone, feminism was a necessity, and, in my view, remains unalterably so. So I'm busy working on the cause. Looking forwards and backwards at the same time.

Domestic appliance: what are your current working concerns?

I've spent the last year making a series of collages using 1960s ballet annuals and glamour magazines as the starting point. The former are figures from the world that I dreamed of inhabiting as a young girl. I've been collaging ballerinas and pin-up models with photographs of roses taken from The Rose Annual, which existed between the 1930s and the 1970s. I like the idea that flora can threaten and subsume. It is a conceit made frighteningly persuasive in one of Nigel Kneale's 'Quatermass' tele-dramas of the late 1950s. Kneale was from the Isle of Man, which more or less faces my house.

You live in Heysham, near Morecambe. How close is that to Linderland?

Heysham and Morecambe provide a ready made lineage of artists and celebrities. Eric Gill, Ravilious, Turner, Ruskin all worked here. Everyone from Diana Dors to The Rolling Stones to George Formby played in Morecambe. I just stand patiently in line, hoping one day to be adopted as Morecambe's own.

The idea of Linderland, on the other hand, came from living in the depths of north Manchester during the 1990s. My immediate neighbours were Bernard Manning, whose club was around the corner, with a painting of Bernard above the entrance looking uncannily like Saddam Hussein, and Mark E Smith, just across from a street called Slack Lane. With neighbours like those, how might one dream of adding to the cultural populace of the district? My answer to this was a homage to the shared anarchism of Smith and Manning.

By conflating my interest in Mancunian religious non-conformism with a passion for Leone's 'spaghetti' westerns, I set out to pioneer a bleak urban district where lawlessness, male violence and visionary witness were principal features.

Ludus is Latin for school or gladiatorial game. Shaker rituals featured in The Working Class Goes To Paradise. What music moves you?

It all begins in the north. Wigan Casino was a feature of my youth, but equally forceful were the greatest excesses of progressive rock. Jon Savage still plays me extracts from 'The Court of The Crimson King' down the phone. I have an endless and tireless fascination with the making of music, although I go through long phases of not wanting to listen to anything.

Ludus played Morrissey’s Meltdown in 2004. Art/music-music/art – equal-but-different/different-but-equal?

I saw no difference whatsoever between the various outlets of my creativity; drawing, taking photographs, fronting a group, making clothes, body building, it was all the same for me. Looking back, one could see this idea as being directly in the lineage of Dada and Duchamp. I loved the ideas of Richard Hamilton, and I loved the fact that Andy Warhol 'produced' The Velvet Underground.

Most musicians have very little interest in the art world, but I think very interesting things can happen when the two worlds collide. Early Roxy Music is one example. You could dance to it or hang it on the wall. With Ludus, we thought in terms that had nothing to do with music in the 'NME' sense. We were as interested in Albert Ayler as we were in Wilhelm Reich. It was all collage.

Beyond your own sleeves for Buzzcocks, Magazine, etc. what are your favourite record covers?

(John Greaves and Peter Blegvad’s) 'Kew.Rhone.' Yes, I know, unbearably obscure, but released on the same day as 'Never Mind The Bollocks' by The Sex Pistols. Out of the two, 'Kew.Rhone' is infinitely more interesting, and the one that I return to, both musically and visually.

You’re forever associated with Manchester’s original punk scene. How much are you judged by your early work?

After thirty years, there is an inevitable accretion of fact, myth and speculation about my early burglary years. I was prepared for my contemporary work to be perpetually overshadowed by its predecessors but thankfully, this has been far from true. Although the original photomontage that was used for ‘Orgasm Addict’ now hangs in Tate Britain, this liberates rather than imprisons my new work.

What art is on your walls?

I'm looking at two heads drawn by Adrian Wiszniewski.

Clint Eastwood or art-house?

Clint wins every time; or rather, his puppet master, Sergio Leone. No one else can do dirt like he can, if only they'd let him do Mary Poppins.

Manchester – So Much To Answer For. Discuss.

I've left the city and the city, rightly, has changed. A friend from Wales arrived there recently and thought he was in Tokyo.

What’s next in Linderland?

Shows in London, Berlin, Glasgow, Cologne, Vienna, and a musical collaboration with Ian Devine and Benoit Hennebert. We recorded twelve songs on a cassette player in 1982 for Les Disques du Crepuscule and now, twenty-five years later, it's time to take them into a studio. Finally, it's to Brussels with love.

This article was first published in Map Magazine, October 2007.

Linder: Danger Came Smiling, Hayward Gallery, London until May 5th 2025 - https://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/whats-on/linder-danger-came-smiling/ Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh, May 23rd-October 19th 2025.

Monday Talk with Linder, Edinburgh College of Art, E22 Lecture Theatre, Lauriston Place, March 10th 2025, 4.30-6pm. https://www.eca.ed.ac.uk/event/school-art-monday-lecture-series-linder

A new project by Linder in collaboration with Edinburgh Art Festival will take place at Mount Stuart, Isle of Bute in June 2025, then in Edinburgh in August 2025. Full announcement forthcoming soon…