Miki Berenyi

What a thrill to meet the excellent Miki Berenyi this evening! She was in town to talk about her brilliant but sometimes harrowing autobiography ‘Fingers Crossed: How Music Saved Me From Success’. What an entertaining raconteur she is! 

The book covers her career as singer/guitarist/songwriter with the band Lush who were fixtures on the indie scene for a decade or so in the 80s/90s. She’s more or less a contemporary of mine and this is very much the music of my twenties - and still very important to me, of course. Here’s the classic ‘Ladykillers’ https://youtu.be/Iedz_x6Hlhw 

After Lush, Miki worked as a magazine copy editor but several years before a return to music with a somewhat troubled Lush reunion tour followed by the formation of Piroshka who’ve made two great albums. Here’s ‘What’s Next?’ which really speaks to me about the current state of this country… www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNoBBaxfkqE 

She’ll be touring with a trio in support of Gang of Four this autumn. 

The book also gives equal time to her pre-Lush life, growing up with a distinct lack of stability in the far from exemplary care of, variously, her often-absent Japanese actor mother, her gasp-inducingly wayward Hungarian journalist father, and her abusive paternal grandmother. It’s grim but not remotely self-pitying, and she also writes really well about the way music eventually became her escape route. More power to her!