Katrina Fox chats with Diamanda Galas

"I think that eventually I won't be exclusively heterosexual by any means. I might go the way of Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday and become a full-on fuckin' dyke," Diamanda Galas proclaimed in an interview in a 1989 book called Angry Women, one which she's still proud of today. "You know what, honey? The women love it, the men hate it and I'm just like - too fucking bad!" she laughs down the phone from her home in New York on the eve of her Australian national tour. The woman who once called for the formation of lesbian gangs to castrate rapists is bringing her new show, Guilty, Guilty, Guilty to Sydney, in which she offers her interpretation of a collection of homicidal love songs by artists as diverse as Edith Piaf and John Lee Hooker.

Aids, dementia and genocide are just some of the themes of Galas's other works, which have seen her earn the title Diva of Darkness and other similar crowns. With a three and a half octave range, Galas uses her voice to channel the angst, pain and anger of the oppressed, whether they be women, gay people or ethnic groups, something she admits is "cathartic" and keeps her sane.

"When I'm able to perform my work - just like anyone else who has a job, I'm fine," she says. "When you feel that your life is over for some reason or other and you have no place on the planet in the universe, that contributes to a state of extreme - to put it mildly - instability, a sense of paralysis and a craziness. There's these books that describe artists who've gone through parts of their extreme bipolar phases and when they were able to create and when they weren't, and I'm like, I need to ask the question: Did they have a cheque in the mail in the last four months? I bet you when they were going through their really depressive moments, their fucking money ran out. Because I'll tell you what - unpublished we are dead and I don't care what anyone says, financial misery definitely does not inspire the desire to create.

"Last year I had a very big tour in the US that was planned and suddenly it was cancelled by an inept imbecile and that put many people aside from myself into a very bad position, and you have to fight very hard not to lose it under those circumstances and I fought against him and learned a tremendous amount by doing it. I definitely believe if you don't fight, you can really, really go under. My work is very cathartic because you see these things you can't control and you try to control a lot of them but you can't control them all and they can really drive you crazy."

And Galas knows about crazy - her first performances were to patients in a psychiatric institution and she's spent time in one herself. "I have to keep busy. I got a cat more than a year ago and when you know you're really, really crazy is when you look at the cat and say 'What are you looking at?' And you think, well, she's looking at you who's sitting in the middle of the room completely paralysed and you'd better move fast because you're going to hang yourself on that chair by the window - and when I speak like this, I'm not speaking casually. Really, a state of motion is imperative for those of us who think too much."

In the 1980s Galas became the poster girl for Aids activism through her trilogy The Masque of the Red Death. The responses from the gay community at the time were mixed. "Many homosexual men have responded very strongly both positively and negatively to my work," she says. "There have many who have been encouraged by it, there have been people who have felt many different ways, and I can understand those different ways because of going through an extremely arduous treatment for hepatitis C myself. There are times where you really don't want to hear about someone doing work, artistic work or otherwise, about that issue - you just want them to be quiet, you don't want to hear about it, you want to be left alone to go through your treatment in silence and talk and listen to anything else, any other subject. So I can't tell anyone that they should like or want or otherwise to deal with my work. I choose subjects that are not necessarily popular." Like murdering men and cutting them up with knives, which was the theme of her 1994 album Sporting Life, in which she sings lines such as "I don't like him. Let's kill him". Or 1995's terrifying Litanies of Satan, an invocation of the work of French poet Baudelaire in which Galas uses every bit of her vocal dexterity to sound as if she's speaking in tongues and channelling demons.

While Galas admits her greatest fear is being censored and not being allowed to perform, she refuses to stay silent about the issues she's passionate about, and now in her 50s, still shows no signs of relenting. "It's an issue I have discussed since the very moment before I was thrown out of the artist's colony in Italy recently for that very inability to have mellowed over the years and in fact to have got much more litigious in the sense that this is the law - this is right, this is wrong, this is the way it's going to be - and if you people are not going to speak for yourselves, I will speak up and we'll see what the consequences are," she says. "But you know, I find that when you get older, you either become sharp-minded or less able, as in my case, to be willing to put up with garbage. You become aware of mortality to an extreme point - you see many friends die. And you see [lesbian serial killer] Aileen Wuornos and there she was in her 50s and was killing those guys - and I'm like, well yeah, you reach critical mass in your fucking 50s and you're like, over it. It's like, uh-uh, no more, bye bye, bam."

While both men and women may find her attractive, Galas is not cut out for traditional family life. "I would certainly love it if some rich man said I would like to marry you and give you lots of money and you can sign this but you don't have to spend the night at my house, or maybe just once a week - if it was about money, I would do it," she says "But I wouldn't do it otherwise because I cannot imagine, other than my female cat, having anyone else in my house. I couldn't abide it - the person would be thrown from the windows."

So, with no men in the picture, is she a "full-on fuckin' dyke" yet? "Unfortunately, no!" she shrieks. "I am so disappointed - I'm tremendously disappointed it hasn't happened. But I'll let you know."

www.diamandagalas.com

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