Lush vocalist Miki Berenyi wasn’t interested in being a ‘ladette’
When the criminally underappreciated UK indie band Lush released its third and final full-length studio album, 1996’s Lovelife, the ensuing media tour was often a rinse-and-repeat cycle of the same three questions: Why had the band shifted its sound away from dreamy shoegaze into Britpop? Was the brash single ‘Ladykillers’ inspired by anybody in particular? Like maybe Anthony Kiedis, perhaps? And most importantly, how did singer/guitarist Miki Berenyi get that cool, bright red colour in her hair?!
You might presume that annoying cosmetic questions and tabloid fodder were standard Q&A fare for a band led by two women back in the “old days”, but as Berenyi herself has noted many times, these weren’t necessarily the types of things being asked a few years earlier of Elizabeth Fraser from the Cocteau Twins or Kristin Hersh of Throwing Muses. The mid-to-late ‘90s were a bit of a weird time for mainstream progressivism in the UK. Were New Labour and Girl Power pathways to liberation? Were you one of the common people or a firestarter? ‘Lad’ or ‘ladette’?
Somewhat by chance, Lush’s Lovelife – and ‘Ladykillers’ in particular – landed right on this cultural faultline, putting Berenyi in an awkward position of both (a) being asked to do “sexy” / degrading lad-mag style photoshoots, and (b) being seen as a potential new mouthpiece for the supposed counter movement to that exploitative old system: the ‘ladettes’. Unfortunately, it soon became clear to Berenyi that the latter wasn’t necessarily a path away from the former.
“There was a point where this idea [of the ladette] might be a celebration,” Berenyi said during a 2024 Q&A with DirtySunbeams, referring to the rise in self-confident, foul-mouthed, sometimes hedonistic new female role models in Britain in the late ‘90s and early 2000s (Zoe Ball, Denise van Outen, and Sara Cox were often associated with the term). “It might be liberating girls from having to be these little dolly whatsits on the top of Christmas trees or something,” she added. “You know, you could drink pints, and you could swear, and you could go to the football, right? That’s now allowed! But, it quite quickly, I think, became fetishised… It wasn’t celebrating people by giving them the breadth to be what they want to be. It was creating another box where—yes, great, you can swear, you can drink pints, you can go to the football, but you’re going to have to do it in a bikini. Which wasn’t part of the fucking deal! I just think you’re always having to fight that kind of stuff off.”
Even in the years before the heights of ‘lads’ and ‘ladettes’, Berenyi, and Lush co-frontwoman, Emma Anderson, were accustomed to having presumptions made and vocalised about them solely because they were women playing in a popular band. Many refused to believe that they actually wrote their own songs, and there was usually someone – often a bloke from another band – ready to take them down a peg.
“There were plenty of brilliant blokes who were in bands that I worked with who were absolutely fine,” Berenyi said. “There’s always going to be some dickheads. But there were quite a lot of people who seemed really angry about a band with two girls in it getting any kind of success. I do remember sort of arguing with someone who said, ‘oh, you only got that fucking Melody Maker cover because you’re two birds.’ And I thought, well that’s interesting, because when we didn’t get on the cover, you said it was because we’re shit. So I can’t really win this in any way, can I?”
Song for song, Lush’s output from 1989 to 1994 was arguably the best among the Cocteau-inspired dream pop bands, a notch above Ride, Moose, Curve and the rest of the one-syllable shoegaze field. As Berenyi and Anderson navigated the waters of increasing notoriety, interviews, music videos, and photoshoots, however, they were put in uncomfortable positions a lot of their male counterparts wouldn’t have experienced in the same way.
The single ‘Ladykillers’ was perhaps, in some respects, a response to this. A chance for Berenyi to step outside Lush’s usual curtain of ethereal reverb to more directly address the type of men who’d been leaving the wrong kinds of impressions on her—or just any man who could benefit from knowing when he was being a knob in a social interaction with a woman.
For established Lush fans, it was a dramatic shift in tone, maybe not the one every shoegazer was looking for, but one that certainly had more of a message and swagger than anything that had come before it. For Britpop lovers and potential ‘ladettes’ in training, it was a relatable anthem for a brief moment in time, before the idea of fighting fire with fire (i.e., changing ‘lad culture’ by joining it) proved more trouble than it was worth.
Now, 30 years later, Berenyi is currently touring with her band the Miki Berenyi Trio, featuring her partner (and ex-Moose member) Kevin McKillop and Oliver Cherer. Their new album Tripla was released last month, and Berenyi’s excellent memoir, Fingers Crossed, was published in 2022.
