Nineties indie frontwoman unrecognisable 26 years after chart-topping hits as she appears on new BBC documentary
IN the early 90s she made waves in the male-dominated music scene with her cherry red hair and riot grrrl attitude.
Thirty years on, Lush frontwoman Miki Berenyi, 57, is still doing what she does best but has swapped her flaming red ‘do for a choppy, shoulder-length black style.
The musician, who now leads the Miki Berenyi Trio, appears in a new BBC documentary telling the story of 90s lad magazine Loaded.
In it, she gives her opinion of the magazine’s editor James Brown, who was given the chance to launch his own mag after four years as the NME’s features editor.
She said: “Loads of people wrote fanzines, you couldn’t leave a gig without five or six fanzines under your arm.
“It’s actually how I met James. He was a bit of an upstart. He was a little bit cocky but just a decent bloke actually.
“There was nothing sexualising in James’s way of dealing with you at all. I didn’t expect it to end up where it did, no.”
James himself then detailed how he assembled a rag-tag bunch of “weirdos” and one straight-laced guy, Kristen Smyth, to keep them in check.
The first issue featured Gary Oldman on the cover along with the mag’s famous tag line: “For men who should know better.”
James celebrated wrapping the edition by dancing wildly to Blur’s Girls an Boys on the office’s tables.
Meanwhile, Lush were branded a ‘shoegaze’ band when they first emerged and were regularly splashed across the pages of music magazines NME and Melody Maker.
US stardom came calling thanks to their hits De-Luxe and Baby Talk, and the duo became the only women to be invited onto the second ever Lollapalooza tour line-up in 1992.
But the band broke up six years later at the height of their powers after their drummer, Chris Acland, tragically took his own life.
Miki and Emma enjoyed a short reunion in 2016, but it didn’t last and Miki eventually formed a new band, Piroshka, with Mick Conroy, formerly of new wave/post-punk band Modern English, and Justin Welch from Elastica.
Miki also worked for a magazine but it folded during lockdown and she decided to concentrate on writing her memoir, Fingers Crossed: How Music Saved Me from Success.
Miki – whos Japanese mother was in the James Bond film You Only Live Twice – goes back to her unconventional childhood that was marred by racisim and abuse before delving into Lush and their rise to fame.
Speaking about it on DKFM, she said she refused to “write a puff piece about Lush” and so traced her tempestuous relationship with Lush bandmate Emma too.
Miki said: “When people go, ‘oh you’ve known each other since school, you must be best friends,’ you nod and smile and you don’t want to rock the boat.
“We weren’t at each other’s throats all the time … but it’s the difficulty of being in a band with all its stresses and all the time you spend together, with two people who have very different personalities.
“And they’re also the only two women in a very male environment. It could have been lovely if we were this united front of sisterhood in this male world, bit that’s not how it worked out.”
She added: “I think it was quite funny, sometimes, the way (we would) lose it with each other is quite amusing.
“There would be no Lush without Emma.”
In the summer she tour the US and the UK with the Miki Berenyi Trio.
Miki said on Instagram: “It’ll be a mixed set of MB3/Lush/Piroshka songs. Take it as me just playing what I can, excited to be able to tour (at my age!).”