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I first saw the new wave singer Lene Lovich on a children\u2019s programme called \u201cMagpie\u201d. She sang her new single, \u201cLucky Number\u201d in a strange voice sometimes spiky, sometimes ululating. I hadn\u2019t heard pop so strikingly weird and to my ears so wondrous since \u201cWuthering Heights.\u201d I wrote down something approximating the singer\u2019s name, and bought the 45 the next weekend and, soon after, a picture disc of her first album, \u201cStateless.\u201d This thrilling gem was released on Stiff Records, the hippest pop label of the time. I played it very, very loud that Saturday morning. \u201cStateless\u201d was full of astounding pop songs, most written by Lene and her partner Les Chappell, performed in a vocal style I had never heard before, and neither had anyone else. A mixture, incredibly, of punk, bubble gum pop and \u201820s Euro-Cabaret, all stirred into a pungent blend. Though coloured with soul instrumentation \u2013 sax, organ – the album was as difficult to define as the title suggests. It was gothic pop before gothic pop existed. It had a ghostly quality, though muscular, not wispy at all: \u201cTelepathy,\u201d about a woman who knows when her boyfriend is cheating because his mind\u2019s \u201clike a TV\u201d to her; \u201cSleeping Beauty,\u201d about extreme plastic surgery, the complete reforming of a body; the dark, uncomfortable \u201cHome,\u201d about escaping it, which has become her theme song. There\u2019s also a marvelous sex song, \u201cSay When,\u201d written by a man from the POV of a woman. \u201cHey, I call the shots. Baby, I say when!\u201d This was a hit single. <\/p>\n \u201cStateless\u201d was followed by \u201cFlex.\u201d Posters advertising \u201cFlex\u201d \u2013 images of Lene in a wedding dress – were all over the London underground when I began working for the BBC. \u201cFlex\u201d wasn\u2019t \u201cStateless II\u201d. It was eerier, more personal, a tilted, original vision, with subjects like reincarnation, angels, (a song which manages to be about both hairy bikers and the cherubim!) and suspended animation. Yet there\u2019s still room for \u201cWonderful One,\u201d a bouncy love song of great emotional clarity. I love the way her words embrace the dreamlike and impossible without seeming merely escapist, like all good fantasy they\u2019re rooted in something. <\/p>\n The dying moment of \u201cFlex\u201d is \u201cThe Freeze,\u201d one of the best science fiction songs you\u2019ll ever hear. It was not her first such venture. Before she found a recording contract, she was asked by the French dance producer Cerrone to write lyrics for him, and she turned out a song called \u201cSupernature,\u201d which was a big hit. Lene can claim with these lyrics about a lost paradise, a theme to which she returns, to have invented the small, strange genre of science fiction disco\u2026 The third album, \u201cNo Man\u2019s Land,\u201d appeared after a wait of three years and, again, it feels less like a follow-up than an entirely separate work. This is 1982 and the sound is brighter, poppier, synthier, more polished, I suppose more commercial, though the songs are as vivid and unique as ever. They\u2019ve taken on a widescreen, cinematic quality. (\u201cSavages,\u201d \u201cRocky Road.\u201d) There is a startling, unforgettable song called \u201cBlue Hotel\u201d which seems to be about telepathic communication in the sky.<\/p>\n Les Chappell plays many of the instruments and co-writes the songs, and most tracks include his vocal contributions. These are rarely backing vocals in the orthodox sense. He interjects whoops, swoops, hollers, roars, banshee moans. Sometimes he sounds like a phantom on a football terrace. These effects are an integral part of the texture of the records. A fourth album, \u201cMarch\u201d, quietly crept into shops at the end of the eighties. Noticed only by her dedicated following, it\u2019s on a smaller, more intimate scale than \u201cNo Man\u2019s Land\u2019\u201d with some inspired songs, one about the condition of sleep and dream, \u201cNight shift,\u201d; one sung from the point of view of a shadow, and one, \u201cNatural Beauty,\u201d which is both a \u2018lost paradise\u2019 song and a simple declaration of love. (\u201cNatural beauty still survives,\/ I can see it in your eyes.\u201d)<\/p>\n \tThere was an endless, post-\u201cRed Shoes\u201d-length wait, (longer, in fact,) for the fifth, \u201cShadows and Dust,\u201d which appeared out of the blue on a New York label in 2004, the voice and sensibility intact, the stylistic range wider: there\u2019s the deliciously pantomimic \u201cWicked Witch\u201d and a setting of Heathcote Williams\u2019 humorous poem \u201cThe Insect Eater\u201d in which Lene plays both Renfield and Dracula, alongside the beautiful and uneasy love story down generations \u201cRemember,\u201d the haunting \u201cShapeshifter,\u201d the desperate \u201cLittle Rivers,\u201d the poppy \u201cGothica.\u201d \tShe has frequently been brought into the studio by other artists. Tom Verlaine of the group Television, The Residents and the Italian singer Giuni Russo all made good use of her. She turned up a few years ago as a randy android on a Hawkwind album, of which she was the highlight. Most interesting, maybe, are her appearances in two long dramatic musical pieces. She was a fragile and finally broken Madeleine Usher on Peter Hammill and Judge Smith\u2019s airless, intense \u2018opera\u2019 \u201cFall of the House of Usher.\u201d This record was a major discovery for me, being an introduction to Hammill\u2019s vast and unique output. It exists in two variations. The first release, in 1991, used a standard rock group format, guitar, drums, keyboards. A few years later, Hammill returned to the tapes, stripped away almost all the rock accompaniment, redid his own vocals to much more powerful effect, and laid the remaining vocals (a superb cast: Lene, Andy Bell of Erasure, Herbert Gr\u00f6nemeyer, the spine-tingling Sarah Jane Morris,) on top of a spectral cushion of guitar sound. Either is worth hearing, but the revision is chilling. \u201cUsher\u201d was originally conceived for theatre and I sometimes wonder how it would work on stage. <\/p>\n \tThen there is Judge Smith\u2019s recent \u201cOrfeas,\u201d (sic), one of a series of \u2018song stories\u2019 as he calls them, designed as sound-only musical narrative pieces. (Think Big Finish, sung.) Whereas \u201cUsher\u201d is doom-laden, \u201cOrfeas\u201d is wonderfully knockabout, Lene\u2019s Eurydice supercilious, contemptuous, comic. Incidentally, she also made the mask of Orfeas which illustrates the booklet.<\/p>\n \tBut now that \u201cShadows and Dust\u201d is on the cusp of its tenth anniversary, I hope there will soon be a new album under her own name. She\u2019s returned to touring, with a tight new band who plainly adore her. Her audiences are pleasingly mixed, from paunchy old blokes in \u201cNever Mind the Bollocks\u201d t-shirts to Goth girls to young gay guys who own all her records. (I\u2019ve only recently realized that she\u2019s a hidden gay icon, though it\u2019s obvious that she should be.) She\u2019s turned up in some extraordinary venues, including an excellent one underneath Brighton station which in a previous incarnation was a shed for railway vehicles. <\/p>\n \tI love what she does. I first saw the new wave singer Lene Lovich on a children\u2019s programme called \u201cMagpie\u201d. She sang her new single, \u201cLucky Number\u201d in a strange voice sometimes spiky, sometimes ululating. I hadn\u2019t heard pop so strikingly weird and to my ears so wondrous since \u201cWuthering Heights.\u201d \u201cOh my God,\u201d I said to my sister, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-254","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-blue-box-blog","czr-hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/matthewwaterhouse.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/matthewwaterhouse.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/matthewwaterhouse.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/matthewwaterhouse.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/matthewwaterhouse.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=254"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/matthewwaterhouse.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":269,"href":"http:\/\/matthewwaterhouse.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254\/revisions\/269"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/matthewwaterhouse.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=254"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/matthewwaterhouse.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=254"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/matthewwaterhouse.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=254"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n <\/p>\n
\n\u201cOh my God,\u201d I said to my sister, \u201cWho is she?\u201d <\/p>\n
\nA third of a century after it was made, \u201cFlex\u201d is still a unique artifact. <\/p>\n
\nI have been listening to these three albums again recently, because they\u2019ve has just been reissued, in luminous new remasters overseen by the artist herself on her new micro-label Flex Music.
\nBut the Stiff Records trilogy is not at all the whole story. When she was widely written about in the late seventies, articles made mention of a mysterious three-track Christmas single which had been released before her contract with Stiff. The articles and, in interviews, Lene herself, talked of this as something of a skeleton. I had the happy fortune of discovering a copy in the mid-eighties in one of those fabulous, dusty Camden Town record shops. (An actor friend lived in the flat over the shop, though I did not know him then.) The \u2018A\u2019 side is \u201cI Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus,\u201d and on the sleeve Lene is peering through a snow-frosted window, looking like a cross between a shocked French maid and my friend Bonnie Langford. The record is great fun, and I like the summery sound of the kettle drums, which must be unique in the history of Xmas musical oddities. <\/p>\n
\nThroughout her career, she\u2019s worn home-made stage costumes, which, in sync her performance persona, are exotic but not exactly locatable in time and place, though often loosely historical. The mysterious East? Camelot? A strange lost Europe? All of these. Some of her songs are science fiction, but, whereas the visuals of, say, Bowie or Annie Lennox lean towards the future, Lene leans towards a fractured, imagined past. Sometimes she wears head dresses. In one of my favourite photos, used for the sleeve of a 45, she\u2019s in a sort of leather waistcoat and a black jacket fringed with lace. A deep red ribbon is wrapped around each of her wrists, her hands in black lace gloves. She holds a fan, which is open, resting on her lower lip concealing her chin. Her hair, usually in long plaits, is here piled frizzily, dropped into it more ribbons, looking like wet red roses. Her eyes are wide, her pallor ghostly. Somewhere between a film gypsy and the ghost of a Victorian lady? Very cool. <\/p>\n
\nOh, and she has produced the sweetest piece of pop music merchandise ever, key rings made from her stage costumes. Can you bear to be without one? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"