Cult cabaret artist reveals her hopes for a cultural revolution – and that she and husband Neil Gaiman have been granted five-year working visas for Australia

Amanda Palmer has called the past few months in the United States “a total shit show”, but there’s one silver lining she’s looking forward to in president Trump’s America: a renaissance of political art.

Speaking at a press conference during Woodford Folk festival in rural Queensland – where she announced she and husband, the author Neil Gaiman, had just been granted five-year working visas for Australia – the Dresden Doll, solo artist and cult cabaret icon invoked the flourishing of art and culture in Weimar Germany as proof that “frightening political climates make for really good, real, authentic art”.

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“It’s been a really scary time in America. I don’t know how it’s felt over here [in Australia] for the past few months, but it’s a total shit show over there. Especially if you’re an artist, a woman, a minority, gay – anything but a rich white man – it’s really very scary,” she said.



“But being an optimist ... there is this part of me – especially having studied Weimar Germany extensively – I’m like, ‘This is our moment.’ Donald Trump is going to make punk rock great again. We’re all going to crawl down staircases into basements and speakeasies and make amazing satirically political art.

“If the political climate keeps getting uglier, the art will have to answer. We will have to fight. It’s already happening – the artists in my tribes have been like, ‘Alright. This is not good.’ We are sharpening our knives for a large buffet.”

Palmer, who is currently in Australia on a stripped-back acoustic tour, also announced that she and Gaiman have just been granted distinguished talent visas by the Australian government, which will allow them to travel freely between the US and Australia for the next five years. The pair will mostly be based in Melbourne.

“We started this [visa application] process long before the spectre of Donald Trump, before his orange head was even a speck on the horizon of our lives,” she said.

“We have a brand new baby, who’s a year old, and I’ve been looking around at the world, the political climate, the art scenes, my friends, our whole situation, trying to figure out where we should land. And Australia does look pretty tasty.”

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While Palmer has a close relationship with Australia (she has toured here about half a dozen times over the past 10 years, solo and with her band the Dresden Dolls), she said she would be sad to miss the Women’s March on Washington, a nationwide day of protest taking place the day after Trump’s inauguration.

“I actually feel quite guilty that I’m not going to be in the States on January 20. I feel like I really should be there in Washington with the millions of other women who are going to give the giant finger to the orange man. But I’ll do what I can from over here.”

• Woodford Folk festival is on until 1 January 2017