Since its original release, the book has become Rough Trade Book of the Year, a Rolling Stone Book of the Year and a Mojo Book of the Year. But, I wondered, is it really a music book? There is after all a lot about Miki’s life before Lush: so is it a book about a person - like a “normal” memoir - rather than a book about music?
Of course, you can’t really separate those things, as everyone whose life has been immersed in music knows. So the first half of the book is about Miki’s dysfunctional, damaging childhood and adolescence. The second half is about her dysfunctional life in the music business. And they make sense of each other.
Music was, for Miki, “a world that accepted damaged people, celebrated them even”. And being in band means being in a world where “obnoxious, reckless or self-destructive behaviour” is the norm.
Part One explains where what she calls “my fucked-upness” comes from. It’s a story of not belonging, of being moved again and again to different environments. She mingles with rich, poor and posh, with snobs and Sloanes; travels between London, LA, Japan and Hungary; is always an outsider. And then there’s the abuse, from family and friends…
At 16, in London, she’s finally part of an in-crowd: the crowd that goes to gigs. After going to 150 gigs in 1984 and “witnessing a great many incompetent but enthusiastically received support acts” she and her schoolfriend Emma pick up guitars and start practising.
She falls into the music business because she’s already fallen into the music scene. It’s a natural progression.
As she explains in the introduction, she never intended to be in a band and “wasn’t driven to form Lush by an inborn talent I wanted to showcase”. It was more about solace and escape, and “the hope that I, too, might escape whatever crap I was stuck in”.
Part Two, the music business part, shows that you can exchange one kind of crap for a different kind of crap. It sounds as if it was a relief when it was over.
There is a lot of detail about how the music biz works (or doesn’t), and about what can only be described as office politics around the band and in the band. Yes, it happens everywhere. A lot of it is based on diaries, giving the story immediacy, emotional honesty and an impressive amount of detail.
It’s a great insight into the ups and downs of the business: management, record companies, recording, touring, press, publishing, photo shoots, promotion. People who help, people who don’t. Sexism, obviously. None of it sounds much fun.
The chapter called Bollocks to Britpop is a great antidote to the way that particular era has been mythologised. Miki describes it as “entitled arseholes everywhere” and a culture where “sexist bullshit is becoming commonplace and reframed as ‘edgy’.” At the NME Brats awards, the only women on the stage all night are “some semi-clad dancing girls and Candida Doyle, keyboard player in Pulp”.
For a while, Lush had felt like part of a musical community (named “The Scene that Celebrates Itself” by Melody Maker). The new movement wasn’t like that: it was all about success and record sales, and, yes, the female-led Britpop bands sold less. “I’ve been subsumed in music since my teens and found my tribe, my family. Now it’s been hijacked by elitist dickheads.”
There is some fun, though, like being on tour. “It’s pretty much everything I wanted as a kid and never got enough of: company, attention, a chance to shine and endless opportunities for distraction.”
The 1992 Lollapalooza tour sounds, to me, like a nightmare, as well as proof that the famed “rock’n’roll lifestyle” is just men behaving badly. The good side: they are bottom of the bill, there are lots of women involved in the production and “the vibe is laid-back and friendly”. The bad side: horrible behaviour from horrible men and “testosterone overload”.
But Miki enjoys being on stage, enjoys (some of) the other bands and enjoys being part of “a vast travelling circus” for 9 weeks with “plenty of exciting diversions”. She sums it up, surprisingly, as: “I wouldn’t have missed it for the world”.
By the end of the book, Miki has a normal job that involves going to an office, and a normal life with a partner and kids. But she hasn’t quite put music behind her: eventually, although she doesn’t go into much detail, there’s a return to music with Piroshka.
The book is a vivid, intense rollercoaster. I felt glad at the end to find Miki had survived with her feet back on the ground.
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