No New York: No Wave and The Women Who Shaped The Scene

A Conversation with Adele Bertei

Los Angeles, September 2026

Hugo Bausch Belbachir: I often forget how much French radical literature and poetry influenced punk movements. In your most recent book, « No New York: No Wave and The Women of Shaped the Scene », you remind us of the role played by the works of Genet, Artaud, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé. Artaud was instrumental for many music performers in establishing a direct confrontational tension with the audience, and often a climate of violence. Many artists from the No Wave and Punk movements would draw on this attitude as an antithesis to subsequent systems of alienation produced by the entertainment industry and mass media cultures in the United States, at the time.

Adele Bertei: We were all reading Artaud and Jean Genet, but were also very enamored with the the Situationists. There was this tightrope dance between the two theories: the Theater of Cruelty and the Situationists, shocking the audience out of their torpor. What was happening in culture at the time, we were recovering from Vietnam and Nixon. We were the children of that generation, dealing with the fallout. It’s hard to say exactly why we were so enamored of French literature. There were many French people in the scene, also adjacent to No Wave; Sylvère Lotringer, Edwige Belmore, Phillipe Marcade of the Senders, Maripol. Lizzy Mercier Decloux, who I think was an extraordinary and quite idiosyncratic talent. Nobody played rhythms like Lizzy on the guitar. In terms of violence, it did sometimes get out of hand; James Chance would end up hurting people, or hurting himself, in ways that were genuinely disturbing. As his antics escalated, it became almost masochistic on his part. Alan Vega, from Suicide, whom I’d call the granddaddy of that kind of confrontation with the audience, did it in a way that was… not safer, exactly, but he could scare people without touching them. James needed physical violence. He wanted physical confrontation. Not long after a show we did at the Paradise Garage with Richard Hell, he was slicing himself up with a broken bottle. It was deeply disturbing, and I basically left the band shortly after.

H.B.B: There’s a radical impulse in life that can’t be expressed as perfectly in literature, music, or painting as it can be lived. That may be why the literature of a young homosexual rebel like Rimbaud, running away through fields in the late nineteenth century, matters so much to aspiring punks. In a performative way, too. 

A.B: Yes, an embodied art, which also had a lot to do with the sexuality in the scene. Many of the women in No Wave worked as dominatrices or did sex work, sometimes to support boyfriends who were lazy musicians who didn’t want to work. (Laugh). There was this extraordinary line involving violent sexuality that also informed the music and the art; the idea of Lorca’s duende, where you have to open your wounds and let a little mischievous gremlin into your bloodstream, to stir things up and come back out in the work. Which also carried a violent feeling: not being afraid, not wanting to be afraid of darkness.

H.B: No New York or Notre-Dame des Fleurs, the choice must have been difficult for the title of this memoir. 

A.B: Yes. (Laugh). 

H.B.B: Speaking of dominatrixes, can you tell me about Terence Sellers? I’ve been working for a year on translating a text she wrote in the late 1980s, called Is There Life After Sadomasochism?, and which is an exceptional, frenetic text about the end of a radical romantic and sexual life with the arrival of AIDS. The end of debauchery and the Devil’s game, in sorts. The end of the decadents, as she puts it. You met Terence through Anya, who lived in the building next door. 

A.B: They were roommates for a while. I met Terence when I visited the dungeon. It was quite an experience. She had museum cases, glass cases laid out with these incredibly rare medieval instruments of torture. I remember a little red pincushion with pins standing up in it, which struck me as the most sinister thing there, in a strange way. She was incredibly brilliant. Anya worked for her for a while, too.

Hugo: I discovered Terence’s work while doing a show with Chris Kraus, who showed me a film she made with Sylvère Lotringer, How to Shoot a Crime, in which Terence is interviewed on sadomasochism. She was extraordinary. I remember thinking, who is this woman? There’s so little written about her. 

A.D: She really was incredible. 

H.B.B: Coming back to the book; you quickly meet Nan Goldin when arriving in New York in 1978. She introduces you to her friends David Armstrong and Cookie Mueller, with whom you spend some time in Provincetown. Nan becomes important, and you have a fascinating way of speaking about her attitude as a photographer. I’ve read and reread this passage: “Being gay in the 1970s was no picnic. You could be harassed, beaten, or even killed if exposed (…). In the world of Nan’s photos, I did not see the shame the outside world foisted on us. I saw a certain tenderness. Hurt, yes, but a certain dignity inside the pain.” You’re saying something very important there. 

A.B: As a gay teenager in the seventies, we went through hell, and Nan understood that so succinctly. Her eye knew where to find the inner beauty without the stigmatization — differently from, say, Arbus.

H.B.B: Arbus is problematic in many ways; going to Washington Square Park to photograph ‘freaks’ without understanding where those people came from or what they were trying to say. Completely marginalizing them.

A.B: One of the things I loved about our scene — No Wave and the Pictures Generation— is that it didn’t separate working-class kids, basically street ruffians who’d come to New York in the wake of Patti Smith and Richard Hell, from the academics. There was a true mix. It mattered, because today, unlike in the sixties and seventies, working-class culture and literature get far less attention, which I think is tragic. Nan was an insider in her scene, which is exactly why she could capture it with such insight. The fact that working-class experience is so ignored in our culture now has a lot to do with where we are politically in America— there’s nothing for them.

H.B.B: And the class dimension is bound up with gender and sexual orientation. In Arbus, as opposed to Nan whose work is an extension of her own life; if you look at the photography, you’re looking at her life, a group of people going against a heteronormative way of life. Gay, trans, drug users, lovers…Whereas Arbus – 

A.B: Was a voyeur!

H.B.B: And there’s no extension of herself, no shared desire; just a vicious curiosity toward otherness. It’s the darker side of photography, in a way. Something I find important in the book is how much you attest that punk was shaped by jazz and Black music. There’s a beautiful moment where you’re leaning against a window with Charles Mingus playing and the New York sky outside. It’s really at the heart of its impulses. You write so well about Fela Kuti, Charlie Parker, Coltrane, Sun Ra – figures whose visual work, not just their music, inspired so many punk artists. Basquiat, for instance, who inherited all of that as a visual artist.

One of the first exhibitions I organized was around J.D.’s – the punk fanzine Bruce LaBruce and G.B. Jones produced and distributed in Toronto in the 1980s, short for Juvenile Delinquents. Its central thesis was that punk had been co-opted by white cis males, but that its true ethos was queer and Black; tracing back through figures like James Brown, whom LaBruce considered the first punk, and medieval women trances. There’s also Pure Hell, an all-Black, first-generation punk band that’s been almost entirely forgotten.

A.B: Basquiat would be at Squat Theater constantly, where Sun Ra’s band was practically the house band. You can see it in his paintings, it’s jazz on canvas. We were all listening – including Lizzy Mercier, who sounded like she’d learned guitar in some dusty alley in Soweto. Not all of us, though; bands like DNA and Mars were more white angst than funk. But for those of us who loved jazz and Black music, it was about working from it, being polyrhythmic with shards of noise, making something brutalist but still danceable, with an underlying agitation. We were listening to local bands like Defunkt, so there was crossover happening in clubs like Max’s Kansas City – a primarily white bastion of underground culture, where Andy Warhol still held court downstairs in the VIP room.

H.B.B: Were there real interactions between the Afrofuturist or free-jazz scene and the punk scene, or was it more a matter of each side witnessing the other? Punk is, in many ways, a very calculated movement; about doing your own thing, forming a band, and ultimately someone becoming the obnoxious frontperson. Were there synergies, shared neighborhoods and spaces, or was it more so parallel?

A.B: I think there were, though I’d draw a distinction. No Wave was a bit different from punk, as much as I resist labels. It was more about deconstruction. Punk was largely three-chord progressions, sometimes with political lyrics, but at heart it was pop. We were very against pop. There was some crossover; bands like James Blood Ulmer’s, where No Wave musicians would sometimes jump on stage with him, or some of the Defunkt guys playing with No Wave musicians. But there was less mixing than there could have and should have been, even though we came from the same ethos of building something new out of old forms. Squat Theater really was a great crossover point for white and Black artists, and some people from the old Warhol scene would show up too. Nico, for instance, was ubiquitous. But there were real problems, too; the Contortions, for instance – James Chance loved James Brown but was also an appropriator, and could say genuinely racist things, which was a real turn-off.

H.B.B: This is part of why you started distancing yourself from that scene. As much as it drew on and appropriated Nazi aesthetics as a kind of reversal of trauma and systems of violence – looking to a German aesthetic that was architectural in postwar cinema, for example – there was also something purely racist within its ideology. You witnessed people around you – Anya and others – using racist slurs, excluding Black and brown people, which is also bound up with the fact that many of them were men. The racism within the punk scene; the remarks directed at certain Black musicians and members of the public, the Nazi aesthetic, and so on. 

A.B: Appropriation is a loaded topic in itself. But bands like James White and the Blacks crossed a line for me. Hearing the racist slurs firsthand, as an insider, was something else. As for appropriation generally, I think our culture has gotten to a point now where the term is almost meaningless. I spend a lot of time in Trinidad, and Trinidadian culture is glorious precisely because everyone is, in air quotes, appropriating everyone else’s culture – Indian, African, French, etc -and it blossoms into this incredible, welcoming hybrid. If you talked about appropriation in Trinidad, they’d laugh you out of the room. Back then, in the No Wave scene, the glorification of Nazism was mostly teenage posturing; what can we do to outrage people the most? Let’s hang a Nazi flag over the stage! 

H.B.B: And this – I think it’s important to remind people – was only twenty-five years after the actual Nazi government. Looking back now it feels distant, but at the time it was barely a generation removed from the concentration camps.

A.B: I remember going to Berlin for the first time with Scott and Beth B, and Lydia Lunch, and seeing bullet holes still riddled across shop windows. It felt so recent to be in Berlin in 1978. So I think it really was childish posturing more than any kind of intellectual position.

H.B.B: And even as we can agree that most music is rooted in Black music, punk rapidly translated that heritage into a scene of white men, and from there into racist gestures. Were there people at the time contesting this?

A.B: A couple of us talked about it, but the best was Lester Bangs’ 1979 « The White Noise Supremacists ». Aside from him, though, not really. Honestly, the scene was fairly segregated, and I didn’t have many Black friends myself in New York at that time. There was Felice Rosser, a writer and musician; a woman named Millie, a friend of Nan’s; Jean-Michel; Rammellzee – I knew them but wasn’t really hanging out with them. It wasn’t until around 1981 that the hip-hop scene began to integrate with the white scene, largely through graffiti. That’s when the whole art world exploded downtown, with Patti Astor’s gallery and so on.

H.B.B: Speaking of galleries, there’s a passage I found very interesting, in which you describe the galleries of the SoHo scene as snobbish. Leo Castelli, I can somehow understand, but Paula Cooper? (Laugh). 

A.B: Oh, yeah! And that’s one of the reasons I wrote about the women in the scene; it was a bunch of men. No Wave was really the first time in the history of any cultural avant-garde that so many women converged in one place, and gender, genre, all of it; we didn’t give a fuck. We were taking off the straitjackets of our imaginations and going for it. In a lot of ways, because we did – in film, painting, music, text – I think the men thought, we’d better step up, look at what the women are doing. There was a real frisson, not competition exactly, but everyone pushing to see how far they could go without any structures, no commodification, no labels. We didn’t even talk about feminism that much, though Lizzie Borden’s film « Born in Flames » would then address both feminism and the racial divide.

H.B.B: Someone like Dan Graham, perhaps, was looking at punk and No Wave too. Or Mike Kelley. Warhol, too, but maybe still a bit distant? 

A.B: We’d throw spitballs at Warhol. We’d sit at a corner table, and you could tell they were whispering about the dirty little punks at the corner – intrigued by us and appalled at the same time, because we’d toss things at them and try to disturb their little clique. Until we got thrown out.

H.B.B: Was this at Max’s Kansas City?

A.B: Yes, in the VIP room downstairs. I should mention that Mike Kelley started out – I’m from Cleveland, and Detroit bands used to come play there a lot. Mike started in Destroy All Monsters, which played the Pirate’s Cove, where we’d also play.

H.B.B: I think that’s also how Kim Gordon met him.

A.B: Oh, that’s right! 

H.B.B: In contrast, you were also encountering an entire generation of women artists; you write about seeing performances by Adrian Piper, one of the first conceptual artists of color, but also Kiki Smith, with whom you’d become friends, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman.

A.B: A lot of women considered part of the Pictures Generation were also involved in No Wave. Barbara Ess is very overlooked; a pinhole photographer and Pictures Generation figure who was also a No Wave musician, playing with Branca and that crowd. There was a real crossover. The Pictures Generation artists reappropriating images and text, Barbara Kruger doing brilliant feminist work.  Richard Prince would be at our shows constantly. There were also SoHo bands considered rivals to our Lower East Side and East Village scene, upset that some of them weren’t included on the No New York album. A bit of rivalry around that record, but we were really all in the same scene.

H.B.B: I want to talk about that. You began working with Brian Eno, as an assistant. And it’s during that series of performances at Artists Space, in May 1978, during which Contortions performs alongside DNA, that Eno decided to bring ten bands together on a single album devoted to No Wave, which was produced in the summer of the same year.

Adele: When Eno arrived in New York, he was friendly with Steve Maas, who’d created the Mudd Club with Anya Phillips. Eno was visiting the Mudd Club often in the evenings and asked Steve to suggest someone to be his assistant. I was suggested, somehow, and started working with him. At the time we were just about to do the Artists Space gigs that week, and I told him he had to come see what we were doing. He was really lovely to work with; conversational, unguarded, extremely creative, and genuinely taken with the way we confronted the audience. When he recorded us, he just left the tape rolling. That’s most apparent on « I Can’t Stand Myself », our cover of the James Brown song, which we played as a warm-up. We’d never really performed it before, just loved it and listened to it constantly. It was our first time in a studio, and we were so excited that he knew to keep the tape rolling. He came into the recording room afterward and said, “Wow, that was amazing. I recorded you.” I think that track is probably the most telling of who we were in that moment. 

H.B.B: Eno had understood that the movement could only be grasped in its live dimension – the movement being tied to the immediacy of physical performance and the very presence of an audience. And, it should be mentioned, it’s one of the rare compilation albums featuring so many women artists.

A.D: I agree. 

H.B.B: And then there’s cinema. I love the scene in « Beauty Becomes the Beast » by Vivienne Dick. You look so youthful, almost childlike, and the way you look at the other woman is incredibly tender. You are learning from her, almost. Nan in the background, taking pictures. And later you appear in Lizzie Borden’s Born in Flames. I’m curious about the role cinema played in the No Wave scene, and in the broader discourse of women artists at the time through that same medium. 

A.B: There were so many women making films then. Sarah Driver, Jim Jarmusch’s partner, was making beautiful films. There was a real interest in stasis, in the manner of Bresson or Ozu, setting the camera up and letting things happen without directing the viewer’s eye. Sarah’s films are beautiful that way, and Jim used the same approach. We were one of the most photographed scenes in that era; compelling, image-wise, and there was constant cross-collaboration. Filmmakers would see you on stage and say, I want you in my film. James Nares, now Jamie Nares, started out playing guitar in the Contortions and became a filmmaker and brilliant artist. Guitarists were picking up cameras, people who’d never played music were picking up keyboards, like I did. That fluidity, and the scene’s general image-consciousness, fed directly into the cinematic side. You could get cheap cameras on Canal Street for a few dollars, so equipment was affordable, and everyone shared resources – Super 8 was cheap, 16mm film if you had the means. So many women made films: Kiki Smith made « Cave Girls », Lizzie Borden made « Born in Flames », Sarah Driver, Bette Gordon… It’s strange to think that today we all carry these incredibly powerful little instruments capable of making films, and people aren’t using them that way.

H.B.B: I think the difference is that in the seventies people would gather physically around these tools and say, let’s make something. Today we’re alienated by the phones themselves; people don’t quite trust it as an artistic tool, even though it clearly can be one. I’ve seen extraordinary films and music made on iPhones. 

A.D: It’s a curious thing. Alienated by the phones yet bound and tied to them. Our sadists.

H.B.B: When you left The Contortions, you founded an all-female band, Bloods, with whom you toured many cities in Europe, including Paris. Can you tell me about the Parisian no-wave scene, or even the French scene more broadly; who were the key players, what were the meeting places? To go back to the beginning of the interview, you point out that punk was influenced by radical French literature from the turn of the century – Rimbaud, etc.; but how did punk then manifest itself within that same culture, in parallel to what was happening in New York, and what were the links and conversations between the two? Have you seen the films made by Pierre Clementi? He is, somehow, the only one who comes to mind. 

A.B: Pierre was extraordinary. The only film of his I’ve seen is « In the Shadow of the Blue Rascal ». Whenever I think of him, I imagine his toe sticking through that black sock in « Belle du Jour ». I was not very familiar with the Parisian No Wave scene, if there was one. Lizzy Mercier Decloux always comes to mind. She incorporated some of what we were doing; cut-ups, taking pieces and reassembling them, something a lot of No Wave artists did, influenced by Burroughs and Gysin, though originally it was Tristan Tzara who started that.

H.B.B: Dada!

A.B: I was enamored with French and Italian cinema; Pasolini, Bresson, we were all watching those films together. American cinema, which had a great run in the seventies, had essentially died out by 1977. At that point our scene was drawing on the French surrealists, the Italian neorealists, and even the Baader-Meinhof Gang, the Brigate Rosse. We weren’t especially political, but we were trying to embrace a kind of Marxist thrust in our work.

Hugo: Well, you played a club run by Kippenberger in Berlin, and I think one could argue Berlin, or Cologne, or Düsseldorf, were really the places where the exchange between New York and Europe happened, in terms of No Wave. Some would say London, but London mostly co-opted punk as an aesthetic, turning it into a fashion movement with Vivienne Westwood – beautiful in its own right, but different from what punk actually was. The core of punk as a radical mode of discourse, in Europe, was really in Germany.

A.B: I agree. We were doing film, writing, and they were doing the same thing in Berlin. Rosa von Praunheim, Ulrike Ottinger, whose films are extraordinary. Kippenberger had this club, yes, where we all gathered, mixing painting, film, everything. There were the Junge Wilde painters; Rainier Fetting, Luciano Castelli, Salomé. There was Malaria!, a brilliant all-female No Wave band, who actually flirted, again, with Nazi aesthetics themselves, in the gray uniforms they’d wear on stage.

H.B.B: In the context of German expression, this is different. 

A.B: Yes. It made more sense coming from the Germans. 

H.B.B: German history, today still, is inherently silent. A large reason being that many people who survived the camps didn’t talk about it afterward. Chantal Akerman spoke about the silence in her family, and therefore in her cinema. And Germans who had collaborated, or were active Nazis, often didn’t share that with their children; it was a source of shame, and kept to themselves. That’s why a filmmaker like Fassbinder, openly gay and punk in a way, staging a kinky, skinny German gay man in leather reminiscent of an SS uniform, feels genuinely confrontational toward his own history and guilt – completely different from some Sid Vicious wearing a Nazi T-shirt with no relationship to that history at all. You feel that tension in German culture, still, today.

A.B: I remember going to Berlin and asking people like Bettina Köster, the lead singer of Malaria!, what was happening during the war, through her parents. Silence. It wouldn’t be discussed, but it would surface subtly in the work; like you mentioned, the uniforms in Malaria!, which I also read as Weimar-ish. It really was interesting, and somewhat obvious why, that silence. 

H.B.B: German culture is psychoanalytic in that way. The silence is always surfacing; in painting, in music, in cinema. It’s heavy. Being in Germany today is heavy, still. The land of evil. 

A.B: And it was too, in 1978. 

H.B.B: Coming back to the book; in the turn of the 1980s, punk begins to dissipate – Richard Hell turns to poetry, others die, drugs claim many, and AIDS happens. A new generation emerges, some of whom have seen your shows. Sonic Youth is the clearest example of a band that drew from punk and No Wave affinities, and industrial music as well. And then there’s Madonna, who many people forget came out of exactly this milieu.

A.B: Madonna and I were in the same social scene, and when she first started performing at Danceteria, we were a little shocked, honestly, expecting something more edgy. She was pulling up her skirt, dancing, singing « Everybody get up and dance ». So we thought, hmmm, okay. Swans was another band very influenced by what we were doing. There was quite a crop of bands that came after, but as you said, AIDS took a real toll, and heroin is the great equalizer for any scene too provocative for the powers that be. It happened during the Black Arts Movement in Harlem, too, this flooding of heroin into scenes that were getting too dangerous to the status quo. Heroin killed a lot of people I knew, people I was close to. Between AIDS, drugs, and the survivors who turned what they’d absorbed into serious art careers, we all eventually went our own ways.

H.B.B: How does it feel writing this book now? If I remember correctly, you mention having tried to write a memoir once or twice before. One was stolen, one was lost. This one closes the curse.

A.B: It really does. I’ve written a couple of other memoirs; amongst them one called « Peter and the Wolves », about the Cleveland scene and Peter Laughner. People don’t really know the richness of that scene, and again, the French influence – Peter played guitar in Pere Ubu, a hugely influential band, and I learned about Baudelaire and so many French poets through him. I also have to mention that Patti Smith is underestimated for her influence on that scene, and on the post-No Wave and punk scene that followed.

H.B.B: She’s the starting point.

A.B: She was, especially for women, because she destroyed the assumption that you had to look conventionally feminine to be a poet or a singer in a rock band. She broke that open and inspired so many women not to play the gendered role. We were so anti-capitalist, so against commodification in that moment, and I think it matters to speak to young women today, too. The messages girls are given right now are disastrous. Macabre, really. Any woman who’s had the freedom not to conform to those strictures needs to speak out, write books, make music.

Adele Bertei was a founding member of no-wave musical insurrectionists The Contortions, and a personal assistant to Brian Eno. Bertei was lead singer for the Bloods, which is considered the first out, queer, all women-rock band. She has appeared in several indie films, most notably as a lead character Lizzie Borden’s « Born in Flames ». She has toured with, written songs for, and recorded as a backing vocalist for artists as diverse as Tears for Fears, Thomas Dolby, Sandra Bernhard, Culture Club, Scritti Politti, and Whitney Houston. Her duet with Thomas Dolby on « Hyperactive! » was a top twenty hit in the UK, as was her single with Jellybean Benitez, « Just a Mirage ». She is the author of « No New York: No Wave and the Women who Shaped the Scene « (2026), « Peter and the Wolves » (2020), « Why Labelle Matters » (2021), and « Twist: Tales of a Queer Girlhood » (2023).