Raunchy electro-rapper Peaches might like to dress up in plastic suits with a phallic strap-on attached when she sings on stage.

She might name albums Fatherf***** and Impeach My Bush.

And Top Of The Pops might have pulled one of her performances from its schedule for being too racy. But she’s keen to stress she’s quite normal.

“I make breakfast every day,” she says, when I ask where Peaches ends and the Jewish girl christened Merrill Nisker in Toronto, Canada, 40 years ago starts. “I fart,” she adds.

Peaches is an extension of Nisker and a way for the hotpant-wearing, mullet-loving siren to express herself in front of people.

She made a name for herself as a leading voice of the grimy electroclash sound – you might recognise the melody, or name, of her crossover hit F*** The Pain Away – after moving to Berlin in the early 2000s.

“What is good about it is when I come back it’s a big place for me to hide away or get involved if I want. It’s not London or Paris or New York, or somewhere you have to walk as fast as everyone else otherwise you’re left behind.”

But before then, in her 20s, she studied theatre at university in Canada to become a theatre director. A new one-woman film she’s created – “an anti-jukebox musical”, Peaches Does Herself – suggests she’s turning her back on music.

“Music will always be involved. I’ve always been involved in other things. Music is the most immediate form of expression. It was a great place to start.”

She started there because she feared she might have a heart attack by the age of 30 if she had to work with actors.

“The way I was working it seemed like I was becoming a dictator instead of building creatively. Yelling at people is not cool. That’s not what I wanted, so I fell into music, quite literally.”

Taking control

She loves being her own director because, well, who’d fancy their chances bossing the banshee around?

Even if she thinks theatre is always a couple of steps behind music, Peaches Does Herself is immediate. Originally the film was going to be a “stripped-down” stage version of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Jesus Christ Superstar for Berlin’s Hebbel Theatre. Peaches as Jesus did not go down well with Webber’s German colleagues. In a statement at the time she wrote, “PEACHES CHRIST SUPERSTAR CRUCIFIED BEFORE OPENING NIGHT!”

So the aggressively sexy singer decided to do what she knows best: herself. “I was thinking about the history of burlesque – Marlene Dietrich, David Bowie, all these things in Berlin. “But what I have created is my own performance world from all my experiences as Peaches. Why don’t I answer the question, ‘Why do I hate jukebox musicals so much?’

“They take songs and then build a whole different story around them. I wanted to use the music and build around music and iconography – and I knew most about me.”

She’ll be in Brighton to perform a full show after a screening of the film. It’s a rock opera with a narrative and music in place of dialogue, filmed in front of a live audience, in the mould of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Peaches likes to question stereotypes and prejudice about gender. Prepare to have your eyes opened. “I hope I can open minds. It’s not an offensive movie. Yes, you see a full-frontal naked beautiful transsexual, but so what – is that person murdering anybody?”