Miki Berenyi has ventured from her London homeland to the US and back countless times since her best-known musical endeavor, Lush, coalesced in 1987. Now, the 58-year-old musician is about to wrap up her final foray across America on October 28 at the Roxy Theatre in West Hollywood. She’ll be performing a gig there as part of the Miki Berenyi Trio, which is supporting their still-fresh Tripla debut released back in March (and tossing some Lush selections into the setlist for good measure).
Additionally, Lush will be celebrating 35 years of Gala, their debut compilation record collecting material released ahead of their proper debut Spooky two years later. 4AD will be reissuing the project complete with a three-LP (and one 7-inch) set and a new bio for the project written by Jenny Hval. You can learn more and pre-order the package ahead of its November 14 release date here.
We caught up with the dream-pop icon, one of the key figureheads of the ’90s alt-rock movement, shortly before she crossed the pond earlier this month for one last tour. Find our conversation below, and check out her remaining tour dates here.
How are things going with the US tour?
It’s absolutely killing me. Once we’re out there, it will be fucking great, but the run-up and the organization and the money and all of it is just too much. It’s inundating. And frankly, it’s doing my fucking head in because you just want to play some gigs and it shouldn’t be this hard, right? When we toured in America with Lush way back when, we had 4AD and a licensing deal with Warner, so we didn’t even have to think about it, because tours were seen as promotion for an album. That was the main thing that record companies made their money from. Now, everything’s switched around because people don’t really make that much [from selling] albums. Old bands make money from touring, but for smaller bands like us, it’s a struggle, full-stop.
Part of the issue is trying to go to America. It’s not really a system that’s built for a band that operates alone to maneuver through. It’s built for lawyers and corporate companies to organize over your head. I suspect some of it’s gotten worse. Without getting too dry, there’s this thing called withholding tax, so when you play a gig, the US government takes 30 percent of your gig money, unless you submit some form that costs about $3,000 to get someone to do it for you. So at every step of the way, there’s a hurdle, and the only way over that barrier is to pay a lot of money to get someone else to do it.
Bands are telling me that it was already hard enough in the first place to tour the States, because of the visa fees. Now that we have a madman leading our government positing insane ideas about charging people $100,000 to get a visa—is it even worth coming over here anymore?
To be fair, I would say it’s always been hard. America has always held a position in the world that it has all the power, so it can say “Yes” or “No” or “Well, why the fuck should we let you in?” When I used to go over in the ’80s to visit my mum, it was all about fears of communism and blah blah blah. Maybe if you went to Israel or something they’d be incredibly tight on security. But most places were like, “We’re not going to ask you why you feel you should be allowed to come here.” But it’s America’s prerogative. It’s the most powerful country on the planet. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a lot of bands now who go, “It’s just not fucking worth it, it’s too expensive and too much of a headache.”
When you look back on the reissued Lush albums, is there any song that you feel really encapsulates your feelings about love more than any other?
[Lush guitarist/vocalist] Emma [Anderson] probably felt more connection to the lyrics than I did, which is why we had different versions of songs like “Thoughtforms” and “Scarlet,” for example. Emma had more…frankly, I’d call it ambition. Or you could argue that her bar was simply higher. Whereas I don’t mind something being captured warts-and-all, if that’s what it is at the moment. I like when a song is undoctored, you know? When I hear the flaws. It’s what makes them human to me. That’s why I don’t think AI will ever really work for me.
They also remind me of being a certain age and what I was trying to do at that time. “Leaves Me Cold” and “Baby Talk”—I like the fact that they’re so odd. A lot of the songs that I wrote were intended to fit into the live set around what Emma was doing. Emma’s were much more melodic. The harmonies were there and you’ve got thought-forms. “De-Luxe” is quite a lively song, but she had her way of songwriting, and sometimes I would write a song that I thought needed to pick up the pace a bit, getting Chris [Acland] to do his punk-rock drumming. I would actually write a song to facilitate that.
I’m reluctant to ask this question, but what are your feelings about the term “shoegaze”? I ask that because I didn’t hear that word until about a decade after I started listening to Lush.
“Shoegaze” came up when we were starting out. It got coined at a Moose gig, right? “Shoegaze” was invented as a term to refer to these fucking boring students who were all looking at their feet onstage. Who the fuck wants to hear that, right? The weird thing is, when we came to America, we were hoping to get away from that fucking term, but of course, in every interview we did, they were like, “Hey, so tell us about shoegaze.” They took it just at face value. They didn’t see any of the snideness. So they were like, “Oh, we love shoegaze.” And we’d be sitting there going, “Are you fucking taking the piss?” And they were like, “No.” I thought there was a certain triumph to that—like when lesbians reclaimed the word “dike.” It was the Americans who took up that word as a baton [and ran with it]. After that, in every MTV interview, they were, like, “Hey, so you’re a shoegaze band.”
I don’t know about the lasting legacy of the term. I might be completely wrong with this, but I did think when all this started to come up in the 2000s whether it was a generation that was more questioning of their sexuality and gender and all of these things that were quite a big part of that burgeoning internet and social media world. I did think that those bands were a bit more gender-neutral, if you like to describe it that way. They’re kind of all a bit homogenous. No one really plays on their sexuality or their gender. And I did wonder whether that jibed in some way with that generation of people growing up in the 2000s that were quite different in that respect. Coming from that indie world, we were probably quite non-binary. Whereas Britpop and rap had distinctly different codes of male and female behavior.
Has making the decision that this will be your last tour made this run more emotional?
To be honest, each of the last few tours have felt like that. When we did the last [Lush] reunion tour, I was very aware that was the last time we were going to be doing that. It’s always quite special for us to tour America. When we were in Lush, there’s a couple of tours that were a bit of a nightmare, but on the whole, touring the States was a really important part of any album [cycle], because there’s a sort of epic quality to tour in America. And we got quite big audiences there back in the day, sometimes bigger than our home crowd shows in London.
I’ve got a really vivid memory of playing Maxwell’s in Hoboken on our very first tour. It was a really short tour, and the thing I remember is that the room was so hot that I came offstage and hair dye had bled onto my face and neck. We were so excited. I just remember sitting in this little Splitter van at the end of the gig, driving away, and we put the radio on, and that [Harry] Nilsson song “Without You” was playing. I remember all of us bellowing this song out. We were so full of euphoria. It felt so small. And yet it also felt so amazing.
