Marlene Marder, Guitarist for Liliput, Dies at 61
By JON PARELESMAY 19, 2016
Marlene Marder, whose blunt guitar chords drove the songs of the pioneering four-woman Swiss post-punk band originally called Kleenex and then Liliput, died on Sunday. She was 61.
Her death was announced by her record company, Kill Rock Stars, which did not say where she died or specify the cause.
Kleenex was formed in Zurich in 1978, during the early, arty, do-it-yourself years of the punk movement as it spread across Europe. The band started as the project of two of Ms. Marder’s friends, the bassist Klaudia Schiff and the drummer Lislot Ha, with two men.
At that band’s first show, the audience wanted to hear more but the guitarist refused to return and play the songs again. Ms. Marder, who had learned her friends’ songs, took over on guitar and stayed there.
The band’s initial four-song EP, released in Switzerland, made its way to the English disc jockey John Peel, who championed the band on radio. A contract with the British label Rough Trade soon followed. As the band drew notice, Kimberly-Clark, owners of the Kleenex trademark, forced Kleenex to change its name before releasing its debut album, “Liliput.”
Ms. Marder and Ms. Schiff remained the band’s core members through changes in singers and drummers. After making a second album, the band dissolved in 1983 when its lead singer, Astrid Spirit, became pregnant and decided not to tour.
Liliput’s sound — akin to that of the era’s post-punk English bands like the Slits, the Raincoats and X-Ray Spex — was skeletal, aggressive and sometimes herky-jerky, suddenly switching speeds and riffs. The band had a few songs in its native Swiss-German but sang mostly in English. Some songs used phrases picked out of English dictionaries or nonsense syllables yelped as background vocals, but others confronted violence and anger with taunting confidence. It was a sound that would echo through the riot grrrl movement and beyond.
“It was the language of people so full of resentment and desire, playfulness and fear, that they simply cannot keep quiet — discovering there was no reason why they should,” the critic Greil Marcus wrote in liner notes to a 1993 Liliput collection.
Ms. Marder stayed in music after Liliput broke up. In 1985 she published “The Diary of the Guitarist Marlene Marder, Kleenex/Liliput.” She ran a record store, and from 1989 to 1992 she performed on weekends with a hard-rock band, Danger Mice. She also ran a booking agency and later worked for the Worldwide Fund for Nature.
Marlene Marder was born in Zurich in 1954. There was no immediate information on survivors.
Ms. Marder oversaw reissues as her band was rediscovered in the 1990s by fans like Kurt Cobain of Nirvana. He named “anything by Kleenex” among his Top 50 albums.
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