Sounds From The Junkshop #22 - Lush

 

“Morning in the mirror, things will suddenly seem much clearer, I promise it’s alright...” - Lush, Lit Up, 1994

Similar to the Boo Radleys, who we covered on Sounds From The Junkshop last week, Lush are another band who'd been slogging it away on the indie circuit for years before suddenly changing with the times when Britpop came along and scoring a few hits before their career was suddenly and tragically ended. A whole group of fans with lank floppy hair suddenly averted their gaze from the floor to scream "SELL OUT!" at them at the time. Well screw you shoegazers, Lovelife was Lush's best album and this week, I'm here to tell you why.

I haven't really touched on shoegazing too much in the SFTJ entries so far because, to be honest, it's was always kind of the polar opposite end of the alternative music scene from the spiky indie-punk I listened to growing up. However, I did know at least a couple of other guys in my teens who really were into it and there'd be a small gang of us who'd often spend Friday or Saturday evenings round at theirs listening to these bands and partaking of a "magic parsley cigarette" which we'd usually sponged off someone's older brother and his mates. Now I'll admit that being sat on a beanbag feeling very peaceful did seem to lend this whole genre of music a kind of pleasant ambience that it never had in your normal state but even then, my general feeling was that most of the bands had one or two good songs (Chapterhouse's Pearl, Slowdive's Slowdive and Catch The Breeze, Spiritualized's Run and the Verve's Slide Away all spring to mind) and a lot of filler. I mean, apart from Ride who I always quite liked for some reason (more on them in a future SFTJ) but mostly the scene just left me cold and I just found bands like Thousand Yard Stare, Revolver and Moose dreary. I couldn't even find the energy to actively dislike it the way that Nicky and Richey from the Manics, who infamously described Slowdive as being "worse than Hitler" did (erm, no lads, to the best of my knowledge Slowdive never broke international law by invading Poland although I'm prepared to be proved wrong by photographic evidence on this one).

Anyway, Lush when I first heard them at least, were just another average shoegazing band to my ears (although they'd been going since the late '80s and I believe had actually started out as a goth band at the tail end of that scene). They'd chalked up a Top 40 hit with For Love at this point but I remember being played the Spooky album on one of those chilled-out weekends and it just completely washed over me. They were favourites of a lot of mates of mine (I think possibly because Miki Berenyi, their singer, was one of the default crushes of a lot of shoegazer boys at the time along with Rachel from Slowdive) but I never really got it.

However, some time in 1994, I remember being round at one of the guys' houses with the rest of the gang one weekend and he said he had the new Lush single - did we want to hear it? I was comprehensively outvoted and so on to the stereo it went. However, when it kicked in with a frenetic bassline and a vicious jagged guitar riff, I sat bolt upright (or as upright as I could given my, erm, relaxed state at the time) and said "Hold on...this...this is GOOD!" The song in question was Hypocrite and it packed more fury and urgency into just under three minutes than Lush had managed in two albums thus far in their career. Needless to say, when the attendant album Split came out, I asked aforementioned shoegazer mate to tape me a copy.

I guess Split is an aptly named album as it catches Lush midway through their transformation from shoegazing mid-tablers to what would come next. Sure, there's still a few drudgy snore-fests on there like Desire Lines and Undertow but there's also an unexpected growing pop sensibility and with a lot of the lyrics gravitating towards the dark side of relationships gone sour, it definitely struck a chord with me. Kiss Chase with its tale of fear of commitment stemming from teenage relationships ("And I know every day is a chance that you'll leave me, so I find what I can to take your place") was a go-to song for me for a long time afterwards until I did finally meet a nice girl and settle down with her a decade ago. Elsewhere, Lit Up was an arm around the shoulder for when you were feeling down and the heartbreaking closer When I Die, written by guitarist Emma Anderson following her dad's death helped me through a very difficult time following the passing of one of my parents a couple of years ago so I'll always have a soft spot for it.

Unfortunately, while it's unquestionably a far better album than Spooky, Split underperformed a bit, only just scraping the Top 20 when its predecessor had gone Top 10 and Hypocrite, which should have been a hit, missed the Top 40 possibly due to the band releasing the turgid Desire Lines as a single the same day seemingly as a deliberate act of self-sabotage. If so then it makes what came next even stranger but no less welcome.

As 1994 turned into 1995, the arrival of Britpop started to cause a few disagreements between those of us in the gang. Some of us, myself included, took to it fairly readily just glad to see bands with guitars getting chart success after feeling as if we'd been outsiders for most of our teenage years thus far (let's be honest, all teenagers ultimately crave acceptance by their peer group - in fact I think a lot of us never really grow out of that) and appreciating that yeah, actually it’s good to see guitar bands with proper tunes being a thing again. Quite a few of the guys though, hated it with a vengeance, seeing it as indie music selling out and becoming the polar opposite of everything they'd fallen in love with guitar music over a few years before (a lot of this part of the group had been grunge fans who'd worshipped Kurt Cobain as well and thus hated the likes of Damon Albarn and Liam Gallagher who certainly weren’t afraid to be rock stars rather than anti-stars). I remember running into one of the guys in the early days of 1996 (by which time we were all in sixth form) wandering around with a very dark look on his face. I asked him what was up.

"It's Lush," he scowled, "They've fuckin' gone Britpop."

This was, of course, the Single Girl single which had crashed into the Top 20 that week and given Lush their first bona fide proper chart success. Similar to the Boo Radleys the year before, the group had sensed the winds of change blowing across the landscape and undergone a massive change in their sound. Single Girl was the first example of it and I thought it was great - a pacy slice of power-pop with spiky lyrics about broken relationships. Soon they would have chalked up a further two Top 20 hits with the punky Ladykillers a venomous diatribe about creepy guys trying to hit you up in nightclubs and the almost '60s style pop of 500 (Shake Baby Shake), written by Emma about her Fiat Topolino of all things.

They may have alienated a lot of the moody indie kids who'd got into them a few years before but I did notice something in the first half of 1996 - a lot of the girls we knew at our sixth form suddenly became Lush fans. These weren't dyed-in-the-wool indie chicks (horrible phrase to use, sorry) either but the sort of girls who'd been into Take That and Shampoo the year before and would go on to be Spice Girls fans a year or so later. And if that isn't proof that Lovelife, Lush's third album, was a great pop record then I don't know what is. Similar to Split, it took a long look at the dark side of relationships but did so with frothy hooks and tunes that stubbornly refused to leave your head afterwards. And with a lot of songs being very much about female empowerment and standing up for yourself (I've Been Here Before, Runaway, Tralala) it saw the band navigate the crossover with ease and get a whole new fanbase. They even managed to get hero of the day Jarvis Cocker along to duet with Miki on the poisonous break-up duet Ciao! and the lush (no pun intended) Bacharach style orchestral arrangements on the quite lovely closer Olympia saw the band really spreading their wings and showing what they were capable of - who knows where it might have ended up had things kept going.

Unfortunately, Lush's story would end abruptly and horribly. In October, drummer Chris Acland, who'd founded the band with Emma and Miki at the turn of the decade, took his own life and the band decided it would be wrong to carry on without him. Emma would go on to form Sing-Sing with singer Lisa O'Neill who put out two good albums and may well be a future SFTJ entry while bassist Phil King would join the Jesus & Mary Chain only for that ship to promptly sink following the disappointing Munki album.

It's interesting to think what would have happened had Lush carried on. Would they have copied the Boo Radleys by putting out a deliberately uncommercial album in 1997-98 as Britpop turned to the whole "new misery" movement spearheaded by Radiohead or would they have kept on with the pop direction to keep the new fans happy? They did eventually reform in 2015 (with former Elastica/Spitfire drummer Justin Welch taking Chris' place behind the kit) and I remember Miki in an interview at the time saying that a lot of fans had pretty much been begging them not to play anything off Lovelife at the reunion shows which really pissed me off - as I've said before, to me it's their best album and deserves its place as a power pop classic. And if the people who thought My Bloody Valentine were gods in the ascendant disagree then I'm sorry but bollocks to them.

As it turned out, the reunion would be short-lived - a bust-up between Emma and Phil after a gig essentially put the kibosh on the whole thing the following year. An EP, Blind Spot, did surface which perhaps unsurprisingly given the above, was a return to their shoegazing roots albeit closer to the tunefulness of Split than the meandering Spooky. Miki now has a new band Piroshka featuring Welch plus various Modern English and Moose refugees. I gave their album (Bandcamp link here) a listen while writing this article and, perhaps as you might expect, it's a good mix of Lush's ethereal sound and the spiky new wave sensibilities of Elastica and Modern English. It's not quite perfect but it's definitely worth a listen for the curious and definitely shows a band with plenty of potential to develop - I'm pretty sure when the second album emerges that we'll give it a review on this here 'zine. In the meantime, I would highly recommend Lovelife and Split to those seeking some top drawer tunes - the former for the night before and the latter for the morning after. RIP Chris, still much missed.