Peaches Turns Calgary Inside Out on No Lube So Rude tour
Photo credit: Shannon Johnston (@me_onlylouder) - Peaches live in Calgary, AB
With Wheelchair Sports Camp as The opening act, Peaches transformed the first night of Calgary Pride week into a celebration of queer bodies, political defiance and Sexual Liberation.
Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5” was still ringing through Commonwealth Bar & Stage when Peaches appeared above the crowd in an enormous nipple costume. It was an appropriately unsubtle entrance for an artist who has spent more than two decades turning the body into a punchline and an instrument of liberation. Flanked by two dancers and elevated on a metal platform, she opened with “Hanging Titties” before shedding the costume to reveal a flesh-toned bodysuit, furry platform boots and the first of many transformations to come.
Peaches climbed, straddled and leapt across a stack of risers; crowd-surfed toward the rear of the venue; performed among the people packed against its back wall; and then ran through the middle of them to reclaim the stage. At different moments, she became a nipple, a vagina, a severed head, and ultimately, an enormous middle finger. Yet the outrageousness never felt like an empty catalogue of shock tactics. At a Peaches show, the production is an argument: bodies are funny, unruly and political, and nobody else gets to dictate what we do with them.
Photo credit: Shannon Johnston (@me_onlylouder) - Peaches live in Calgary, AB
Wheelchair Sports Camp opened set the tone for the night. The Denver group, led by rapper, producer and activist Kalyn Rose Heffernan alongside Gregg Ziemba, kicked off the first night of their tour with Peaches, but it marked a fresh return to the city for the group. Remembering their previous visit for Sled Island—and the festival’s end-of-week karaoke—they worked a Butthole Surfers cover of “Pepper” into a set that fit right in with Heffernan’s razor-sharp crowd work.
The reminisced about their previous time in the city where they had spent part of the day filming a video at the Compound YYC, though the city’s preferred abbreviation left Heffernan unconvinced. “What the fuck is YYC, anyway?” she asked. “Make it make sense,” turning the confusion into a setup for Wheelchair Sports Camp’s own “MAKE it MAKE SENSE.”
Her humour continually exposed the assumptions embedded in the room around her. “We have merch downstairs,” she announced. “I don’t know how I’m gonna get there, but I’m gonna get there.” The line drew a laugh, but its target was unmistakable: Heffernan, a disabled artist, commands the stage and uses their platform in a subtle way to bring light to the lack of accessibility in venues. Later, Heffernan revealed another piece of tour merchandise tailored to the night’s headliner: “We made pins of my nipple just for you, Peaches.”
For the closing “EAT MEAT!,” they shouted out former Nine Inch Nails drummer Josh Freese who loved the single so much, he sent the track to Peaches, and credits as the potential lead for landing the tour. Heffernan moved behind the kit, explaining that she had not played drums since middle school. If men were allowed to play shitty drums and shitty guitar, she reasoned, why shouldn’t she? While waiting to begin, she heckled her bandmate with impeccable timing: “Greg, do you have drumsticks for me? What the fuck? Don’t fuck it up, Greg.” What followed was not a novelty ending but a gleeful rejection of the idea that anyone must wait for mastery—or permission—before taking up space.
Photo credit: Shannon Johnston (@me_onlylouder) - Peaches live in Calgary, AB
Peaches picked up that provocation and inflated it to absurd proportions. “Looking good out there, you Calgarians,” she called as she tore through material spanning her career, from “Rub,” “Vaginoplasty” and “Operate” to the songs on 2026’s No Lube So Rude, her first album in more than a decade. The new record is currently one of ten shortlisted for the 2026 Polaris Music Prize, placing this tour firmly in the present rather than reducing it to a victory lap for an electroclash icon.
The production repeatedly played with the gap between ridiculousness and conviction. Before disappearing into an enormous jacket, Peaches announced a “time for a fashion moment: an oversized Balenciaga suit.” Soon she complained that her neck felt disconnected and told the room to stop the show. Then her head appeared to fly loose. For a moment, the trick was convincing enough to unsettle the crowd; the apparent injury became the bridge into another transformation as Peaches lost her head and became a vagina.
“Dedicated to a place where we all come from,” she said. “Vagina. Big vagina.” After pausing to kiss it, she added, “Vaginas are pretty cute.”
The show’s parade of anatomy could be deliriously silly, but Peaches never presented the body as politically neutral. A succession of layered bodysuits revealed slogans including “Free Palestine,” “Be Nice Fuck ICE” and “Trans Rights Now,” each new layer turning a costume change into a declaration. This was not officially a Calgary Pride event, but taking place at the beginning of Pride week, it felt like an unofficial opening ceremony. “All the girls, gays and theys are here,” Peaches observed.
After travelling above the audience to the back of the room, she performed at close range, faces and phone lights crowding around her. She eventually ran through the audience to the front, collapsing the usual hierarchy of the room. The venue change from the much larger MacEwan Hall to Commonwealth may have reduced the production’s scale, but it also intensified its intimacy: there was nowhere in the room untouched by the performance.
Photo credit: Shannon Johnston (@me_onlylouder) - Peaches live in Calgary, AB
The first encore brought the evening’s two halves together. Introducing “Fuck the Pain Away,” Peaches described it as “a Polaris Prize song” and Calgary’s anthem before asking, “And what do we say to that?” The answer roared back immediately. Wheelchair Sports Camp then returned to perform the song with her, transforming one of Peaches’ defining tracks into a shared act and a testament of the song’s impact that one could so readily know the words on the spot. Brendan Yates of Turnstile had just performed the track with her a few days before, is there anyone that doesn’t know the words to this song? The Polaris reference also carried unusual weight. The Teaches of Peaches, the album that gave the world “Fuck the Pain Away,” has received the Polaris Heritage Prize; now No Lube So Rude is shortlisted for the 2026 Album Prize. Few songs survive 25 years without hardening into nostalgia.
Photo credit: Shannon Johnston (@me_onlylouder) - Peaches and Wheelchair Sports Camp live in Calgary, AB
After “No Lube So Rude” completed the first encore, Peaches returned once more in a padded, inflatable middle-finger costume. From inside it, she began Barbra Streisand’s “People.” The visual gag was undeniable, but the performance was not ironic. Peaches belted the Funny Girl standard with genuine theatrical power, revealing a voice capable of carrying far beyond rap, punk or electro-pop. The collision of Broadway sentiment and wearable obscenity was absurd, but a grand finale to what felt like a theatrical production the whole way through.
It also supplied the night’s final argument. Beneath all the prosthetics, slogans, simulated decapitation and inflatable genitalia stood a serious performer, but Peaches is the star of the show.
