Miki Berenyi can recall with crystal clarity the day she told Terence Trent D’Arby to take a hike.
It was August 1995, and the entire Britpop scene had uprooted from Camden, in north London, to Páirc Uí Chaoimh, in Cork, for the Féile 95 festival. Under dazzling blue skies, a who’s who of scenesters descended on the creaking GAA temple. Blur, Elastica, Paul Weller, The Stone Roses and, playing on the Saturday, between Sleeper and Reef, Berenyi’s band, Lush.
“It was very Camden. I remember sitting in the hotel bar afterwards, and it was all kind of, you know, Paul Weller sailing by, members of Elastica and Blur,” she says from her home in London. “And that was when I had that encounter.”
Berenyi details it in her gripping autobiography, Fingers Crossed: How Music Saved Me from Success, which appeared in 2022. “Backstage Terence Trent D’Arby is in the trailer opposite and his assistant pops into our Portakabin with the news that Mr D’Arby is requesting my presence,” she writes. “He’s literally sitting on the steps not 10 yards away looking straight at me. I tell her that, if he wants to speak to me, he can get off his arse and come over himself.”
The book was a different sort of rock memoir, detailing not only Berenyi’s adventures at the fringes of Britpop (amid its nosedive into toxic misogyny) but also her colourful upbringing as the daughter of a former Bond-girl mother from Tokyo and a womanising-journalist father from Hungary who would bring his daughter to nightclubs as an aid to picking up women.
She also wrote about the sexual abuse to which she was subjected by her paternal grandmother – who had lived the high life during the Nazi occupation – and her teenage experiences with eating disorders and self-harm. It is a moving, often challenging read – and its warm reception led directly to her new musical project, Miki Berenyi Trio, who are about to release their beautifully gauzy debut album, Tripla.
“The band sort of started from doing a book tour. You know, ‘Oh, can you play a couple of Lush tracks?’ So that’s what we actually started doing it as,” she says of the trio, which includes her partner, KJ McKillop, on guitar, and Oliver Cherer, on bass. “It kind of gained this momentum. In order to play live we thought, Well, okay, we need songs, right? So that’s what we were writing for.”
In her 50s, Berenyi has no interest in sounding like the shy young songwriter who formed Lush with her schoolfriend Emma Anderson in 1987. Bonding over a shared passion for the Thompson Twins, they had clocked up effervescent cult hits such as For Love before reluctantly going Britpop with the gobby smash Ladykillers (about the Red Hot Chili Pepper Anthony Kiedis trying to take Berenyi to a strip club and an encounter with Matt Sharp of Weezer) before imploding in tragedy in October 1996 with the death of Chris Acland, the band’s drummer.
But fans of her earlier work are likely to adore the new album (whose title is Hungarian for Triple). It is steeped in her familiar haunting vocals, with gorgeously shimmering riffs that hark back to the shoegaze scene with which Lush were synonymous.
The lyrics are often deeply personal. Vertigo is about the 4am sleeplessness that can be a feature of middle age; Big I Am rages quietly against toxic masculinity on the internet (“Feeling like a nobody/ Throws his weight around”).
“It is quite difficult at this age to write about things without sounding like a f**king pensioner, if you know what I mean,” she says. “But, weirdly, when I think about things like social media, or green issues, or all of these things, they are described as young people’s concerns. But the internet has sent some people I know completely batshit. That is not restricted to young people at all.”
In her memoir Berenyi emerges as a sort of Cassandra of Britpop. It was obvious to her that the scene was headed to a dark place – but nobody paid any attention. In one horrible sequence at a London members’ club, she recalls a well-known comedian “sweeping his eyes around my body” while a rock star “wondered aloud” when they were going to get around to having sex in the toilets.
How far British rock had fallen from the early 1990s: in some cases it was as if pub rockers now thought they were the second coming of John Lennon.
“When you open up that independent music world, which had its own ethos and its own counterculture, to ‘What we’re aiming for is getting on TFI Friday’ – Chris Evans’s TV version of a lad mag – ‘and we want to get daytime-radio play and blah blah blah’,” she says, “that means knocking off all the interesting edges from yourself. You’re playing a whole different game.
“And then half the people who are playing your music are not really interested in the music. They’re interested in the celebrity and the success, the ‘Oh, we’ve got Blur in the studio’, and long-lens photos of Damon and Justine [the Blur and Elastica singers, Britpop’s reigning power couple] on holiday. An entirely different world.”
The problem with all bands is how you navigate the bumps in the road. Some bands, it draws them closer together. Unfortunately, with us, it absolutely exploded us apart
— Miki Berenyi on the demise of Lush
Lush came to an end following Acland’s death by suicide, weeks before they were due to head out on tour. But the band remained beloved, and, with shoegaze making a comeback, the three surviving members reunited in 2016 for comeback gigs and a new EP.
Things did not work out as planned. Berenyi and Anderson, whose dynamic was rocky at the best of times, had grown farther apart over the years. In Acland’s absence, the chemistry was different, and after a final show at Manchester Academy in October that year they bowed out for good.
There is little hope of reconciliation. The pair no longer speak, possibly because Anderson didn’t appreciate being portrayed as competitive with Berenyi in the latter’s memoir. Berenyi, of course, regrets that the comeback concluded as it did, but when you’ve been around the block a few times you learn to let things go. And in any case, reliving the glory days of Britpop is not a priority.
“It didn’t end well, I’m not going to lie. But the thing is, for most of it, it was actually really good. It was genuinely exciting. Way better than I thought it would be. I took a long time to make up my mind, not just because of any personality issues but because it had been a long time since I played music. I didn’t know if it was something that I was even equipped to do any more.
“And, actually, I discovered that once you’re back in the saddle it all kind of comes back, and it’s actually really good fun. The problem with all bands is how you navigate the bumps in the road. Some bands, it draws them closer together. Unfortunately, with us, it absolutely exploded us apart.”
She isn’t sure how she would get on if Lush were starting in 2025. Social media can be 10 times as cruel as anything the now defunct music press might have said in 1992.
[ Brett Anderson: ‘I was trying to look at myself as a specimen’Opens in new window ]
“People have more of a voice. If you have a shitty experience or you don’t like what someone’s written, you can go right out there and correct the record. At the same time, you are much more vulnerable, in that people can be incredibly hostile and nasty and target people. Also, it’s very difficult to get any traction. There aren’t the channels to elevate you. You don’t get much help. There’s a lot of grunt work that you have to do.”
Success in music today is often down to a roll of the dice, she says.
“It just relies on luck, like something going viral. And then, of course, in the wake of something going viral, there’s about 1,000 PR companies that try to copy that. I’ve resisted going on TikTok, because I’m already on four bloody platforms, and the thought of having to film videos to explain what I’m doing is a step too far.”
Despite her misgivings about the music industry, her new project has given Berenyi a renewed sense of enthusiasm. It’s just like those early days when she and Anderson and the rest of the gang would pile into a van and play whatever venue would have them. In the most exciting way possible, she’s gone full circle.
“There came a point in the 1990s where I just found that music scene completely unrecognisable. And so much of the reason for me even getting into music was to be a part of the scene that existed – bands and live shows and the full 360-degree experience of it. Coming back to it on quite a grassroots level, just piling into a car and playing a gig in Bedford or something, it actually feels a bit more like it did at the beginning.”
Tripla by Miki Berenyi Trio is released by Bella Union on Friday, April 4th
