Adele Bertei
No New York: A Memoir of No Wave and the Women Who Shaped the Scene (Book)
In 1975 a young queer singer from Cleveland meets photographer Nan Goldin — an encounter that will lead them to New York’s bombed-out downtown, where something unprecedented is brewing. At Max’s Kansas City and CBGBs, in derelict lofts and underground clubs, a generation of visionary women artists is rewriting the rules of creativity, sexuality, and power.
Adele Bertei didn’t just witness the No Wave explosion—she ignited it. As acetone organist for the Contortions and Brian Eno’s assistant, she…
Twist: An American Girl, A Memoir (Book)
From iconoclastic writer and musician Adele Bertei comes a wholly original hero's journey that wages war on the cliché of the “misery memoir.” Set in a 1960s and ’70s American neighborhood rife with poverty and violence, fatherless Irish mothers and Italian mobsters, and women crucified into madness by misogyny, Bertei speaks through her electrically alive avatar Maddie Twist to flip the victim script. Through her unshakable belief in imagination, poetry, music, and community, she transforms tra…
Peter and the Wolves
Adele Bertei is a poet, writer, actor, performer, singer, songwriter, and filmmaker. She entered the downtown New York scene of the late 1970s as organist for musical insurrectionists, the Contortions. Bertei appeared in lead roles in several indie films, notably Lizzie Borden’s Born in Flames, and has toured with, written songs for, and recorded as a vocalist for artists as diverse as Tears for Fears, Sandra Bernhard, Culture Club, Scritti Politti, Whitney Houston, and Lydia Lunch. Bertei’s fir…