Shake, rattle and write: why the music memoir is booming
By her own admission, Miki Berenyi was not a woman itching to write a memoir. Even if she had been, she says, why would anyone have been interested? Her band, Lush, were “never that big”. They enjoyed cult alt-rock success in the early 90s, scored three Top 30 singles in the Britpop era, and broke up in 1996. They briefly reformed in 2015, but broke up again after less than a year, keen “to return to our families and homes”. When a publisher approached her with the idea of an autobiography, she says, “I literally laughed in his fucking face – I was like: ‘Why would I want to do that? That sounds ridiculous.’”
But then Berenyi lost her job as a subeditor when the magazine she worked for folded. “Lockdown was looming, and I thought, ‘Oh shit, actually this isn’t a great time to be looking for a job’, so I kind of … It was a bit more pragmatic than a burning ambition.”
Pragmatic or not, Berenyi’s book, , turned out to be a warmly reviewed success on publication last year, detailing not just Lush’s journey through the 90s indie scene and horrible end – their split was precipitated by the suicide of their drummer, – but Berenyi’s extraordinary and frequently harrowing early life: her Japanese mother left her in the care of her Hungarian father, a hard-partying womaniser who bought her vodka aged eight and, at one juncture, had Berenyi selling shower fittings on the streets of Prague for ready cash. It’s a fiercely honest, unsparing and very funny
