Artist behind the famous image on the cover of the Buzzcocks album Orgasm Addict (1977), Linder Sterling is only now starting to get the recognition she deserves. A product of the Manchester punk scene, Linder has been steadily building her diverse artistic output, including performance, collage, photography and film. And 2006 is looking like her year. A quality monograph by JRP Editions has recently been published, she participated in this year’s Tate Triennial, and there’s a spate of exhibitions showing in Europe and New York, including this one, curated by Jean-Max Colard for the brand new gallery space, LH.

It seems as if something’s happening for you at the moment.
Yes, it’s a good time.

Tell us about the work you’ve chosen to exhibit in Paris.
There’s a series of pieces based on the colour of the Ladurée packaging, huge silkscreens which been hand gilded in gold leaf. The printing is a very mechanical process, but the actual gilding is working against that. The work is a commission from the British Council in Prague. Being a Communist country, Prague never had any pornography, but I happened to find a tiny little pocket calender from the 1970s in a flea market. There was a brief political softening in Prague then, and someone obviously thought, ‘I know, I’ll make a pornographic calendar’. Prague had a fantastic relationship with Paris anyway, with that amazing architectural echoing between the two cities. And the buildings in Prague are now being renovated to their original colours, and the colours are very much the Ladurée colours. There’s a resonance between Prague and Paris, a cultural exchange between the two cities.

How much do you feel is your life and work tied to Manchester?
Yes, in some ways it was very tied to Manchester, though I left a few years ago. And before I left I really wanted to document the city, I think when you know you’re going to leave somewhere you really want to make a record, so I did lots of photography there and filmmaking. I’ve often joked that one day there’ll be an Ian Curtis boulevard, but I think they’re actually going to propose an Ian Curtis avenue or something. I don’t know how I feel about it. I find it really hard to evaluate just how important that period is. It is quite mythologised now. And I can’t be bothered evaluating it, let’s move on.

You’re associated with the punk movement.
All that history is now quite monopolised by just a few voices, a few people who have elected themselves as spokesmen, literally, of that generation, and I think it’s really important that there’s room for other voices to be heard, each story is quite unique and quite fascinating.

How do you feel about that period now?
In some ways it feels almost archaic now, especially when you see original documentary footage of the punk days. And now in Britain, you have almost cartoon punks, young punks coming up now, they’re kind of like a cartoon collage, with their black hair and tartan trousers… I think to myself, I invented you, you’re my weird grandchildren. Like all movements within popular culture, you get this residue that goes on decades after the event, of people adopting certain dress and certain music. And because of the book, I had to really go back and think about my crazy cultural origins, and see if there were any trajectories going through, and I think there are. I think that period in culture was kind of like a crack through to a fairly new territory. I think it was a very short-lived period.

It’s a real youth movement, and associated with your youth too.
It’s quite odd, I grew up in Liverpool, just as the Beatles, the whole – it was called Mersey Beat - all that Liverpool sound, was developing. My life has been in parallel to the history of pop music. I was born two years before Elvis Presley’s Heartbreak Hotel, which was essentially the beginning of pop. It’s quite interesting how my generation, our lives are parallel to the development of pop. As we age, one listens to pop music and thinks, what’s the ultimate destination of this culture? Will it also die, because so much is to do with youth, culture’s obsessed with age, the older generation are dinosaurs, everyone’s obsessed about being young, it’s quite fascist in that sense.

Tell us about your band Ludus.
In Manchester, most of the bands were all male. Factory Records was very, wonderfully, male, and then you had this little label, New Hormones, which was all funded from the Buzzcocks royalties, that had more the misfits, the people who didn’t quite know where they belonged. But I spose in the late 70s, it didn’t seem too big a step to go from making photo-montage to thinking about making songs. Everybody I knew was making songs. It seemed like a small step to investigate the possibilities of how you’d work in sound. I suppose there was acceleration then in the culture, one could wonder what it would be like to find musicians and make songs, and within the week be doing it.

That’s punk.
I think so, I think that sense of urgency, and maybe with hindsight, one looks back and thinks that there was a sense that that speed couldn’t have gone forever. That slight sense of urgency, ‘Well, what are you waiting for, just do it.’ And that was very punk. And maybe that element of punk has stayed with me even now. That, just do it, get on with it. If you haven’t got a publisher, or if you haven’t got a gallery, it doesn’t matter, just make the work and then worry about how you get the work out. That aspect has stayed with me.

You’ve had a very diverse output, do you have a clear idea of your identity as an artist
I think only recently there’s been a kind of softening in British culture, where one can be accepted for having had many areas of practice, only in the last 5 years maybe, that’s really beginning to happen. But I think over my life, I tried to make myself palatable, So at certain periods, I’d think, ‘I’m really going to concentrate on photography, because that’s what’s really interesting right now, and that’s what really intrigues me’, and what happens I suppose is that the editing of the self goes on. Now it’s very fashionable to say yes I made a film, I do drawings, I’m a DJ, we’re quite used to that, but the reality of a life lived like that is that you’re often penalised, because you don’t just do one thing, you’re inconsistent. Again, this book has been a very interesting adventure, a chance to put the story straight. I tried to put every element in, but not let anything dominate, and at the same time to have odd little bits and pieces… the Factory Egg Timer’s in there, You’re kind of telling people a story, and at the same time, leaving some little images unexplained as well.

Female identity has been a constant in your work.
When I was 16 I lived in a tiny mining village near in the north of England, and I remember I found Germaine Greer’s book The Female Eunuch and it absolutely just changed my consciousness, and it changed the way I lived my life, though I didn’t understand half her vocabulary… When she came to England in the mid 60s, she was very funny, she was very witty, she was very sexual, very beautiful, I think she was amazingly beautiful, I’d never seen a woman like that before in my life. I remember seeing her on TV and wondering, who is this goddess? I think for me as a young teenager growing up in this mining village, it was a revelation. Some people discovered God, but I discovered Germaine Greer. She was very important to me. And the importance of the book… because if you live in a tiny village, a book is like a lifeline. I suppose it’s about finding the right book at the right age, it gives you that sense of vision, you have some notion that there’s another life out there.

You’ve worked a lot with Morrissey, there’s rumours that you’ve been lovers…
There’s lots of gossip. Yes, we met 30 years ago this October, it’s a long time, most friendships don’t endure that long. Our lives very markedly different, maybe it’s the difference that’s made the relationship; that very lack of parity makes for a very diverse friendship.

I imagine there’s been some amazing times.
I think that period when I was photographing Morrissey, on those early tours in the early 90s, when he’d left the Smiths and was re-emerging. When you’re using a camera, you’re quite invisible anyway, and can have that sense of being able to very acutely witness something, and at the same time be quite removed from it… I think seeing that level of world hysteria, witnessing those moments, like when he filled Madison Square Gardens.

Who are some artists or musicians that you admire?
There’s so many. I always try and find out about really obscure female artists, surprise, surprise, because most information is about male artists. I like French female surrealists like Leonora Fini, you can’t still get a book in English about her work. It was a very fertile period, the men were so self-assured and flamboyant. I tend to return to that period of female Surrealists, there’s something there, even though I’m very aware of contemporary art practice. But I get inspiration from everywhere, from film, from popular culture. I’m very interested in what gets thrown away, with what’s ignored, with what’s not elevated,

Do you identify with the misfit?
Yeah, with not fitting in. Because that happens to be my experience. There are always people who just always absolutely know what they want to do, who are absolutely focused. I was never that clear. It’s like they have a menu and can choose and I felt like I was never given the menu, I could never quite find what it was. People would say, ‘well I want to be that’, but I wanted to be that, and that, as well. Maybe it’s like life as montage… My life as a montage.