babe alert! miki berenyi

when i first met my last ex in 2007, i was not prepared for him. he was a 19 year old jewish boy with cute glasses, shy eyes and impeccable taste in music. he introduced me (unknowingly) to most of the bands/musicians that i listen to today... including lush. he was heavily interested in electronic music and shoegaze and, in 2007 and barely over 17 years of age, all i had ever been exposed to was shitty indie crap (which i'm still into, no doubt). something inside of me ached when i discovered this whole new branch of music. it was dreamy, it was different, it was noisy, it was soft, it was... amazing. falling in love while listening to my bloody valentine and slowdive really did something to me. the music truly means THAT much more to me now, and my all-time favorite band of the "shoegaze" genre has always been and will forever be lush. i remember when my ex sent me the first music vid by lush - it was over aim (because this was before skype was a thing) and he said that the singer reminded him of me because of her hair, which he loved.

so, my first babe alert on this blog has got to be miki berenyi of lush. she's a songwriter, a singer, and a guitarist, and while i love her other bandmates, especially emma anderson, her style is totally and completely beyond comparison. remember, this was the early 90s, which could be either super fantastic aesthetically or completely off point. miki rocked it. she rocked orange-red hair for years, she rocked the guitar and she effortlessly rocked dark tights, boots, and glittery/floral dresses. needless to say, i am deeply and forever in love.

miki and emma met when they were 14 years old. they spent a lot of their time going to shows and interviewing shit bands for their fanzine, alphabet soup. it didn't take them long to realize that they could probably form a band and do better than the kinds of musicians they were interviewing.

“Either you’re pretty and you get lots of boys after you or you look like a piece of shit and no one’s interested. We both looked like pieces of shit. So while the rest of the class was going off to boy’s schools and seducing various middle-class young men, we were off seeing any band that was playing. We vowed to form our own band someday.”

i would give my left kneecap to get my hands on one of their fanzines, btw. i think miki originally wrote more riot-grrrly music which makes a lot of sense considering her background in zine making and such. a badass babe with cool hair, mad style, who used to write zines AND participated in one of THE BEST shoegaze bands of all time? oh miki. half hungarian, half japanese, 100% beautiful and amazing. even her name is cool.

unfortunately, the band split up in 1998, 2 years after drummer chris acland committed suicide. it still breaks my heart that we lost such a wonderful musician and, in turn, also a magnificent band.

"Of course, all my memories of Lush are shot through with some sadness as they remind me that Chris is no longer here. We had a weird bar count in a couple of songs, the break in “Sweetness and Light” and the one in “Superblast!” and it was my job to give Chris the nod when the drums had to kick in again. I’d turn away from the mic, look round at him, and he’d always pull some silly face or be laughing hysterically at something. It makes me feel bereft to think that those days and that person are gone." 

miki appears on tracks sometime but for the most part remains inactive in the musical world. the last i heard she was writing for magazines, so, good for her. emma went on to form the band sing sing but in 2008 they also called it quits. as much as i wish with all my heart for miki to return to music fulltime, i have to respect what she has to say in this next quote:

"Another reason I never started another band is that I believe that the magic of a band that really clicks is rare. When it works, it works, and you don’t want to mess with it. No matter how bad things were between me and Emma, I knew that without her I couldn’t come up with anything half as good as what we’d managed to achieve together with Lush. And that’s pretty much how I feel about Sing-Sing. I liked a couple of their songs, but they were nowhere near as good as Lush. But of course I’m totally biased!"

i guess i just have to be happy with all of the wonderful music they left behind for me to listen to. and miki's style. we can't forget her style.

“You can be so much more eloquent about stuff that pisses you off than you can about really good things. I can’t express happiness in lyrics. Happiness is something that you do, and sadness is something that you think about for ages and try to get rid of in writing or painting, or whatever”

“When I first dyed my hair red my parents found it hysterical, y’know. “You’ll laugh at this in five years” that sort of thing. But a decade on and it’s the same.”

 

how could you not be completely in love with her? it's impossible. with her glittery shirts and sweaters, floral dresses, miniskirts, little girl tshirts and her infamous orange-red hair, she's a shoo-in for a babe alert! now i'm going to leave you with a lush song which you might recongnize from the vgame Rockband. hope you enjoy!!!


when i'm up you're coming down